DINO CAZARES On FEAR FACTORY’s Influence: “I Feel That We’ve Influenced A Lot Of Bands To Add Melodic Vocals”

Fear Factory guitarist and founding member Dino Cazares has opened up about the band’s impact on younger generations of metal acts — from introducing melodic vocals into the genre to perfecting their trademark machine-tight syncopation. Speaking in a new interview with Black Shadows Media, Cazares reflected on how his band helped shape the sound of modern heavy music – or at least allegedly introduced clean vocals to a pretty extreme genre.

“Well, I definitely feel that back in the ’90s when Fear Factory first came out, that we definitely did have an influence in this genre we call metal. And I say metal as a whole, not the subgenres. But definitely we influenced a lot of bands like Static-X and many other bands after that.

“But I also feel that we’ve influenced a lot of bands to add melodic vocals, ’cause at the time when we first came out in 1990, there wasn’t really a lot of bands doing that. In fact, I can’t think of any band that was doing that. So to combine the heavy vocals and the melodic vocals, even death growls and melodic vocals, there wasn’t anybody doing that. I feel that Fear Factory definitely influenced that to a lot of different genres of metal.”

For Cazares, one of Fear Factory‘s most distinctive innovations came from an unlikely source — a fleeting section in Metallica‘s …And Justice for All era: “Also, the syncopated guitars with the kick drums, that was something that I heard way back when Metallica did it in the song ‘One’. They only did it for a second. I decided to start a whole theory about that with my band. I brought that whole thing into my band to make it the band. Everything that we did was all syncopated — almost everything. So that was something that we wanted to create and keep in our band, which was able to influence a lot of people to do that as well.”

It wasn’t the first time he’d credited Metallica. Back in 2017, during a Q&A at the California College of Music, he explained: “[Metallica] had a song called ‘One’, and in the song ‘One’, [there was a syncopated riff in the middle]. I [thought], ‘Okay, that can actually be done if you play it.’ That’s the only time they’ve ever done that. I was, like, ‘Wow! I wish they would do it more.’ So me wanting them to do it more made me do it, and that’s how I wanted to start my band, and that’s how I wanted my band to be.

“I’m not saying like Metallica. Just that one little snippet of music really inspired me to go out and do guitars and drums syncopated the whole time, a whole record where it’s like that. So every snare hit, every kick hit, every tom hit was the exact same picking as my guitar. So every time I hit a downstroke, upstroke, doubles, triples, the same thing would be with the kick drums and the snares. So it was all syncopated together, and that was the first time some people ever heard that done that way.”

Despite Fear Factory‘s eventual reputation as genre pioneers, Cazares admitted that the band’s hybrid of brutality and melody was a tough sell to record execs at first: “The first time somebody heard our stuff, they were, like, ‘This is not original.’ I’m, like, ‘Okay. Why?’ I was asking myself why. So we went back to the drawing board. The thing about the band when we first started was, like, ‘Okay. We’ve gotta make music. We’ve gotta just keep recording and just keep stuff going.’

“So the first demo we did was three songs, the second one was seven songs, the third one was sixteen songs. That’s a lot of songs. So we just went back to the drawing board and just kept recording and recording and recording and trying to perfect our sound and trying to create something original. It wasn’t until that one lucky break that we got that somebody actually said, ‘Yes.’ The guy felt like… The reason why he signed us is ’cause he felt that we were doing something different. In our genre, at the time in the ’90s, a lot of the music was pretty aggressive, for our genre.

“The death metal and grindcore scene was massive. Bands that you probably never heard of, like Napalm Death and Morbid Angel, were really big. So we were trying to come up in that scene, but stand out at the same time. So our vocals were very aggressive, heavy stuff, and all of a sudden, we had these beautiful, melodic vocals, [and] a lot of record companies were, like, ‘What the…?’ Even record company guys were saying, ‘What the fuck is this? We don’t want this. We don’t look at this as a product we could sell.’

“So it took that one guy, the one A&R guy, to really believe in what we were doing and saw the future of the band. And it took him to go back to the owner of his record company and say, ‘Look, this is the future right here. This band is the future.’ And, of course, the rest is history.”

Fear Factory is currently plotting their first new record with vocalist Milo Silvestro, which is due out sometime in 2026. Or at least that’s what we’ve heard so far.