Fear Factory release “Roboticist” on 29 August, the first recording with singer Milo Silvestro and drummer Pete Webber.
Fear Factory put out “Roboticist” on Saturday 29 August, ending a wait that has run since Milo Silvestro was announced as their singer three and a half years ago. It is the first recorded material to feature Silvestro and drummer Pete Webber, and the first new Fear Factory song since 2021.
The track has existed in some form since 2023, when an instrumental version was released to promote Toneforge Disruptor, a virtual guitar rig plugin and standalone app. Dino Cazares said at the time that it had outgrown its original purpose.
“Initially it was just going to be a instrumental for the plugin, but it came out so good that I decided to make it a song for the new album. Maybe the album will be called the Roboticist. It fits so well with our concept.”
The instrumental was mixed by Damien Rainaud, who has worked with the band for years and is producing the album. In March, Cazares told “New Breed TV“ that the song had been restructured for its proper release.
“Yes. The arrangement slightly changed — for the better, of course. ‘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,” he explained at the time.
The record will be Fear Factory‘s eleventh and comes through Nuclear Blast, though no release date has been given. Speaking last month to Argentina’s “Rock & Pop 95.9“, Cazares placed it at the far end of a story the band have been telling since 1992.
“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.”
He has also said each track will arrive with a written explanation of its lyrics, published through the band’s website and social channels, an approach he has compared to 1998’s Obsolete, while noting that record was a straight narrative and this one works differently.
Asked what the singer has contributed beyond vocals, Cazares pointed to his range as a player and the fact that the two wrote lyrics together.
“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. So, creatively, it worked out great. He’s very familiar — ’cause Fear Factory‘s one of his favorite bands, so he’s familiar with the classic elements of what makes Fear Factory. And so him, when he joined the band, he fit right in just like that. Not only the style of vocals, but also the style of what makes a Fear Factory song. And, yeah, he fit right in and he definitely has his own elements as well, besides the classic Fear Factory style.”
Silvestro also wrote the album’s closing track, which Cazares has described as a cinematic, post-human piece in the mould of “Expiration Date“.
The single lands on the opening night of the band’s Cybernetic Domination European tour, which starts on 29 August in Poznań, Poland and finishes on 10 October in London, with Crystal Lake, Hate and The Nocturnal Affair supporting.
North America follows. Fear Factory co-headline a US run with Mushroomhead through late October, then carry the “Cybernetic Domination” billing into a November tour with Darkest Hour and Brotality, taking in Seattle, Portland, Boise, Fresno, San Diego, Pomona and two nights at the Whisky in Los Angeles. They close the year on 19 December at Heavy Metal Xmas in Mexico City.
Silvestro, who is Italian-born, was announced in February 2023 as the replacement for founding singer Burton C. Bell, who left the band in September 2020. He and Webber played their first headline show together on 5 May 2023 at the Whisky A Go Go in West Hollywood.
The band’s most recent album, Aggression Continuum, came out in June 2021 through Nuclear Blast but had been recorded mostly in 2017, with Cazares, drummer Mike Heller and Bell. Everything released since has been archival, including the reworked version of 2012’s The Industrialist.
