Fear Factory - Scumgrief

For some of you, this week’s pick is going to bring back a lot of memories, mostly of dark nightclubs and boots with heels the size of a house brick. Those of you who maybe haven’t heard of the band, who are having visions of a production line that only produces skeletons, are not only way off the mark but also might have been living under an actual house brick. Who hasn’t heard of Fear Factory at this point?

Hell, the heavy metal band from Los Angeles, California have been going strong (or depending on who you ask, at least just going) since 1989, when their earliest days under the name Ulcertron were spent recording work that was much closer to grindcore than any given Fear Factory album you might dip into. 1992’s debut Soul of a New Machine, however, dropped a lot of those stylings for a much more alternative metal feel – which, given that it was 1992 at the time, was nothing short of groundbreaking.

The band are often hailed as the forerunners of the entire nu-metal/alternative metal scene and it’s not hard to see why when you give that album a few spins. They defined the sound even further with 1995’s Demanufacture, an absolute beast of an album that blew the band’s popularity into the stratosphere and inspired more than a few big names in the genre to take up their instruments. Plus, you’d have to guess, changed the course of a few of the ones that had already started down a different path.

We’re going to go all the way back to those format shaping days with our Rock Song of the Week pick this week, however. Soul of a New Machine has a list of bangers as long as Shaquille O’Neill’s arm, but we’ve gone for the immense and pleasantly titled Scumgrief, a track that you can clearly identify an entire genre to come from nearly five years before that genre even reared its head. It’s a huge, properly gritty and grimy piece of music that will get your blood pumping in that way only the very best metal tracks can. I’m going to leave the rest to you, so fire up those headphones and get to work. No, not actual work – ear work.