Ministry return for their final hurrah. Hate To Go sees old and familiar faces in the fold for Al Jourgensen’s goodbye.

MINISTRY

Al Jourgensen has said goodbye before. The Last Sucker in 2007 was billed as the end of Ministry; the C U LaTour that followed was meant to be the final lap, and yet a few years later the machine was back up and running, grinding out Relapse, From Beer To Eternity and a run of politically charged records that took the band deep into its fifth decade. So, forgive the old guard a raised eyebrow when the man announces that this time, he really means it. Hate To Go (Take Out Or Delivery) could be Ministry’s seventeenth and final studio album? The full stop on a story that began in Chicago in 1981, and if the singles are anything to go by, Uncle Al has no intention of going quietly.

The difference this time is the tone of the farewell. There is no slammed door, no feud and no sense of a band collapsing under its own weight. Speaking last year, Jourgensen put the decision down to fatigue rather than illness or infighting, telling one interviewer simply, “My ears are tired from music.” He has talked about painting, about resting, about a life beyond the studio, and in the album campaign he has gone further still, joking that “It’s time to herd goats.” That relaxed, almost cheerful resignation sits in fascinating contrast to the music itself, which, on the evidence so far, is as furious and as pointed as anything the band have released this century. The title says it all: he hates to go, but the order is placed, and you can have it delivered or come and collect it yourself.

FAMILIAR PERSONNEL

The line-up that carries Ministry over the finish line is the one that has served the band through its recent touring cycles. Monte Pittman and Cesar Soto handle guitars, Paul D’Amour, once of Tool, holds down the bass, John Bechdel handles samplers and synths, and Pepe Clarke Magaña sits behind the kit. It is a seasoned, road-hardened unit, and the sense on the singles is of a band that knows exactly how to frame Jourgensen’s snarl: tight enough to hammer the riffs home, loose enough to let the samples and the chaos breathe.

The headline addition, though, is a returning one. Paul Barker was the other half of Ministry’s golden era, the bassist and co-producer who stood shoulder to shoulder with Jourgensen from 1986 until 2003, and his fingerprints are all over The Land Of Rape And Honey, The Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste and Psalm 69. The two parted on bad terms, spent years at arm’s length and patched things up in 2018, and Jourgensen has made no secret of wanting his old partner involved in the last chapter. Barker is not touring, as D’Amour remains the live bassist, but he appears on the closing track, We’re Still Here, the first time he has turned up on a Ministry studio record since Animositisomina. Jourgensen has called the final album, with Barker back in the fold, “the perfect way to go out,” and for longtime fans, it is impossible not to read it as a circle being closed.

The early synth-pop of With Sympathy gave way to Twitch, and a harsher, sample-driven sound that pointed the way forward, before The Land Of Rape And Honey and The Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste turned Ministry into one of the most influential bands of their generation. Psalm 69 earned the first of six Grammy nominations, Filth Pig and Dark Side Of The Spoon took them somewhere murkier and more sludge-soaked, and the George W. Bush-baiting trilogy of Houses Of The Molé, Rio Grande Blood and The Last Sucker established the template for the political broadsides that followed. After the death of guitarist Mike Scaccia in 2012, many assumed the story was over, but AmeriKKKant, Moral Hygiene and 2024’s Hopiumforthemasses proved there was plenty of fuel left in the tank. Even last year’s The Squirrely Years Revisited, a reworking of those early synth-era songs that his bandmates put together and presented to him as a surprise, felt like a man tidying his affairs before leaving the building

A SAMPLE-HEAVY JOLT

Crickets opens proceedings, and for a band whose albums so often kick off with a sample-heavy jolt, a title like this is a sly one. Crickets are the sound of an empty room, of silence after a question nobody wants to answer, and I would expect Jourgensen to use it as a sarcastic overture, the noise of the powerful saying nothing at all. Ministry openers have a long history of setting the agenda through found sound and spoken-word clips before the riffs crash in, and this looks set to follow suit, priming the listener for the bile to come. It is also a smart way to open a farewell: the silence speaks first, and everything after it feels deafening.

Voices Of Hate follows, and it reads like a companion piece. If the record has a central theme, it is the volume of hatred in modern public life- who is shouting, who is amplifying it and who is profiting from it and placing a song with this name so early suggests Jourgensen intends to name that noise before he takes aim at its sources. I would expect a mid-paced, chant-driven stomp in the mould of the AmeriKKKant era, the kind of track built to be bellowed back at him from a festival pit.

CLASSIC JOURGENSEN

Clown Car is one of those classic Jourgensen titles that tells you everything and nothing at once. The image of an endless procession of buffoons spilling out of a tiny vehicle has become a well-worn shorthand for political chaos, and it would be a surprise if this were not another broadside at the ruling class on both sides of the Atlantic. Expect a bouncing, almost circus-like groove underpinned by Bechdel’s samples – Ministry have always been at their most entertaining when the rage comes with a punchline.

We Hate is where the album’s targeting becomes unmistakable. Built as a direct response to Donald Trump’s posts on Truth Social, including the AI-generated material that has become a feature of his online presence, it turns the president’s own rhetoric back on him in typically unsubtle fashion. Whatever your politics, it is a reminder that Jourgensen has never been interested in fence-sitting; this is the same man who spent three albums savaging the Bush White House, and the satirical instinct is as sharp as ever. Joshua Bradford, formerly of Revolting Cocks, directed the video, and the result is gleefully grotesque. Musically, it rides a thick, chugging riff and a sing-along refrain that will surely become a fixture of the farewell setlist.

