Aggression Continuum

It’s been a long journey for Fear Factory’s 10th album. Though it was initially completed in 2017, guitarist and founder Dino Cazares endured lawsuits from former band members and set up a crowdsourcing fund to put his industrial-metal hellscape through a complete remix and have the original drum machine tracks re-recorded by live drummer Mike Heller. But the biggest blow was the departure of longtime singer Burton C. Bell, who recorded vocals for Aggression Continuum before leaving the band in 2020. “The record was almost called Continuum, but I felt it needed another word to really express what it was,” Cazares tells Apple Music. “So, the Aggression part is really just a description of the kind of music we play, how we felt on this record and the struggle we went through to get it out.” Below, Cazares discusses each track on this semi-concept album. “Recode” “We worked on this song with a guy called Igor Khoroshev. He was in the band Yes, and he also produced Burt’s vocals. He’s an amazing keyboardist and composer, and he wrote this amazing orchestral piece that really elevated the song and made it more epic. The intro is based on Terminator Salvation, where Christian Bale is talking to the resistance. In our version, it’s about all the struggles we had putting this out. But the song is basically about AI capturing humans and extracting their memories and dreams and transferring them to automatons so they’ll think they’re human.” “Disruptor” “This is the album’s first single. In the video, you have these four individuals that are trying to hack into a mainframe to disrupt a signal from the spaceship you see in the sky, which is sending drones to capture humans and extract their memories. If they disrupt the signal, the drones will be confused and will either fall out of the sky or will be flying aimlessly. It was partly inspired, again, by Terminator Salvation but also an episode of Black Mirror called ‘Metalhead’ that has dog drones chasing people.” “Aggressi