In a new interview with Australia’s Jaimunji, former FEAR FACTORY frontman Burton C. Bell spoke about his plans for new music after issuing two singles in 2024 — “Anti-Droid” and “Technical Exorcism” — and a cover of RAMMSTEIN’s “Du Hast” in 2023. He said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “The guitars [on ‘Anti-Droid’], they weren’t prominent in the mix. But yeah, I’m expanding on it. And it’s music that I’ve written with my band, whereas ‘Anti-Droid’ was written by the producer, Alex Crescioni, in L.A. And then ‘Technical Exorcism’ was written by me, but I had drums done by Paul Ferguson and guitars by Norman Westberg. But these next two songs and all the other songs we’ve been writing is the combination of the band and us working together as a band. And, to me, it’s just pretty much I think I found my placement, I found the sound that I wanna do. It’s me, two guitar players, bass player and a drummer. No keyboard. It rips. It follows my mantra of ‘heavy, groovy, dark and moody.’ And groovy is not necessarily slow — groovy is also uptempo — but every song I’m gonna be playing from my past catalog and my new catalog fits that mantra.”Regarding what it has been like releasing music under his name after being involved with so many other projects over the years — including FEAR FACTORY, ASCENSION OF THE WATCHERS, GZR, CITY OF FIRE and MINISTRY — Bell said: “It’s very liberating, I’ll tell you that. I don’t have to pigeonhole myself. I don’t have to stay within a certain parameter of a sound. I don’t have to use a certain producer. Basically, the sky’s the limit right now, and if it falls into my criteria of ‘heavy, groovy, dark and moody,’ I’m gonna do it. So it’s been very liberating. Also, I’m very conscious that all eyes for this music are on me, so I’ll be to blame if they don’t like it. But I’m not really concerned about that. But it really is all the pressure’s on me to make this sound killer, because I do — I feel like I do have something to prove.”I’ve done all this music throughout my entire career, and I’m going to continue doing the music that I am passionate about,” he explained. “For instance, all the music I’ve done outside of FEAR FACTORY doesn’t sound like FEAR FACTORY, but it’s still heavy. GZR, working with [BLACK SABBATH’s] Geezer Butler, that was amazing. Working with MINISTRY, that’s been amazing. Writing the music for ASCENSION OF THE WATCHERS, it was heavy in another respect, more of a esoteric respect, but it wasn’t just pounding. I’m putting all those together and creating the sound that I wanna move forward with, and that’s the sound of Burton C. Bell, which is heavy, groovy, dark and moody.”Asked if there are plans for him to release a full-length solo album or if he is going to keep putting out singles, Bell said: “At this point I’m just doing singles. In this day and age, without any label support, I’m able to release music on my own time and get it ready and make it perfect enough for release. And just releasing one song at a time keeps me out there, keeps my name out there, and hopefully the next goal is just to start touring.”Last month, Bell told Australia’s Heavy about “Anti-Droid” and “Technical Exorcism”: “I’ve had a great response [to the singles I’ve released so far]. Live, the fans really like it. They really translate live very well. The band that I have gathered, or should I say curated, ’cause it took me a couple of years to curate this band and grab these guys together. I’ve known [them] for a few years, but finally I got this band together. And the music that we play is really translating into a new group that’s really translating these songs in a heavy, groovy, dark and moody way. It’s amazing. So what you hear is gonna be heavier live.”Asked if he is sticking with his previously announced plan of putting out one song at a time before eventually releasing a full-length album, Bell said: “I am, but I’ve been recording a lot more new songs. So I’ve been releasing one thing at a time, but I do plan to have an actual physical release, hopefully in the coming year. So, the band and I, we have a few more songs that we’re working on and that we’re gonna just start working on new stuff. Well, we’re already working on new stuff, but the two new songs — the first song that you guys are gonna hear in probably another month is a fucking banger, dude. It crushes — crushes. And the one after that crushes as well. And we’re just gonna continue with that mode — just crushing.”Regarding whether “Anti-Droid” and “Technical Exorcism” are “a good sonic representation of what to expect from the whole album”, Bell said: “I would say come to see us live and that will be a great representation of what you’ll expect from the album, because, like I said, what we do live is we translate these songs to what we are doing now to our version. So even FEAR FACTORY songs and GZR songs, they are much more full. When you come [to see us] live, it’s