When it comes to the current status of Fear Factory, there hasn’t been much in the way of clarity for the past few years. The band have largely been inactive in the public eye since coming off the road back in 2016. While they were among the initially booked artists for Glenn Danzig‘s ‘Blackest Of The Black‘ festival back in May of 2017, the group quietly disappeared from the roster long before the show took place.

May of 2017 also saw the band’s former bassist Christian Olde Wolbers declare that the band was over in a social media post that featured the hashtag of ‘#GrownAssMenThatCantWorkOutShit’. Olbers himself had not been a member since 2006 at that point.

- Advertisement -

A glimmer of hope for fans emerged back in November of 2018, when Fear Factory vocalist Burton C. Bell publicly announced that the group had completed a new album titled “Monolith” and that it had been delivered to their label. At the time he mentioned some legal issues had to be panned out before moving ahead with the record.

However, despite Bell even going so far as to reveal the tentative artwork for the album, the band’s guitarist Dino Cazares appeared to be unaware of any new release when asked about it by a fan this past February. It’s been fairly quiet on that front since up until today, October 02nd, when a fan asked Cazares for an update on the band’s new album via Twitter, to which Cazares directly replied:

There is no new FF album https://t.co/D6uZ9yabGy — Dino Cazares (@DinoCazares) October 2, 2019

Fear Factory have had a complicated history over the years which has seen various incarnations of the band come and go—including a run without Cazares that lasted a few years. Bell has remained the one constant over the bands career with factions of former key members reportedly warring behind the scenes.

To that end, the band’s long-rumored legal woes are said to have emerged from bad blood between now former members and their involvement in incorporating the band earlier in their career. Whether or not those rumors are true, they wouldn’t be the only headache the group have had to content with in recent years.

This past April saw the release of a greatest hits compilation culled from the band’s Roadrunner Records years titled “Linchpin” arrive without the group’s input or knowledge. Furthermore, as of press time, several of the band’s 2000s era (“Archetype“, “Transgression“, “Mechanize” and “The Industrialist“) albums have also been absent from streaming services and digital retailer for some time now.