Man’s Not Obsolete: Fear Factory At The Dawn Of The AI Resistance

Of all the wars for the human soul being waged these days, the one over so-called artificial intelligence feels the most existential. It’s become impossible not to think about AI every fucking day, and it’s almost never by choice. Data centers are shooting up like weeds, obliterating fresh water supplies and creating psychologically torturous amounts of noise pollution. Every issue of the New Yorker these days seems to include a long, deeply reported story about how AI is sending people into psychosis, yet every time I find myself in a mixed group of civilians, someone makes an offhand comment about what they just asked ChatGPT to do for them — the grocery list, the vacation itinerary, or something else they were damn well capable of doing themselves before these tools rolled out. The global economy is currently being propped up by the bet that this objectively evil industry will become a sustained success, even as its express goal is to put people out of work by automating their jobs. The profits, if they come, will flow only upward. Things are going great.

As bleak as all of that is, nothing eats at me quite like the way AI has begun to colonize the creative arts. Every morning, I log on for my shift in the metal blog mines and see a barrage of hideous AI album covers, obviously Suno-made songs, gig flyers and lyric videos generated by prompts. This past week alone, Bay Area thrash vets Forbidden and power metal newcomers the Scepter both seared my retinas with AI-generated visuals, and I immediately lost interest in the accompanying music. The comments sections on these ghastly simulacra of human expression are invariably full of vocal opponents, but the “get over it” sycophants get their licks in, too, and in the end, it doesn’t seem like anybody changes their mind. When I log off for the day, maybe I get to go to a show, where I’m increasingly likely to see AI art on t-shirts and stage backdrops. It’s an epidemic, and the bad-faith argument beloved of AI boosters, that it’s not going anywhere so I might as well get used to it, starts to sound depressingly convincing.

Metal isn’t a monolith. There have always been bands who have kept it old-school, just as there have always been bands who rushed to embrace new technologies, often at the expense of good taste. There’s a vast graveyard of quantized productions with badly programmed drums and ugly CGI album covers, but at least someone was making that stuff, not some poorly understood ghost in the machine. (A lot of that CGI art is retroactively charming, but that’s another blog for another day.) In the genre’s ’80s heyday, there was an air of general paranoia around tech and surveillance, typified by classic songs like Voivod’s “Killing Technology,” Queensrÿche’s “NM 156” and “Screaming In Digital,” and most famously, Judas Priest’s “Electric Eye.” Now Rob Halford posts AI cat memes on Instagram all day. I had to unfollow him.

Some bands brought modern technology into their music much more aggressively, often in service of making a bigger philosophical point. Running in parallel to the wider industrial music scene, industrial metal soon arose, with cyberpunk futurism fully integrated into its dominant aesthetic. Godflesh, Pitchshifter, and Ministry used samples, synths, vocoders, and dance beats to blur the line between man and machine, and acts like Max Cavalera’s Nailbomb and the UK duo Anaal Nathrakh weaponized industrial elements to push the extremity of their sound farther than they could with purely organic sounds. None of these bands made the future sound like a particularly nice place. They often sounded like they were engaged in active combat with the machine elements of their music, not frictionlessly embracing them the way today’s Suno advocates do. No band defined the adversarial relationship between metal and technology quite like Fear Factory, the LA band founded in 1990 by guitarist Dino Cazares and drummer Raymond Herrera.

Fear Factory were an unusual hybrid, a band inspired by classic UK grindcore and the still-nascent US death metal movement but equally open to industrial music, IDM, and hip-hop. With the addition of chameleonic vocalist Burton C. Bell, they became a fluid, shapeshifting entity that could credibly channel all their varied influences. The band’s 1992 debut, Soul Of A New Machine, was the only death metal album of its era that could get away with giving a credit to a “sample god.” (Whoever you are, Otis — great work.) Soul Of A New Machine got its title from Tracy Kidder’s 1981 book, The Soul Of A New Machine, which won a National Book Award for Nonfiction and a Pulitzer Prize for its blow-by-blow account of the cutthroat race to design a next-generation computer. From their very beginning, Fear Factory were intensely engaged with the changing role of technology in society.

1995’s Demanufacture found Fear Factory further honing their sound and their aesthetic. Death metal was still in the mix, but it was becoming increasingly drowned out by the industrial vocabulary the band was developing. Their rhythmic precision, driven equally by Cazares’ machinelike pick hand and Herrera’s piston-punching drums, formed the bedrock of every song on Demanufacture, and Bell found a happy equilibrium among his varied vocal styles. 1995 was also the year of White Zombie’s industrial pop-metal masterpiece Astro-Creep: 2000, but where that band made music for sleazy robot strip clubs, Fear Factory sounded like being tortured in a jail cell made of gleaming chrome. 

