FEAR FACTORY guitarist Dino Cazares spoke to Landry.Audio about how the attitudes of heavy metal fans have evolved over the course of the last four decades since he first started getting into music. “A lot of metalheads are a lot more conservative, which I was really surprised,” he said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET). “It’s changed into that. You think I’d put a video out with a girl shaking her ass and the metalhead community wouldn’t fucking attack me? Of course [they would]. MASTODON did that a few years back — they put a video out like that, and people were just so mad about it. A lot of metalheads have gone conservative compared to what it was back in the ’80s and even parts of the ’90s… That’s just how it progressed. People are more aware of the #MeToo-type movement and racism and sexism and all that stuff, and people take all that into consideration now.
“Don’t get me wrong — as long as it’s all safe and not for reals… I mean, look at CANNIBAL CORPSE; they get away with songs like ‘Fucked With A Knife’ and ‘Butchered At Birth’,” he continued. “They can still get away with it, ’cause it’s still considered somewhat fantasy, and I guess they’re kind of the grandfathers of that, so they’ve been grandfathered in. But nowadays you can’t say a lot of things on the Internet because people are gonna attack you for it. And that’s where I see the conservativeness.”
FEAR FACTORY‘s latest album, “Aggression Continuum”, came out on June 18 via Nuclear Blast Records. The LP features Cazares; drummer Mike Heller; and former vocalist, lyricist, and co-founder Burton C. Bell. It was produced and engineered by Damien Rainaud (DRAGONFORCE, ONCE HUMAN), with keyboards by Igor Khoroshev (ex-YES), and programming on two songs from longtime collaborator Rhys Fulber (FRONT LINE ASSEMBLY). “Aggression Continuum” was mixed by Andy Sneap (MEGADETH, KILLSWITCH ENGAGE, TRIVIUM), who also mixed FEAR FACTORY‘s previous album, 2015’s “Genexus”.
Photo credit: Stephanie Cabral
