When Rob Zombie howls in “Heathen Days” that he has “died a thousand times,” and therefore lived just as many, he means it. Upon going solo after White Zombie’s breakup in the late ’90s, the one-time noise-rock underdog became metal’s demonoid phenom with 1998’s Hellbilly Deluxe, a monster mosh of horror-themed industrial-metal that spawned the generational vampiric speedway anthem, “Dragula,” along with several other Halloween playlist essentials. Following Hellbilly’s uninspired follow-up, 2001’s similar but less successful The Sinister Urge, guitarist Mike Riggs and bassist Rob “Blasko” Nicholson left the band and Zombie reformatted his sound on 2006’s Educated Horses, trading in the sleazy industrial for a lighter brew of honky-tonk glam and Southern-fried doom.
Zombie’s musical output became less frequent in the 2000s as his other career as a horror film director ramped up, especially around his polarizing 2007 remake of Halloween. However, his headliner status in metal never faltered, and when he began dropping albums again at a good clip in the 2010s, Zombie realized he’d earned the good-will to do whatever he wanted and still get his bag touring the Hellbilly hits. His music began to resemble Grand Funk Railroad soundtracking a haunted hayride, and he gave his albums increasingly absurd names like 2016’s The Electric Warlock Acid Witch Satanic Orgy Celebration Dispenser. None of these records, including 2021’s The Lunar Injection Kool Aid Eclipse Conspiracy, produced a single track that rivals even the fifth-best song on Hellbilly Deluxe, but his new album, The Great Satan, gave fans reason to believe.
Zombie’s eighth solo album features Riggs and Blasko back in the band for the first time in 25 years, and with them, a return to the propulsive industrial metal that defined Rob Zombie’s initial era. Although 2010’s unevenly awesome Hellbilly Deluxe 2 was advantageously billed as a follow-up to his debut, The Great Satan actually sounds like a spiritual successor. It’s the heaviest Zombie has sounded since then, and the album’s opening clutch of songs are a return to fright-night form: chainsaw-revving guitars in “F.T.W. 84,” pile-driving go-go rhythms in “Tarantula,” and oozing sci-fi synths in “(I’m a) Rock ‘N’ Roller,” an idiotically fun romp in which Zombie claims he’s both an alligator and a space invader and then unleashes a deranged squawk to silence anyone who questions him.
Zombie, with his signature dreadlocks, clavicle-length beard, and X-marked forehead, has looked 60 since he was 30, but whatever chemical he’s incorporated into his self-care routine has worked wonders. He sounds untouched by age on The Great Satan, viciously energetic and vocally capable of yowling and groaning like the superbeast he’s always been. That's why it’s such a shame when he resorts to demon-speeding on cruise control. The Matrix soundtrack-core begins to wear a little thin by the time “Punks and Demons” arrives at the record’s halfway point, but instead of balancing the speed-freak industrial with sumptuous strip-pole fodder like he did with Hellbilly Deluxe’s “Spookshow Baby,” Zombie falls back on his more recent fumblings.
For every rousing rocker there’s another kitschy experiment: witchy funk-metal drizzled with unintelligible movie samples (“Out of Sight”), an anachronistic ode to Woodstock-era debauchery (“Revolution Motherfuckers”), and a song where Zombie croaks like a choking pirate over music that sounds like Funkadelic and Primus fumbling through a TikTok duet (“Sir Lord Acid Wolfman”). It feels a bit ridiculous to ding Rob Zombie for not taking himself more seriously, but his best music has always had the right balance of camp and songcraft. On The Great Satan, Zombie sounds torn between wanting to revisit the boo-metal sound that made him famous and wanting to continue coasting on the gibberish trucker-rock of his later years.
What this record suffers most from is a lack of direction. While Zombie’s original guitar ghouls are back in the fold, The Great Satan is not a reunion with Scott Humphrey, the co-producer and co-writer on Zombie’s first three records. Zombie’s recent go-to producer, Chris “Zeuss” Harris, is well suited for the album’s brusque heaviness, but there’s a certain atmosphere that’s been missing in Zombie’s music ever since he and Humphrey split professionally. The perverted eeriness of “Living Dead Girl,” the art-house dynamic swings in “Superbeast,” and all the cartoonish subtleties that make “Dragula” such a blast are long gone. The Great Satan has a handful of tracks that will be worth revisiting in October, which is more that can be said of his last few efforts. However, no matter how many puffs Zombie takes from “Dragula”’s exhaust fumes, he’s never able to achieve that Hellbilly high.