A lot of the magic of Demanufacture comes from how human it insists on sounding. Its pessimistic vision of futurism could only be brought to life by living, breathing musicians at the absolute top of their game. Cazares and Herrera playfully obfuscated their humanity by writing those pneumatic rhythms, but the sheer amount of personality in their playing sounds like the fleshy core of a cyborg overpowering its software. Demanufacture’s cover, by British comic book artist Dave McKean, depicts a bisected human spine — half barcode, half bone, with a frayed power cord emerging from the bottom vertebra. This was Fear Factory’s vision of themselves in 1995, a band grafted to technology but still – as Anaal Nathrakh would put it a few years later – human, all too fucking human. In an increasingly tech-dependent world, the band’s enemies were on the other side of that coin. Bell sings about fighting against “the human machines of hate” on the scorching Demanufacture track “Self Bias Resistor.” Three years later, he’d expand on those thoughts.

In 1998, Fear Factory released their masterpiece. Obsolete is a concept album set in the year 2076, in a world trapped under the bootheel of an AI-led police state. It’s the first Fear Factory album to feature Christian Olde Wolbers on bass, an addition that would round out the band’s sound and free up Cazares to focus solely on his guitar parts. It’s a transitional album, in a sense; 2001’s Digimortal would much more fully embrace the nü-metalisms that were introduced on Obsolete. But to me, it sounds more like a culmination. Everything Fear Factory was interested in musically and conceptually comes together here, and everyone in the band performs at a career-best level. That goes double for Bell, who flexes his gifts as a lyricist and storyteller at least as much as he does as a singer.

The narrative of Obsolete borrows heavily from ’80s techno-dystopias like RoboCop and The Terminator. Our hero is the Edgecrusher, a human whose self-appointed mission is to resist and undermine the AI authorities, represented by the Securitron police force and their enforcer bot, the Smasher/Devourer. Edgecrusher spends most of Obsolete on the lam, bearing witness to the technostate’s atrocities and trying to keep himself from sinking into despair. He watches an anti-nuclear weapons protest, where the organizer sets himself on fire as the Securitron closes in. The album’s title comes from the cop who takes the charred megaphone off the protestor’s corpse and declares that “Man is obsolete – erased – extinct.” (That spoken word part is done by new wave icon Gary Numan; the following year, Fear Factory would remix “Cars.”) The Edgecrusher flees and eventually finds himself in a church, only he doesn’t know it’s a church, and he doesn’t recognize the figure stretched out on the cross. He’s moved by the scene anyway, and as the album ends, he concludes, “We must respect ourselves as a free-thinking culture and procreate compassion for one another. Without compassion, man will certainly become obsolete.” 

Obsolete now feels eerily prescient. “Securitron (Police State 2000)” calls out the inherent links between AI technology, surveillance, and policing, and the chilling title implies that, in 1998, Bell felt that at least part of the picture he was painting was only two years away from fruition. In the intro text for “Descent,” the Edgecrusher is confronted with images of “violence, depravity, and despair” flashing on a screen, which are revealed to be illusory. Do you trust anything you see on a screen today? (It’s worth noting here that much of Obsolete unfolds not in lyrics but in written supplements found in the CD booklet. That fact alone makes the album feel like an antidote to the kind of contextless, tech-driven listening that the streaming era encourages.) “Hi-Tech Hate” protests automated weapons systems, not unlike the ones the Department of Defense hopes to create through its contracts with AI companies. The Edgecrusher’s revelations about human compassion come inside a church, and Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence,” has been the most high-profile rebuke of the AI age yet. As the towering ballad “Resurrection” gives way to the gutting denouement “Timelessness,” the band samples Mario Savio’s “bodies upon the gears” speech, linking the Civil Rights era to the AI resistance. The list goes on and on.

The thematic content of Obsolete is only as powerful as it is because Fear Factory were never Luddites or cavemen. Even more than on Soul Of A New Machine and Demanufacture, they were living at the cutting edge of extreme metal on Obsolete. The album is about the potential excesses and abuses of futurism, but the music itself sounds thrillingly futuristic. “Edgecrusher” exemplifies the boundaries the band were pushing at the time. Bell raps the verses, and the graffiti artist and producer DJ Zodak adds record scratches that are every bit as crucial to the song as its guitar, bass, synth, and drums. On Fear Factory’s next record, 2001’s uneven Digimortal, they too often sounded like they were following nü metal trends. On Obsolete, a year before Slipknot’s self-titled album and two before Hybrid Theory, they were the ones leading the way.  

Nearly three decades after Obsolete issued its prophetic warnings, the metal community is failing to heed its call. Metal has always been broadly anti-authoritarian, but as fans and bands have aged out of teenage rebellion, too many of them have been content to accept the ruling class’s demands lying down. That has to do with trends that are far bigger than metal, but it’s still difficult to watch. Even some of the apparent resisters have risked undermining themselves with hypocritical behavior. Testament released the incendiary “Infanticide A.I.” as the first single from last year’s Para Bellum, then followed it with suspiciously AI-looking animated videos for “Shadow People” and “High Noon.” (I’d love to be proven wrong, but I do think the burden of proof is with the artist here.) Helloween’s Michael Kiske went on a righteous anti-AI rant onstage a few months before his bandmate Kai Hansen announced a solo album with maybe the most repulsive AI album cover I’ve ever seen. My beloved Iron Maiden have mostly scrapped physical backdrops at their live shows in favor of video screens, which have run thick with AI slop. The resistance, at least among the old guard, is looking pretty weak.

