Mankind Is Obsolete, (MKIO) is a female-fronted industrial rock band, based in Los Angeles, California.
By 2001, Jon Siren had joined Christopher Anton's synthpop band, Pseudocipher,[1] while Natasha Cox and Gordon Bash were members of the group "Lotus Reign".
[2] Later, Siren and Cox met at the Musicians Institute in Los Angeles and recognized that they had similar tastes in music after seeing each other wearing the same Sisters of Mercy t-shirts.
[6] With Cox on keyboards and Siren on drums, they began recording what would become their first EP, Metamorph, without a singer before Natasha stepped up to the role of lead vocalist.
[7] By February 2003, a live band had been assembled adding Jamie Roy on bass, Mark Nurre on guitars and Nathan Trowbridge on keyboards and running the light show.
[6] The album has been reviewed as realizing a "mature and lucid vision", which Siren describes as being about "rising above a lot of the battles we were having in our daily lives.
[6] The tour was characterized by performances of such physical intensity that on one occasion Natasha threw out her back on stage and needed emergency room attention following the show.
In the spring of 2007, MKIO lost Nurre and Bash as the band prepared to record their third album with Sylvia Massy and Jim Wood producing at RadioStar Studios in Weed, California.
[11] A more typical reviewer found the album both a mature and experimental work that is "very rich" and "very organic", alternating between lush and hypnotic and aggressive and pounding.
Work on songs for what would become Möbius Loop began soon after the tour supporting the remix album Manic Recession in the fall of 2010, with Siren and Landes starting with the instrumentals.