After spending the past several years proving themselves onstage, Fear Factory’s new lineup is finally on record.
The industrial metal veterans have released “Roboticist,” their first new song featuring vocalist Milo Silvestro and drummer Pete Webber, officially opening the next chapter in a band that has spent more than three decades exploring the increasingly uncomfortable relationship between humanity and machines.
Released through Nuclear Blast, “Roboticist” received its premiere on SiriusXM’s Liquid Metal with host Jose Mangin before arriving alongside a cinematic new video directed by Vincente Cordero and produced by Arion Csihar.
For Fear Factory, the single represents considerably more than another entry in the catalog.
Silvestro and Webber have already spent roughly three and a half years in the band’s touring lineup, giving audiences plenty of opportunity to see how the new configuration handles a body of work built around mechanical precision, crushing riffs and the distinctive collision of aggression and melody that guitarist Dino Cazares helped establish in the Nineties.
“Roboticist” is the first opportunity to hear what that lineup sounds like when it isn’t looking backward.
Produced, engineered, mixed and mastered by Damien Rainaud, the track embraces the hallmarks that made Fear Factory one of industrial metal’s defining bands: tightly synchronized guitars and drums, futuristic atmosphere and the sense that man and machine are locked in an increasingly violent struggle for control.
It’s also the first Fear Factory recording with Silvestro behind the microphone, making “Roboticist” the true starting point for the band’s post-Burton C. Bell era. Bell’s combination of guttural vocals and soaring melodic hooks helped define Fear Factory’s sound across landmark records like Demanufacture and Obsolete, leaving Silvestro with the unenviable task of stepping into one of industrial metal’s most recognizable vocal roles.
Rather than immediately rushing that transition into the studio, Fear Factory spent years putting the new lineup through its paces on the road. Now, with hundreds of performances behind them, Cazares and company appear ready to begin building something of their own.
The title couldn’t be more appropriate. Fear Factory have spent their career imagining dystopian futures dominated by technology, artificial intelligence and mechanized existence. More than 30 years after the band began issuing those warnings, reality has increasingly started resembling the world they were writing about.
With “Roboticist,” the machines are running again.
And for the first time, Milo Silvestro is officially at the controls.
