FEAR FACTORY played "Roboticist" live for the first time on Saturday night, August 29, at Tama in Poznań, Poland — the opening concert of their "Cybernetic Domination" European tour, and the same day the song was released through Nuclear Blast.
They did not save it for the encore. "Roboticist" opened the show, which is a statement of intent: this is the first FEAR FACTORY recording with singer Milo Silvestro and drummer Pete Webber, both of whom have been in the touring lineup for close to three and a half years without a studio credit to point at. Until Saturday the band had been playing nothing but back catalogue.
The Poznań setlist ran:
- Roboticist (live debut)
- Industrial Discipline
- Powershifter
- Acres Of Skin (tour debut)
- Shock
- Edgecrusher
- Linchpin
- No One (first time since 2001)
- Invisible Wounds (Dark Bodies)
- Soul Hacker
- Martyr
- Arise Above Oppression (first time since 2005)
- Archetype
- Demanufacture
- Zero Signal
- Replica
- Resurrection
"No One", from 1998's "Obsolete", had been off the stage for twenty-five years. "Arise Above Oppression", from 2005's "Transgression", for twenty-one. For a band selling a new era, it is a curious and welcome choice to reach that far back on the same night.
"Roboticist" was produced, engineered, mixed and mastered by Damien Rainaud, and arrived with a video directed by Vincente Cordero and produced by Arion Csihar. It premiered on SiriusXM Liquid Metal.
Guitarist Dino Cazares has framed the song around the person building the machines rather than the machines themselves. "Basically, what that is about is about the actual roboticist, the person that makes them. We call it the architect of the artificial. He's building machines to outlast the flesh," he told Poland's Strefa Music Art.
On the wider shift, Cazares said: "It's a whole new era for FEAR FACTORY, and we've been promoting it that way live. One of the first things that Milo says is, 'Welcome to the new era of FEAR FACTORY.' That's exactly what it is."
He was equally direct about the criticism that Silvestro sounds too much like Burton C. Bell. "Some people complain that he sounds too much like him, but if he sounded not like him, then people would be, like, 'Well, it doesn't sound like FEAR FACTORY,'" he said. "On the new record, there's definitely still a lot of those same elements, but Milo definitely has some of his own style."
"Cybernetic Domination", with CRYSTAL LAKE, HATE and THE NOCTURNAL AFFAIR, runs until October 10 in London.