Electro-industrial duo Alien Faktor are back with Hanging by a Threat, a single out now on all the usual platforms, and the first music from their new album Stockholm Syndrome, which is due on 15 January. It is their first studio album in 28 years.
The band started in Milwaukee in the early 1990s and are now based in Madison, Wisconsin, where founder Thomas L. Muschitz and guitarist Mike Hunsberger have reunited. Muschitz began writing the new songs in late 2025, and says he did the one thing he has always done when he is sickened by the state of his country: "Create art." The single is described as a rally cry against injustice, intolerance and the rise of fascism, with heavy guitars, bombastic percussion, stomp-worthy synths and revolution samples.
The back catalogue goes back to 1994 debut Abduction, the first ever release on Muschitz's own Decibel Records. Their 1997 album Arterial Spray… and Cattle Mutilations reached No. 20 on CMJ's Dance Top 25, they recorded at Chicago Trax, and they did remix work for Caustic, Collide, Leather Strip and Psychic TV featuring Genesis P-Orridge. They also covered Alanis Morissette's You Oughta Know for a compilation, and more recently MGMT's Time To Pretend.
A band that shut up shop when their label closed at the end of the 1990s and came back three decades later with something to say is exactly the sort of return I'm happy to back. Putting Greg Reely, who has mastered records for Skinny Puppy and Front Line Assembly, on the new album, and getting the same painter back for the sleeve, tells you they have gone about it properly.
That painter is James Barany, who also did the cover of Arterial Spray. The new cover is called Nomenclature of Sierpinski. The press release lists KMFDM, Ministry, Skinny Puppy, Front 242 and Front Line Assembly among the bands to compare them to.
Listen: https://alienfaktor.bandcamp.com/album/hanging-by-a-threat