Lilithzplug is building a world and it’s one worth living in.
There are artists who make music, and there are artists who build worlds. Lilithzplug is working more like an architect. They’re no strangers to the underground scene, but ‘Cybergirl’ and ‘Code Lyoko’ mark a clear shift, the moment the blueprint becomes a place you can step into. Their back catalogue laid the groundwork, but these two singles feel like dispatches from inside their cyberworld, each one landing like a time capsule you didn’t know you’d been waiting for.
Lilithzplug is building a world with its own internal logic — a virtual band in the truest sense. It's giving 2006 Frutiger energy, except rooted in a distinctly Black feminine experience that makes it feel entirely its own. At the center of it are three sisters, Claudia, Amara Jr., and Melody, rendered in 3D animation by creator Amara Robins, a neurodivergent artist whose identity and perspective shape the project from within. Early-2000s futurism runs through everything: the chrome surfaces, the digital frost, the electropop pulse, the sense that technology and intimacy were always going to collide. R&B filtered through glass. It's the specific feeling of a relationship that processes you like data, uses you like software, and leaves you trying to recover a version of yourself that hasn't been corrupted yet.
Start with Cybergirl and you’ll understand everything. "Machine with no machinery / You turn me on, you power me" sets up the central tension: the fear of being reduced to a function, something that can be switched on and powered down. The production has that UK garage and drum and bass undertow PinkPantheress does so well, letting feeling and rhythm blur together, while the vocals stay soft and weightless, sitting just above the beat like they're floating. Lyrics like "I need the password" capture the whole feeling in four words, reaching for someone who has already decided to lock you out. By the time the bridge lands, "Uploading my data just to make another me," the idea sharpens. Love starts to feel like performance, a version of yourself shaped to fit someone else, until you no longer recognize yourself.
With Code Lyoko something has crystallised. And it's icy. The production is colder, more deliberate. A Kaytranada-influenced warmth runs underneath though and the liquid drum and bass has found its edges here. The opening line, “You say you love me, but you won’t code me right,” isn’t a dramatic accusation. It's a quiet realization, the kind that arrives after you've already accepted it. Whether or not the 2003 animated series directly inspired it, the parallels are hard to ignore. A show built around identity, erasure, and memory where characters could be wiped and restored. Robins is clearly fluent in that language, and the bridge proves it. With lines like "If I code you back in, you'll try to take my mind / Try to keep me wiped," you realize the simulation was never separate from the feeling. It was always both.
There is so much to be said about Lilithzplug and what Robins is building — the visual world, the sisters, the early-2000s aesthetic that feels less like nostalgia and more like prophecy. At the end of the day this is a project with genuine emotional depth. A fully realised world built on Y2K-dusted production and songwriting that hits harder the closer you listen, created by an artist who clearly knows exactly what she's making.