becoming more of an organic kind of feeling; it’s just heavy. It’s me, obviously, and then I have two guitar players. They both trade off doing rhythm and lead, bass player and drums. So, if you wanna hear what the album is gonna be like, come see what we do live and you’ll understand and you will not be disappointed.”Bell played the first concert with his solo band on June 13, 2024 at 1720 in Los Angeles, California.Backing Bell at his recent gigs have been guitarist Henrik Linde (THE VITALS, DREN),drummer Ryan “Junior” Kittlitz (ALL HAIL THE YETI, THE ACID HELPS),bassist Tony Baumeister (ÆGES) and multi-instrumentalist Stewart Cararas.When the 1720 concert was first announced, Burton called the gig a “historic event” and vowed to perform “new songs and classics spanning my career.”In August 2024, Bell released “Technical Exorcism” along with the official Don Pancho Films-directed music video for the track.In March 2024, Bell — who released “Anti-Droid” that same month — was asked by Knotfest’s “Nu Pod” podcast if he has an entire album’s worth of material ready to come out. He responded: “No. I’m working on individual singles at a time. I do have a record’s worth of music. But I’m adopting the hip-hop strategy where instead of coming up, releasing a single and then the whole album comes out a couple of weeks later, and then a couple of weeks later, when that album is out, the momentum of the single and the whole record just kind of slows and becomes sluggish and just almost crashes. So I learned watching hip-hop artists and other artists as well, [where] they would just release a single at a time, keep that momentum, keep that spotlight on them and just release a single every few weeks and just keep that momentum going.”He continued: “In this day and age, the short attention span of the masses is very apparent. There’s this old saying in economics, less is more — supply and demand, less is more. So if you just feed ’em just a little bit at a time, they wanna hear more. And that’s where the interest stays. They’re compelled to keep listening. ‘Oh, he’s got something else coming out. Oh, he’s got something else coming out.'”Bell’s discography includes multiple live and recorded collaborations with BLACK SABBATH icon Geezer Butler and JOURNEY’s Deen Castronovo (as G/Z/R); industrial maverick Al Jourgensen and MINISTRY; and guest vocal appearances with PITCHSHIFTER, CONFLICT, SOIL, STATIC-X, SOULFLY and DELAIN, among others. He’s the vocalist of ASCENSION OF THE WATCHERS and CITY OF FIRE and, of course, the co-creator of FEAR FACTORY and the only musician to appear on every FEAR FACTORY release from 1992 through 2024.FEAR FACTORY created a sound that revolutionized extreme metal, defined in no small part by Bell’s innovative scream/sing dichotomy and the influences he brought from post-punk and industrial. Songs like “Replica”, “Linchpin”, “Edgecrusher”, “Fear Campaign”, “Archetype”, “Cyber Waste” and “Zero Signal” are modern metal anthems. “Demanufacture” (1995) and the RIAA gold-certified “Obsolete” (1998) are genre-redefining works heralded by fans and critics as essential albums. Orwell, Bradbury, “Blade Runner”, and sophisticated sci-fi and fantasy works fed Bell’s lyrics and concepts.The band toured the world with METALLICA, SLIPKNOT, KORN, MEGADETH and OZZY OSBOURNE, taking bands like SYSTEM OF A DOWN and STATIC-X out as support acts in their early stages. After years of behind-the-scenes band member turmoil and legal issues, Bell left FEAR FACTORY in the fall of 2020.Bell said “Anti-Droid” is “a statement about breaking free. Breaking the bonds of what I felt was a prison in many ways. Not just financially or contractually but creatively, as well. I felt constrained to this format we’d written ourselves into. The ‘factory’ doesn’t have a capital F. It’s the factory of the music industry, a certain form of business, and priorities. Being a slave to an established way of thinking is not really freedom. I am moving forward.”The 56-year-old Bell had been largely inactive on the musical front since officially announcing his departure from FEAR FACTORY in September 2020. At the time he said that he could not “align” himself with someone whom he did not trust or respect, an apparent reference to FEAR FACTORY founding guitarist Dino Cazares.In March 2023, Bell was asked by Joshua Toomey of the “Talk Toomey” podcast how it felt to see FEAR FACTORY going out on tour with someone else singing the parts he originally wrote and recorded with the band. He responded: “It doesn’t affect me at all. To be honest, I haven’t been this happy in a long time. More power to them, but I’m just moving forward in my own life, my own career, and I’m just trying to make a name for myself.”Asked if he has checked out any of the videos on YouTube of FEAR FACTORY performing with his replacement, the Italian-born singer Milo Silvestro, Bell said: “No, I don’t. I don’t care to.”Burton went