Ministry - Hate To Go: Take Out Or Delivery

After more than four decades of noise, reinvention, and scorched-earth industrial music, Ministry are bringing the machine to a halt. Hate To Go: Take Out Or Delivery is billed as the band’s final studio album, and Al Jourgensen is closing the circle by reconnecting with the sound and personnel of Ministry’s most celebrated era.

Hate To Go: Take Out Or Delivery arrives as Ministry’s final full-length statement. Rather than treating the occasion as a sentimental farewell, Jourgensen points backward to the ferocious combination of electronics, sampling, distorted guitar, and mechanized rhythm that transformed Ministry during their Sire/Wax Trax! years.

Most significantly, the album features a guest appearance from Paul Barker, Jourgensen’s former Ministry and Revolting Cocks partner. Barker was an integral part of Ministry’s classic period, contributing to the run that stretched from The Land of Rape and Honey and The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste through Psalm 69 and Filth Pig. His return gives the record a tangible connection to the lineup that helped establish the vocabulary of industrial metal.

The track titles suggest Jourgensen isn't leaving quietly. “Crickets” opens the album before “Voices of Hate,” “Clown Car,” “We Hate,” and “Delete” fill out the first side. Side two begins with the pointedly titled “Grifter,” followed by “Singularity” and “Burned Out,” before Ministry bring the album, and potentially their studio-recording career, to a close with “We’re Still Here.”

It is a fittingly defiant title from a band that has survived virtually everything. Since emerging from Chicago in the early 1980s, Ministry have undergone one of alternative music’s most dramatic transformations, moving from synth-pop and new wave through the Wax Trax! underground before helping turn industrial music into something heavier, uglier, and powerful enough to infiltrate the metal mainstream.

This limited-edition vinyl pressing comes on black and silver splatter vinyl, giving Ministry’s purported final studio album an appropriately stark physical edition.

If Hate To Go really is the end, Ministry aren't using it to soften the edges. They’re returning to the machinery that made them dangerous in the first place, settling old scores, reconnecting with an old conspirator, and leaving the power switched on as they walk out the door.