The Wisconsin electro-industrial project releases its first single from ‘Stockholm Syndrome’

Alien Faktor are back, and Retrofuturista premieres ‘Hanging by a Threat’, the first single from their new album ‘Stockholm Syndrome’. The song reaches digital platforms on October 27, including Apple Music and Bandcamp. The album follows on January 15.

Title: Stockholm Syndrome
Artist: Alien Faktor
Release Date: 2027-01-15
Genres: EBM, Industrial Music
Label: self-release
Description: Retrofuturista premieres Alien Faktor’s ‘Hanging by a Threat’, out October 27. The album ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ follows on January 15.

Featured image: © Paige Gilberg

Alien Faktor started in 1994 in Milwaukee as a solo project of Thomas L. Muschitz, who launched the Decibel Records label that same year to put out the debut album ‘Abduction’. ‘Desolate’ followed in 1995, then the remix EP ‘Final Expenses’ and the album ‘Listen!’ in 1996. Mike Hunsberger joined on guitar and programming for ‘Arterial Spray… and Cattle Mutilations’, released on November 4, 1997. The record climbed to No. 20 on CMJ’s Dance Top 25 in February 1998. Decibel closed at the end of the decade and the band stopped working.

Muschitz and Hunsberger are now working together again from Madison, Wisconsin. The new songs started in late 2025, when Muschitz, busy with film and audio production, began writing under the weight of what he saw happening in his country and elsewhere. The single came out of that anger. Muschitz has said he channelled despair into fury, kept hold of a little hope, and did what he has always done, which is make art.

‘Hanging by a Threat’ runs on heavy guitar, a booming drum sound and synth programming made for stomping, with samples of revolution layered on top. A relentless, thunderous return. The lyrics oppose hatred, intolerance and fascism, and sum up their position in four statements: kindness is strength, violence is weakness, compassion is art, hate is disease. Muschitz wants the track to sit alongside many other voices and to remind listeners that power rests with the people.

‘Stockholm Syndrome’ goes back to the band’s 1990s sound and adds new influences and current production. It uses hard beats, noise effects, EBM synths, textured guitars and psychedelic atmospheres. Greg Reely, whose credits include Skinny Puppy, Front Line Assembly, Delerium and Fear Factory, mastered it. The artwork is by James Barany, a painter who teaches at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and who also painted the cover of ‘Arterial Spray… and Cattle Mutilations’.

The first run

In the 1990s the band recorded at Chicago Trax, The Warehouse and their own Milwaukee studio, The Womb, and worked with Chicago industrial names including Chris Randall of Sister Machine Gun and Van Christie of Die Warzau. Their tracks were remixed by Joseph Bishara, Seibold of Hate Dept and Matt Green of Spahn Ranch. As remixers, they reworked material by Caustic, Purr Machine, Pain Station, Collide, Swamp Terrorists, Leather Strip and Psychic TV with Genesis P-Orridge. They also covered Alanis Morissette’s ‘You Oughta Know’ for Re-Constriction Records’ compilation ‘Nod’s Tacklebox o’ Fun’, and more recently MGMT’s ‘Time To Pretend’.

‘Hanging by a Threat’ is out on October 27 on Apple Music, Bandcamp and other digital platforms. ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ arrives on January 15.

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