Ministry has celebrated over 40 years of genre-defining industrial metal (and briefly synth-pop but we don’t talk about that) helmed by everyone’s favourite demented uncle, Al Jourgensen. This latest, HOPIUMFORTHEMASSES, harkens back to Ministry’s ’90s output, sharing a lot of DNA with Psalm 69 which will delight old heads.
The new record continues the Ministry tradition of criticising whatever has gotten under Al’s skin since the last album. This time, his razor-sharp tongue focuses on Just Stop Oil, incels, white supremacists and just straight-up ‘Goddamn White Trash’.
You can make the argument that some of the tracks are somewhat inaccessible to those who aren’t chronically online, at least from a lyrical standpoint but the riffing more than makes up for that with stellar riffing like the stomping chugs on ‘Aryan Embarrassment’ and ‘The TV Song’, the latest instalment of the iconic TV saga.
Every single Ministry album since Relapse features at least one song that everyone hates purely from an ideological standpoint and Uncle Al ups the ante by giving us two: ‘BDE’ and ‘Just Stop Oil’. It’s a clever move if you think about it, it opens up a dialogue about the subject matter, they just happened to be killer songs as well.
Your political opinions don’t necessarily have to line up with Al’s to enjoy this record as there’s a great deal of care going into the musicianship, particularly the guitar work from Monte Pittman and Cesar Soto. Hopefully, the music transcends political ideology in a way that Ministry’s iconic Dubya trilogy did but we live in a very different world nowadays and political discourse has become quite heated and toxic.
The samples and industrial elements are on point as usual as they even include some euro dance instrumentals on Ricky’s Hand. Ministry once again focuses on the media and the cult of personality that comes with it on tracks like ‘New Religion’ and ‘Cult of Suffering’.
Ministry’s output has been somewhat inconsistent over the years but HOPIUMFORTHEMASSES is a clear step in the right direction. Even if the days of Ministry are as numbered as Al says, we can still take some comfort in knowing Ministry went out with a bang instead of a whimper or maybe we’ll just have to wait and see what Al thinks of the next president…
HOPIUMFORTHEMASSES is available now via Nuclear Blast
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