Fear Factory‘s Fear Factory Roboticist new single arrived on 29 August for a very deliberate reason: in Terminator 2, that is the exact date Skynet becomes self-aware and triggers the apocalypse. It is the band’s first new music in five years, and the timing is not a coincidence.
‘Roboticist deals heavily with the rise of AI,’ guitarist Dino Cazares tells Metal Hammer. ‘The “roboticist” is the architect who creates the artificial intelligence, like a human Skynet who doesn’t realize what he’s unleashed until it goes haywire.’ The track does not directly name the Terminator franchise, but it does not need to. Fear Factory have been mapping this territory since the early nineties.
Man, machine and a point to prove
The thematic lineage runs deep. ‘If you go back to Demanufacture and Obsolete, we’ve always explored man becoming obsolete and machines taking over,’ says Cazares. ‘We’ve always sung about the relationship between man and machine, and now it’s caught up to reality.’ For a band whose classic records built entire worlds out of that tension, the current moment must feel like vindication and dread in equal measure.
Cazares is not particularly interested in the moral panic around artificial intelligence, though. ‘People complain about AI, but they’re using it every day, they just don’t realise it,’ he says. ‘We all have to embrace it in some way because it’s already integrated into everything we use, from cell phones to cars. Unless you live off the grid in the mountains, you can’t avoid it.’ Hard to argue. Harder still to argue when the band have been making exactly this point, on record, for over three decades.
The Fear Factory Roboticist new single also marks the recording debut of Milo Silvestro, the Italian singer who joined the band in 2023 after Burton C Bell’s departure. Cazares found him during the Covid lockdowns via the Fear Factory Facebook page, where Silvestro had been posting cover versions. ‘As soon as airlines opened up, I flew him out, auditioned him, and was blown away,’ says Dino. The turnaround was fast. ‘We had a tour booked with Static-X in 2023, so I brought him into the band a month before we left, and we didn’t stop touring for three years straight.’
Silvestro’s voice, by Cazares’s account, carries both novelty and familiarity. ‘Milo’s voice brings a new energy, but it feels familiar because Burton was one of his favourite singers growing up.’ That is a delicate balance to strike, particularly for a fanbase that watched Bell’s exit in 2020 unfold against a very public breakdown in his working relationship with Cazares.
A decade of lawsuits, bankruptcy and rebuilding
The turbulence goes back further than Bell’s departure. Through much of the 2010s, Cazares and Bell were locked in legal disputes with former Fear Factory drummer Raymond Herrera and bassist Christian Olde Wolbers. The litigation dragged on long enough that Cazares eventually filed for bankruptcy to retain the rights to the Fear Factory name. It is the kind of story that ends careers. For Cazares, it appears to have sharpened his focus instead.
‘For me, every record is made out of desperation,’ he says. ‘I always feel like I have to prove something. With this, it took a while to get back on our feet after all the lawsuits we went through and Burton quitting. But we’ve come out of it stronger than ever.’ Whether or not you take that as the rallying cry of a band on the back foot or one genuinely reinvigorated, the energy behind the Fear Factory Roboticist new single suggests the latter.
Cazares is keeping the wider record close for now. What he will confirm: the upcoming 11th album will feature ten songs, including Roboticist and the next single, Detonizer. ‘He’s a character who is fighting back against the AI, who wants to detonize the system,’ Cazares says of that track’s protagonist. The album is due in 2027.
Two singles in and the concept is already coherent: a roboticist who builds the monster, a detonizer who tries to destroy it. Fear Factory have always written about this stuff. The difference now is that the argument no longer needs explaining.
