Review by Rick Eaglestone for MPM
Front Toward Enemy is the phrase stamped across the face of the M18A1 Claymore, printed there so nobody deploying it under fire gets it backwards. As song titles go it is the most Manson thing imaginable: theatre and real threat fused into one object, with a wink.
The track has a strange history. It first appeared in 2024, capitalised throughout, as a CD-exclusive extra on the Raise The Red Flag single, a three-thousand-copy curio for the faithful. Two years on it has been revisited, retitled, and pushed onto streaming on 17th July as the second advance cut from One Assassination Under God – Chapter 2, the thirteenth Marilyn Manson album, due 14th August on Nuclear Blast. Salvage, then. It does not sound like salvage.
There is no ceremony. The riff lands within seconds, squat, mechanical, mid-paced in the way industrial metal is mid-paced when it aims at your ribs rather than your feet, and Manson arrives over the top of it barking a rally cry that works less as a chorus than as an order. Tyler Bates, co-writer and co-producer, keeps the arrangement deliberately starved: a couple of guitars, a drum sound like a fire door slamming, and just enough electronic grime round the edges to remind you which decade built this man. Bates walked away from the touring band in January, though he stayed for the record, his fourth with Manson.
What Chapter 1 occasionally lacked was momentum, and this has it in abundance. The verses are all sneer and swagger, jabbing at rule-breakers and phonies in a vocabulary that has not shifted much since 1998 but arrives in a drier, nastier rasp. Later he promises to keep swinging until the bruising blacks over and his face stops working properly, which is self-mythologising of the most transparent sort and, irritatingly, effective.
Inventive? Not remotely. Third on the album and plainly built as a battering ram, it exists to move forward and hit things, with the same grim economy as the ordnance it is named after.
Henri Alexander Levy’s video, out on 21st July, is where things turn properly odd. Everything is staged in a flat white void. No gothic clutter, no candelabra, nothing to hide behind. Into that emptiness Levy drops two miniature Mansons, child doppelgangers in full regalia, one on guitar, one behind the kit. They are horrible. They are also the sharpest visual idea he has had in a decade, because the image reads instantly: a man propped up by younger, smaller, more marketable copies of himself.
The rest is a sequence of tableaux. Manson hauling himself upward on a mirrored crucifix. Manson stalking the white space in a long cape. Manson laid out on a hospital trolley while one of the small ones prepares for surgery. Subtlety is not on the invoice. What holds attention is the lighting, which strips away every fog machine and shadow he has ever hidden behind and leaves the performance exposed. Very brave or very careless, and I still cannot decide which.
Front Toward Enemy is lean and mean and free of pretension: the sound of a man who has stopped assembling concept records and started throwing punches, wrapped in the most self-aware imagery he has committed to film in years. Whether you want to stand in front of it is another question. The label is right there on the casing.
One Assassination Under God – Chapter 2, will be released August 14th. Pre-order available now.
https://mm.bfan.link/oaug-ch-2
“Front Toward Enemy” music video out now.
