After enduring a year like 2020, no one could have possibly expected Al Jourgensen
to stay silent on the maelstrom of the past 12 months. As the mastermind
behind pioneering industrial outfit Ministry, Jourgensen has spent the last four
decades using music as a megaphone to rally listeners to the fight for equal
rights, restoring American liberties, exposing exploitation and putting crooked
politicians in their rightful place — set to a background of aggressive riffs, searing
vocals and manipulated sounds to drive it home.
As Jourgensen watched the chaos that befell the world during the height of a
global pandemic and the tensions rising from one of the most important elections
in American history, he seized on the opportunity to write, spending quarantine
holed up in his self-built home studio — Scheisse Dog Studio — along with
engineer Michael Rozon and girlfriend Liz Walton to create Ministry’s latest
masterpiece, Moral Hygiene (out October 1 on Nuclear Blast Records). Anchored
by last year’s lead off track “Alert Level” — which asks listeners to internalize
the question “How concerned are you?” — the 10 songs on this upcoming
15th studio album cover the breadth of the current dilemmas facing humanity,
while ruminating on the sizable impact of COVID-19 ,the inevitable effects of
climate change, consequences of misinformed conspiracies and the stakes in the
fight for racial equality. And most importantly doing so with the lens of what we
as a society are going to do about it all.
“The one good thing about taking a year off from any social activity is that you
really get to sit back and get an overview of things as opposed to being caught
up in the moment,” says Jourgensen,“and what became inevitably clear is that
the times ....... more