FEAR FACTORY have set a date for the first recording to feature their current singer. "Roboticist" arrives on Saturday, August 29, and it is the first release to carry vocalist Milo Silvestro and drummer Pete Webber, both of whom have been part of the band's touring lineup for nearly three and a half years.
The song will not be entirely unfamiliar. An early instrumental version was made available back in 2023 to promote Toneforge Disruptor, a virtual guitar rig plugin, and guitarist and main songwriter Dino Cazares confirmed this past March that it had been reworked for the band's next album.
"The arrangement slightly changed — for the better, of course," Cazares told New Breed TV. "'Cause it was originally written as an instrumental, and the ending part of the song is now the middle part of the song. And it sounds amazing. So you just gotta check it out when it comes out."
The timing is deliberate. August 29 is also the opening night of the "Cybernetic Domination" European tour, which starts in Poznań, Poland with CRYSTAL LAKE, HATE and THE NOCTURNAL AFFAIR along for the run, and finishes on October 10 in London.
As for the album itself, Cazares has been pointing at one subject all year. Speaking to Argentina's Rock & Pop 95.9 last month, he framed the record as the next chapter in a story FEAR FACTORY have been telling since their debut.
"We've always been singing about that, since the beginning of FEAR FACTORY, since our first record, 'Soul Of A New Machine', and that was basically just an introduction to who we are and what we were about," he said. "Obviously, the story progressed and the concept progressed to where we became obsolete, humanity becomes obsolete. And on this new record, all that's left of humanity is fragments. And what's left of humanity, we are fighting for de-extinction — in other words, to not become extinct. But there's a whole other part of the story that's with it too."
Asked what Silvestro brought to the material, Cazares was unreserved. "Milo is a talented musician. He's a talented singer. He can play a lot of instruments — keyboards, drums, guitar, bass, vocals. But on this record, he mainly did — of course he did all the vocals, but we shared a lot of the same lyrics. So we wrote lyrics together. It was good, creatively, to work with him, 'cause he's a musician that understands all different aspects of the music and the instruments."
There is one more advantage, and Cazares treats it as the important one: FEAR FACTORY are among Silvestro's favourite bands, so he already knows exactly which parts of the machine are not up for redesign.
Source: blabbermouth.net