GRIFTERS

Delete is the shortest title on the record and arguably the most ominous. In an age of disappearing records, scrubbed social media accounts and information that can vanish at the press of a button, it is easy to imagine this as a meditation on erasure, of truth, of history, perhaps even of the band itself as the end draws near. I would expect something colder and more mechanical here, closer to the stark electronic edges of the early industrial years than the thrash-adjacent assault of the recent albums. Bechdel’s role could be crucial here; his samplers and synths have long been the connective tissue between Ministry’s electronic past and metallic present, and a track like this would give him the spotlight.

Grifter turns its attention to the con artists and opportunists Jourgensen has railed against for decades. Televangelists, snake-oil salesmen and politicians on the make have all been in his crosshairs before, and with a title this blunt, I would wager the band are going straight for the jugular. Sitting at the midpoint of the record, expect a quick, vicious cut rather than a sprawling epic.

The White Man Lied is a title as confrontational as anything in the Ministry catalogue, and on a record so concerned with power and deception, it looks set to be one of the album’s most pointed statements, a reminder that Jourgensen’s politics have always been rooted in a deep suspicion of official history.

METALLIC TEXTURES & POUNDING REPETITION

Singularity shifts the focus away from politicians and onto the machines. It plays out as a dystopian vision of a robotic takeover, with a mechanised narrator calmly announcing that people have had their turn and the machines are taking over, and it lands squarely in the middle of the current anxiety around artificial intelligence. There is a delicious irony in the godfather of industrial music, a genre built on man wrestling with machine, closing out his career with a warning about technology getting the upper hand. The video, directed by Ben Garcia of Rage4Order Designs alongside Jourgensen and Bradford, leans into the sci-fi imagery, and the song itself is one of the most purely industrial things the band have released in years, all metallic textures and pounding repetition.

Burned Out is the album’s mission statement. Stitched together from news clips touching on immigration enforcement, the Epstein files, and the war in Gaza, it captures the exhaustion of living through a relentless news cycle, before pivoting towards a call for people to stand together rather than tear each other apart. Musically, it is vintage Ministry, a slab of churning, piledriver riffing that could only have come from one band and Bradford’s cartoon video, which turns Uncle Al into the ringmaster of an animated procession, adds a welcome streak of black humour. As an opening calling card for a farewell record, it hits every mark: angry, catchy, topical and very loud.

WE’RE STILL HERE

We’re Still Here closes the album, and it is the song that carries the most emotional weight on paper. It features Paul Barker, marking his return to a Ministry studio recording after more than two decades away, and the title alone is a defiant one for a band on its way out. It reads as a two-fingered salute to everyone who wrote Ministry off over the years, but also as a quiet acknowledgement of survival, of friendships repaired, of bandmates lost along the way and of a body of work that will outlast the band itself. I fully expect this to be the moment that makes longtime fans pause, and if Barker’s distinctive bass lines are anywhere near the front of the mix, it could be the most satisfying full stop Jourgensen could have hoped for.

What Hate To Go does best is refuse to soften. Plenty of veteran acts use a final album as an excuse for nostalgia or reflection, but the three singles released ahead of the album, the rallying cry of Burned Out, the satirical blitz of We Hate, and the sci-fi dread of Singularity show a band still aiming squarely at the present. Each attack from a different angle, and yet each is unmistakably Ministry: the samples, the barked vocals and the mechanical heaviness that has influenced everyone from Nine-Inch Nails to Rammstein.

It also helps that Jourgensen remains one of the most distinctive voices in heavy music. Love him or loathe him, there is nobody else who combines his gallows humour, his punk-rock contempt for authority and his studio-rat obsession with texture and noise. His lyrics have never been subtle, but subtlety has never been the point; Ministry records are meant to feel like a punch to the gut and a slap in the face at once, and the fact that he is still finding fresh targets after four and a half decades is remarkable in itself.

POLITICAL MINISTRY

Political Ministry albums of recent years have occasionally been accused of preaching to the converted, and over ten tracks, the line between righteous fury and repetitive sloganeering can be a thin one. Some of the sample-heavy topicality that makes these songs feel urgent today may also date them quickly, and there is a risk that the album ends up as a snapshot of 2026 rather than a timeless farewell. The omission of The White Man Lied from the vinyl and cassette pressings is also an odd decision for a final record, and those who buy the album on wax will be left with an incomplete version. And while Barker’s return is a gift to longtime fans, a single guest appearance on the closing track may leave some wishing he had been more deeply involved.

To Go sounds like exactly the kind of exit Jourgensen promised: loud, defiant, and completely unrepentant. A farewell album that opens with a sarcastic chirp, takes aim at a sitting president, warns of a robot apocalypse and closes with the return of an old friend is not the work of a man running out of ideas, but of one who has decided to leave while he still has something to say. Whether Hate To Go ultimately sits alongside The Land Of Rape And Honey, The Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste, and Psalm 69 in the upper tier of the Ministry catalogue is a verdict the full record will deliver – but for now, the order is in, the engine is running, and Uncle Al is going out exactly as he came in: angry, irreverent and impossible to ignore.

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