FEAR FACTORY Guitarist Talks Lineup Changes, Upcoming Album

Aniruddh "Andrew" Bansal of GuitarWorld.com recently conducted an interview with guitarist Dino Cazares of Los Angeles cyber metallers FEAR FACTORY. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

GuitarWorld.com: Your new album, "The Industrialist", is coming out June 5, and it's supposed to be a concept album. What's that all about, and how did you guys decide to do a concept album?

Dino: Well, we've always been doing concept records ever since the early days, from "Demanufacture", "Obselete", "Digimortal" and so on, but this time we decided to take it a little bit further. We've always been presenting the concept of man versus technology and man versus machine. The past records have been about the perspective of the human, but this one is about the automaton, which is a robot. The concept is about his perception, what the automaton sees, what he feels and what he learns. He's basically a robot that collects memories and stores them. He's fighting for his life, and for other automatons. We as humans built the automaton to help us for everyday life, but he basically turns against humans. And that's what the story is about.

GuitarWorld.com: You programmed the drums on the album, but what's the situation when you're on tour. Who's your live drummer?

Dino: It's called a Mac computer. He's our drummer. [laughs] No, but seriously, we have a live drummer. His name is Mike Heller, and he is in a band called MALIGNANCY. He is playing all the songs and doing a great job. I think right now we are tighter. We feel like a really tight unit right now. We've got Matt DeVries on bass. He was the guitar player in CHIMAIRA, but he's playing bass for us. For FEAR FACTORY, we always wanted our bassist to be like a second guitar player. So Matt pretty much does everything I do, and it definitely makes us really tight on the low-end part. Then you've got Mike Heller on drums who's a very tight drummer, very technical and just super solid. I think our band right now, me, Matt and Mike are very tight with each other. Very locked.

GuitarWorld.com: Speaking of these changes, obviously Byron Stroud was the bassist and Gene [Hoglan] was with you guys. You did so many shows after "Mechanize" was released. You toured everywhere, on your own and with METALLICA as well. So do you feel like it's a big change for you with these two guys now not in the band?

Dino: No, not at all. I didn't feel like it was a big change at all. I mean, of course, we miss them as friends, because we toured with them for the last three years, but everybody does their thing. Byron is playing in 3 INCHES OF BLOOD now and Gene is playing in .. every band. [laughs] Gene is one of those drummers that everybody needs. You're lucky if you get him, you know what I mean? Right now he's doing TESTAMENT, he's doing DETHKLOK, he's doing a lot of stuff. But I do believe we have really good, solid players in Mike Heller and Matt DeVries. The band sounds really tight and solid, and I'm really happy about it. I wouldn't pick shitty musicians.

Read the entire interview from GuitarWorld.com.

"Recharger" audio stream:

"The Industrialist" trailer: