In the midst of listening to oOoOO’s debut LP, “Without Your Love,” I found myself asking a question that I had always somewhat been aware of but never truly confronted: Why has electronic music become such a popular channel through which to express sadness, and sometimes even utter bleakness? This question is all the more intriguing to me when thinking about the beginning of the genre. Sure, a song like Kraftwerk’s “Robots” has a certain touch of the sinister and eerie to it, but there’s also the groovy excitement of futurism in there. They’re charging their batteries, they’re full of energy—they are the robots, and their own sterile automation is cool and novel to them.

Now, in 2013, it seems the disillusionment is kicking in. Nowadays I see the theme of “depressed robots” everywhere in music. This may have a little or a lot to do with my frequent imagining of electronic music as a gift given to robots who have become sentient, a way to cope with their sense of crippled, distorted humanity. And this fantastical theory actually could provide a great answer to my original question. At first, when the robots simply needed entertainment, we gave them simple, self-referential tunes like “Robots,” something that quelled minor identity crises and made them feel like they were not alone, like there were other robots out there too, who were listening to the same song and thinking (or processing) the same things. But as their level of consciousness grew, so did their loneliness, and soon they needed something more introspective, something that encapsulated more their unfathomable metal emptiness. And that problem got worse, and worse, until we are here, in 2013, listening to a song like “Stay Here,” a melancholy duet between automatons.

“It pulses down somewhere,” the male voice sings, “Ask me what I wanna be.” I don’t know about you, but to me, these sounds like lyrics a robot would write. The “pulse,” that sense of life, is “somewhere,” but in no particular location, no tangible chamber like the human hearts we are so lucky to own. And the plea for self-expression a few seconds later must come from someone who has never had the chance to exercise their own autonomy, never had the chance to even choose what they are, let alone who they are. And then comes the female response—a sympathizer, a fellow machine searching for companionship.

And something that excites me especially about oOoOO’s album is that it does not only sound like it was made for robots, but by robots. They are sick of propagandists like Kraftwerk, men who try to hide the tragedy of their people’s condition through sleek dancey charades. They have decided to take the matter into their own hands, and expose the ugly truth to their listeners. The opening song, “Sirens,” sounds like a glitchy and exhausting attempt at music. The spastic explosions of vocals and static frying conjure up the image of a half-real being fighting with all its might to validate its existence, to prove its capacity to create. There is even a song called “Crossed Wires,” in which reversed vocals and unsettling jittery fuzz make the act of creativity seem perverted, almost demonic. It is nearly enough to make me believe that the struggle is real, that this will be the burgeoning trend in the world of social justice: Robot Rights. I can feel myself becoming viscerally indignant about the unfairness of it all, even though I am rationally aware none of this is real. And as I feel my grip on reality slipping, my last thought is, “Hey, at least I have oOoOO to blame.”

Without Your Love is out now via Njight Feelings.