TERMINAL returns with a follow-up to the critically-acclaimed debut album Blacken the Skies (2021), updating the industrial glam formula with "more industrial, more glam". Thomas Mark Anthony makes his case for being the genre's best lyricist, weaving grand themes of power, zealotry and corruption through complex rhyme schemes and anthemic choruses. Picking up where the previous album left off in its excoriation of society's dangerous hypocrites, the first line of lyrics on the new album is "How many guns would Jesus buy?" Plato's Republic provides the album's title and its theme--that an unjust society is a doomed society, that democracy in itself is no defense against demagogues or tyrants. As the last track exhorts, "Rise, restless choir, from the fields of rust and fire."
The album is dedicated to the late Metropolis founder Dave Heckman.
1. Asymmetric Warfare
2. The Sin of the Sanctified
3. Smart Weapons
4. Did We Ask For Truth
5. [Redacted]
6. Don't Be Taken Alive
7. The New Republic
8. Paradoxical Reactions
9. Fall of the Reign
10. Dirty River [Necrosis]
11. Testify
12. Disproportionate Response
13. Rise