Fear Factory guitarist Dino Cazares announced that he’ll decide who the band’s new singer will be within few days from now. Their original vocalist Burton C. Bell quit the band in 2020 following a dispute over ownership of the band with previous members Raymond Herrera and Christian Olde Wolbers, after which Cazares was declared the sole owner of Fear Factory.
Temple of Bleh was primarily interviewing Cazares about Fear Factory’s new music when the guitarist responded with details about their search for a new singer. “We’re at the point where I’m gonna decide on a singer any day now,” he began. “There’s multiple people that are really good — really good. Even some females that are really good. And making a decision is gonna be definitely tough. ‘Will the fans accept them? Will the fans not accept them?’ — that kind of thing. I worry about all those kinds of things, but at the same time, I’ve gotta be how I was in the beginning and not fear — not fear change. I necessarily don’t fear change, but I do take it into consideration how fans are gonna take it. I mean, I can’t base everything I do on what a fan might think, because then I’ll never get anything done. But it is definitely a big decision. And whoever I choose, I want them there to be for the long run, because I plan on making a few more records before I’m retired or gone or whatever. It’s definitely a big decision. And it’s some big shoes to fill.”
In spite of those ‘big shoes,’ Cazares continued by looking on the bright side of having a new singer, “I wanna get back to playing songs that we never got to play live. It’s no secret that Burt had some vocal issues when he sang live — he just couldn’t sing certain songs. It just happens. Like ‘Linchpin’, our biggest song, we could never play it. I wanna be able to find a singer that can sing that song and we can play it live every night. I wanna be able to give people the hits — the songs that they paid money to see.”
All that’s left for Cazares to do is get the potential vocalists in a room with the rest of Fear Factory and see how well everyone gets along, as well as whether they’d be too nervous to perform with them live, etc. He mentioned that the musicians he picked out for his other band Divine Heresy “went on to do big things” and that he’s excited by knowing that he’s found some more great talent.
Last Friday, Fear Factory just shared their first new single since 2015, “Disruptor.” It’s the lead single from their upcoming album Aggression Continuum, which is due June 18 via Nuclear Blast. It will be the last album to feature Bell’s vocals, since they were tracked several years before the legal dispute. Bell was a central part of Fear Factory’s sound, having been the frontman since they formed in 1989. Regardless of the caliber of the replacement vocalist, Aggression Continuum is the end of an era for the industrial metal band.
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