Martin Bush reinvents White Girl as an electro-pop monster

Looking at Martin Bush as he sits in front of Lawrence’s Bourgeois Pig, one would assume that he was in a hardcore band: serious beard, close-cropped hair, numerous tattoos. In fact, Bush did front the Lawrence hardcore quartet Salt the Earth for several years in the early aughts, and he occasionally finds time to play in local Sabbath-inspired band Hyborian.

But after Bush and I grab beers and find seats on the sidewalk in front of the Pig, we don’t talk about rock and roll. These days, Bush’s main gig — and the reason that most people recognize him — is his electronic project, White Girl. In August, he inked a deal with a brand-new Massachusetts label, Nice Nice Records.

“I ended up talking to several different labels and settled on this one because the guy seems really cool,” Bush says of label founder Erik Delly. “His head is on straight.”

The label’s first release is White Girl’s new 7-inch, out on Halloween. The single teases a forthcoming, as-yet-untitled EP, due in January. The new tracks mark a departure for White Girl, which has until recently been something of a group effort. Mr. History guitarist Matt Epstein and Sundiver drummer Nick Organ were in the band from 2012 through 2013, and Bush has also made White Girl singles with Architects guitarist Keenan Nichols and hip-hop act Vertigone. Now, it’s a one-man show, and the material sounds like a whole other act.

“These songs are so stark,” Bush says of the new tracks. “I went into the studio in late April and early May to record this [EP]. The songs didn’t really need full instrumentation and were more just, like, Kraftwerk-y electro stuff, so I didn’t end up bringing any of those dudes in.”

Bush says he spent a lot of time listening to Kraftwerk’s Computer World and Prince’s Purple Rain, and he doesn’t hide those influences on the new songs. The upcoming 7-inch has a genre-shifting A-side in “M.E.T.R.O.R.O.C.K.,” which moves subtly between Kavinsky-style vocodered electronics and big, shimmering guitars; the B-side, “Cocky,” is a full-on 1980s jam. Taken together, the single is as breezy as Bush means it to be.

“They’re pop songs,” he tells me. “They’re supposed to feel like you’ve been friends with them for 10 years the first time you hear them. I think that’s the hallmark of a good pop song.”

Bush’s newfound creative direction doesn’t end with his songwriting, though. Without the additional band members to fill up a stage, Bush — determined, he says, to be more than just a guy tweaking a bunch of knobs and playing keyboards — has been toiling over a complicated live setup.

“A lot of what we’ve been doing over the last few months is building a light show,” Bush says. “You got to have something going on [onstage], and nobody has anything like this. I had to do a lot of my own coding and things like that because the technology just doesn’t exist.”

Bush has built what he describes as “basically this Kubrickesque looking space pod thing that’s got an LCD video screen in the middle of it,” courtesy of many trips to Home Depot and Radio Shack. (There are also more than a few weird components, compliments of eBay purchases from China.) As he talks about this elaborate assembly, Bush takes on a certain mad-scientist air. One of the reasons that his songs are rooted in stark electro pop, he says, is because he’s just one man up there onstage to replicate all the recorded sounds. The extra effects he creates are compensation for the viewer.

“I don’t want to be one of those guys that’s just up there with an Ableton Controller doing techno karaoke,” he says. “Not to rag on guys that do that, but when I go see that, I’m bored. Even though you can’t see everything I’m doing, I’m sweating and freaking out when I’m onstage. It’s more fun for me that way.”