Hope lies underground. John Cobbett has played guitar in some of my all-time favorite bands, including Ludicra, Hammers Of Misfortune, Slough Feg, and VHÖL. He recently sent me Thrashkraft Volume II, the new album by his utterly unclassifiable modular synth project Advancer, and it might be the most inspiring middle finger to AI I’ve heard to date. Like Fear Factory, Advancer uses futuristic (or really, by now, retrofuturistic) sounds to decry our increasingly tech-mediated future. Opening track “We Don’t Need No Bots” is an electropunk protest anthem built around a fully analog digital hardcore beat and bug-eyed vocals by Cobbett’s kid. If we have a future, the song seems to say, it runs through the youth rejecting the raw deal that’s been laid out before them. “Don’t even get me started about billionaires and the damage they’re doing to kids,” Cobbett wrote to me in a subsequent email.

“I have a lot to say on the subject at hand, having researched it extensively and raising a tween through all this psychotic hype about how AI is going to eliminate all the jobs and make humanity redundant. Believe me, the kids are hearing this VC propaganda and are well aware that they’re growing up into a world inundated by slop,” Cobbett went on. “Raising kids offline is the key challenge. I’m beyond stoked that my students want to play guitars and drums. They want to rock, in real time, face to face. In spite of all the brainrot and screen addiction rampant in their world, some are rejecting it. This is a very good sign. Tied in with that is a blossoming all-ages scene, even here in small town Montana. Kids want to be together in the same room. Increasingly that’s all they’re going to be able to trust, as everything online is fake. Extrapolate this to recorded, DAW-pasteurized music and it follows that live & local is the obvious solution. Community. Scenes. Shows in the woods with no phones allowed.”

In New York City, a band with grassroots ties to a very different scene have been beating the anti-technocratic drum for more than a decade. The gabber/synthpunk/industrial metal outfit L.O.T.I.O.N. Multinational Corporation shares members with half the Toxic State-affiliated DIY punk bands that emerged in the 2010s, and they’re fronted by Alexander Heir, the artist who drew all those bands’ album covers and show flyers. Their first LP, from 2015, was called Digital Control And Man’s Obsolescence, and they’ve been doubling down on their criticisms of the techno-oligarch class ever since, especially through the lens of how the tech world is intwined with modern warfare. Heir’s art for 2019’s World Wide W.E.B. is a parody of a Soldier Of Fortune magazine cover, with splash headlines including “IS YOUR CPU TRYING TO KILL YOU?”; “WESTERN ELITES’ BRUTALITY”; and my favorite, “ARE YOU OBSOLETE?”

L.O.T.I.O.N.’s latest album is Machine Hallucinations, named for AI models’ tendency to simply make up facts – or, say, to target an Iranian primary school for an airstrike – when confronted with incomplete or inaccurate information. After a glitchy noise intro by Igor Cavalera, a pioneer of this faux-genre for his work on Nailbomb’s Point Blank, L.O.T.I.O.N. launch into 28 harrowing minutes of their singular brand of fried-motherboard industrial stomp. It actually does kind of sound like Astro-Creep-era White Zombie, if Rob Zombie had been up there yelling about the microplastics in your bloodstream instead of grindhouse flicks. Machine Hallucinations is heavy, groovy, and gleefully in-the-red, and like every L.O.T.I.O.N. album before it, it sounds like the T-3000 being overtaken by a virus that forces it to dance. It’s also got some of the most clear-eyed critiques of our increasingly technofascist world I’ve ever heard. 

Machine Hallucinations isn’t exclusively or even primarily about AI. Heir understands that the evils that plague us are all connected, so a song about ICE raids (“Boots On The Ground”) or the genocide in Gaza (“Never Say Never”) feels as integral to L.O.T.I.O.N.’s identity as a song about social media algorithms (“Digital Rot”) or AI’s environmental cost (“Absolute Insanity”). L.O.T.I.O.N. were singing about these subjects since long before ChatGPT and Claude rolled out to the public, which means they’ve sadly lived to see everything they were warning us about come true. It makes me wonder how Burton C. Bell feels about being thrust into the world of Obsolete by the proliferation of Flock cameras.

Advancer and L.O.T.I.O.N. certainly aren’t the only heavy acts that are vocally anti-AI. Broadly speaking, musicians hate this shit, and anecdotally, nobody I know who plays metal below the festival-headliner level has embraced AI tools. I wonder how much of that is because the people I know mostly come from real, in-person scenes, where gatekeeping and unspoken rules make it verboten to do something as lame as signing up for a Suno account. I do worry that tech-bro tourists will continue to flood the zone with AI slop, and that it may someday become so overwhelming to separate the real art from the computer-generated stuff that well-intentioned listeners will fall back on old favorites even more than they already do. In the meantime, quiet acts of resistance might include reading publications like Stereogum (sorry) or asking your local record store clerk for a recommendation instead of relying on the algorithm. For some less quiet acts of resistance, check out the liner notes of Obsolete. You’ll need a physical copy.

TEN NAILS THROUGH THE NECK

JOURNEY TO THE WORLD BEYOND