Mechanical Soul

The song "Stifle" features guitars by Dino Cazares from American industrial metal band Fear Factory. The collaboration came about through Fulber's close ties with Fear Factory, as he said to ReGen Magazine: "After Bill did the vocal for 'Stifle', he thought the feel of the song would benefit from some heavy guitar accents, so I just said, 'I will ask Dino.' One call, done deal." Also, the song was proposed to be on the soundtrack for the video game Cyberpunk 2077, for which Rhys Fulber had composed several tracks, but ultimately was rejected. The track "Barbarians" with vocals by Jean-Luc de Meyer from Belgian EBM group Front 242 is a rework of the song "Future Fail" from Front Line Assembly's 2006 album Artificial Soldier. According to Fulber, vocalist Bill Leeb felt that the old song "wasn't really highlighting Jean-Luc's vocals" and suggested "to come up with a different take". Leeb wanted "something slower and more epic". The remix of "Hatevol" under the moniker of producer Bryan Black's Techno project Black Asteroid was originally intended for a prior release, said Fulber: "We asked Bryan to do a remix earlier and we were going to release a single with the remix and a new song, but decided to just wait for the next album and add it on there. As the album came together, the remix wasn’t as stylistically different as before, so we thought it would be a nice contrast."