For this follow-up effort to their 2021 debut album ‘Blacken the Skies’, the Terminal formula of industrial glam has been updated with ‘more industrial, more glam.’ Mainman Thomas Mark Anthony also makes a strident case for being his genre’s best wordsmith, weaving grand themes of power, zealotry and corruption via complex rhymes and anthemic choruses. Picking up where its predecessor left off in its excoriation of society’s dangerous hypocrites, the very first line on the new record is “How many guns would Jesus buy?” Plato’s Republic provides the album title and theme – that an unjust society is a doomed society and democracy in itself is no defence against demagogues or tyrants – while Anthony’s sonorous baritone is prominent in the mix as he ponders existential themes of religion and mortality.
Compared to the rapid-fire delivery of ‘Blacken The Skies’, the new Terminal songs are wider in breadth and depth as well as longer in duration, while experimental influences are evident in the orchestral-inspired title track and in the hard glam of ‘Don’t Be Taken Alive’, which is believed to be the first industrial blues shuffle. The album includes four instrumentals among its thirteen tracks.
‘The New Republic’ is dedicated to the late Metropolis Records label founder Dave Heckman.
The soundtrack to a world unbalanced, reeling, spinning out of control and running out of time, Terminal allies industrial music and glam rock with trace quantities of dark techno, synthpop and raw machine recordings. Each of their songs is a broadside against the atrocities of lost humanity and the devastation of our planet.
Terminal is the work of singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Thomas Mark Anthony. A lifelong anti-apartheid and civil rights activist over a life lived in South Africa, Canada and the United States, Anthony is joined by the US-based Terminal Live Unit for his group’s powerful and confrontational live shows.
THE NEW REPUBLIC
TRACKLISTING
1 Asymmetric Warfare (1.13)
2 The Sin of the Sanctified (3.49)
3 Smart Weapons (4.45)
4 Did We Ask For Truth (4.16)
5 [Redacted] (1.08)
6 Don’t Be Taken Alive (4.19)
7 The New Republic (5.05)
8 Paradoxical Reactions (1.17)
9 Fall of the Reign (5.50)
10 Dirty River [Necrosis] (4.09)
11 Testify (4.22)
12 Disproportionate Response (1.17)
13 Rise (4.38)
new album
CD | digital
out 25.08.23
(Metropolis Records)
pre-order CD | DL
pre-save/add digital
includes the single
THE SIN OF THE SANCTIFIED
Bandcamp audio