on to say that he doesn’t mind being asked about FEAR FACTORY despite the fact that he is no longer in the band. “FEAR FACTORY, it’s what I’m known for,” he explained. “And the 30 years I had with FEAR FACTORY were some of the proudest moments of my career. And everything I’ve ever done in FEAR FACTORY I’m very proud of. Even some of the questionable things I’ve done in FEAR FACTORY I’m still proud of. It was a great legacy.”During an April 2022 appearance on an episode of “The Ex-Man” podcast hosted by Doc Coyle (BAD WOLVES),Bell touched upon FEAR FACTORY’s latest album, “Aggression Continuum”, which was released in June 2021 via Nuclear Blast Records. The LP, which was recorded primarily in 2017, features Bell and fellow original FF member Dino Cazares (guitar) alongside drummer Mike Heller.”I was just happy that record finally came out,” Burton said. “We finished that record in 2017. By the time it came out, I’d forgotten all about it. ‘Oh, yeah, I remember that song. Oh yeah.'”There’s some good songs on that record. The song ‘Collapse’ is a good song. The title track ‘Monolith’ is a good song,” he added, referencing the LP’s original working title, before it was changed by Cazares.When Coyle noted that the mix on “Aggression Continuum” is “great,” Bell hesitated for a couple of seconds before reluctantly agreeing. “I guess,” he said. “When I finished the record [in 2017], the record was done and agreed upon and then further work was done without my say.”Elsewhere in the chat, Burton admitted that “it was difficult” for him to leave FEAR FACTORY. “Stepping away from FEAR FACTORY was not an easy decision by [any] means,” he said. “But what I experienced for the 10 years before that, the lawsuits, the acrimony, that was the one that killed me. And I just had to step away to realize, you know, they can take all this stuff from me — they can take the money, they can take the royalties, they can take the trademark away from me — and I realized that didn’t define me. They can take that, but I’m still Burton C. Bell, motherfucker, and whatever I have they can’t take. So I’m just kind of moving forward and doing new things.”According to Bell, hardship is par for the course for most musicians, who often find themselves victims of bad contracts, unscrupulous management and, all too often, what appears to be a penchant for self-destruction.”I knew a long time ago I wanted to be an artist — way before I was in FEAR FACTORY,” he said. “When I was in high school, I was, like, ‘I wanna be an artist.’ To be an artist, you’ve gotta suffer. You’ve gotta understand that people wanna take from you the entire time — what you create they wanna make money off of and take it away from you and just give you a pittance. But being bitter is not my style — never has been.”Whatever negativity has happened in the past with FEAR FACTORY doesn’t even hold up to the amount of positivity that has happened,” he continued. “If you think about the negative, it can weigh you down so much, but it’s not really that much in comparison to what the band achieved, what we created, what we provided to the music world, and for that I’m proud and very happy.”No one likes to talk to a bitter person at all,” Burton added. “Me for one. It’s, like, ‘Man, just get over it and just move on.’ ‘Cause holding on to the past doesn’t serve me anything, it doesn’t serve anybody else anything. Move on and show ’em what you can do from that point forward.”Bell’s exit from FEAR FACTORY came more than two weeks after Cazares launched a GoFundMe campaign to assist him with the production costs associated with the release of FEAR FACTORY’s latest LP.Bell later told Kerrang! magazine that his split with FEAR FACTORY was a long time coming. “It’s been on my mind for a while,” he said. “These lawsuits [over the rights to the FEAR FACTORY name] just drained me. The egos. The greed. Not just from bandmembers, but from the attorneys involved. I just lost my love for it.”With FEAR FACTORY, it’s just constantly been, like, ‘What?!’ You can only take so much. I felt like 30 years was a good run. Those albums I’ve done with FEAR FACTORY will always be out there. I’ll always be part of that. I just felt like it was time to move forward.”In 2023, Bell unveiled “Paradise Found”, his debut exhibition of photographic works, at the Vincent Castiglia Gallery in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The photographs Bell presented were representational of his industrial and science-fiction aesthetic.”Paradise Found” consisted of 20 original full-color photographs of abandoned industrial buildings taken in darkness and fog from 2002 to 2003. Bell’s images are printed on aluminum using the dye sublimation process — an approach Bell calls “celluloid impressionism.”Bell’s ASCENSION OF THE WATCHERS project released its second full-length album, “Apocrypha”, in October 2020 via Dissonance Productions.[embedded content][embedded content]
