After three EPs of their intrinsically homemade electronic-R&B, North London duo Tender are set to release to first full album, Modern Addiction, on September 1st via Partisan Records. One song set to feature on that monumental release is ‘Machine’. According to the band, “It's about the notion of living in a simulated world, being controlled by corporations, technology and addictions.” It’s a theme we’re increasingly coming across in songwriting - one that recently took hold of Rina Sawayama's ‘Cyber Stockholm Syndrome’. The imagery that Tender paints is particularly powerful - “you cut me open and pull me open, a hollow chest instead of a heart” - but it’s not a feeling of emptiness or yearning that this song conveys; it’s contentedness. Touching on genres of indie-pop, dance and R&B, ‘Machine’ is overtly electronic, even the vocals are layered, tinny and punctuated into short, animatronic sentences. Considering the increasingly integrated virtual world already at our fingertips, it would seem that Tender’s dystopian simulated one of manufactured sedation doesn’t seem all that far away at all. - HT