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Photo by Kurt Johnson

At this point, who isn’t worried about AI? Do you ever feel a little dread at the thought of just thinking about opening an AI model, or every time you Google something and it force feeds you this disgusting AI summary of the thing you’re looking for without even asking? Well, if this sounds like you, visual artist and director Illuminati (Tati Bruening) is here with just the project for you. 

Contact Sports, Bruening’s musical project, has released their self-titled debut on Queens Road Music/Atlantic Records. Bruening, who is only 25 years old by the way, has already built a world online, having amassed over 3 million followers on Instagram and TikTok with haunting digital art and liminal-space world building. She’s worked with the likes of FKA Twigs, A24, and YSL Beauty and now she’s translating that eerie internet-soaked aesthetic she’s come to be known for into sound, with blown-out, bulbous synth shards that capture a generation shaped by a pandemic and an all-consuming internet era. 

The record was written and produced by Bruening and two-time ARIA Award winner Konstantin Kersting (Fisher, Mallrat, Tones and I), and mixed by Victor Verpillat (Don Toliver, Zara Larsson) ,and mastered by Dale Becker (SZA, Billie Eilish). Across twelve tracks, the album takes on the strange place where technology meets nature and society. Bruening describes it as a reaction to the current state of tech, from the hopeful symbiosis between people and machines to darker themes, like comparing the birth of AI to the creation of a god. 

It isn’t all doom, though. There’s a rather eclectic sense of humor in the absurdity of the moment, and no track shows it off better than “Autonomous Romance (AR),” an anthem about falling in love with a Waymo driver. Song titles like “Xylem + Phloem,” “Symbiosis,” and “Weapons of Mass Ignorance <WMI>”give you a sense of the nature-versus-machine tension at play, almost inducing anxiety in you. 

The singles each came with equally ambitious visuals, suiting an artist who started as a visual creator. The video for “Insane,” directed by Kurt Johnson, was shot at Linnahall in Tallinn, Estonia, the sprawling Soviet-era arena built for the 1980 Olympics and later seen in Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, and features two android sumo wrestlers battling under Bruening’s command. “Attention Economics,” featuring Genesis Owusu, came with a Johnson-shot video that Bruening edited herself. 

Then there’s “BP Oil Spill 2010,” featuring underground rapper and pluggnb pioneer Weiland in his first new music in more than two years. Its visualizer sees Bruening free-driving through dense kelp fields, a skill she learned just for the project, which is actually extremely cool. “Me & My Machine” is the album’s humanism-versus-technology thesis in action, with a video filmed in Latvia that pairs the clinical labs of a biotech center with vast greenhouses, plus a 35-foot “Tree of Life” hand-woven from electrical and Ethernet cables. 

For Bruening, the album is also a statement of intent. She says she wants to plant a seed in an AI data center and cultivate an entire forest, a vision of making something sincere that isn’t interrupted by algorithms or audience expectations. It’s an interesting approach for an artist whose following was built on those very platforms.

The path to this record began in Newport Beach, California. Bruening was, in her words, “bred to play sports,” the daughter of two former pro basketball players who met playing in Germany. She played at the varsity level but was pulled toward music, fashion, and art, and found her sound through the EDM corners of YouTube. After 2024 singles “Enzyme” and “WWW” and 2025’s “Malaysia Airlines,” the full-length debut feels like a big step forward. 

Contact Sports are on the road with Madeon on his Victory Live tour, with dates set up through October 24 in Los Angeles. She’ll also join Danny L Harle on November 6 in Chicago and November 7 at Queens’ Knockdown Center for the all-star OUTLINE lineup with yeule and Saya Gray. 

Listen to Contact Sports below: