“I really don’t want to listen to any of the music that I listened in the ‘80s and ‘90s. I just don’t. I know that music so well, I don’t want to hear it anymore,” says Paul Barker. “It’s like listening to the Beatles. I love the Beatles, but I never listen to the Beatles because it’s part of our consciousness. You just grow up with it.”
Barker’s urge to lean into less familiar musical terrain extends to his own work. Active since the early 1980s, he played in Seattle post-punk band The Blackouts before going on to spend close to 20 years in Ministry. He released his first album as Lead Into Gold in 1990 and the most recent one this year. Knife the Ally is the name of the latest Lead Into Gold full-length, which was released via Artoffact Records in June. “The ally is industrial music,” he says and the album is, in a way, a call to arms, to do something musically different.
We spoke after soundcheck on a Saturday night in late August, when Lead Into Gold headlined Slipper Clutch in downtown Los Angeles. Playing to a full venue, Barker ripped through songs from Knife the Ally, like the title track and “Lionize.” Baker kept the crowd on their feet with a relatively simple, solo stage setup.
“I feel like using tracks and singing in a karaoke-style situation, it just makes sense now,” says Barker. “In many ways, it’s not ideal, but it is post-modern, let’s say, so I want to do that. I hope to go out with a full band at some point. Maybe next year.”
The show at Slipper Clutch came shortly before Lead Into Gold was set to head out on the Industrial Nation tour with Front Line Assembly and Clock DVA. The tour begins on Thursday, September 11 and concludes in Detroit on October 5. The Friday, September 12, stop in Los Angeles is Cold Waves XIII and also includes Nitzer Ebb and Mentallo and the Fixer. At the time of writing this, few tickets were left for the show.
For Knife the Ally, Barker focused on minimal lyrics and straightforward songwriting. He keeps the pulse of the album energetic, the grooves tight and the noise compelling. “It’s punk in attitude, not punk registered trademark style, you know what I mean?” he says.
It’s also an album with surprises for listeners. “It’s All a Sign,” my personal favorite on the album, has a psychedelic undercurrent that’s unexpected and works amazingly well with the noise-and-groove combo that often marks Barker’s work.
The album came together as a result of Barker’s intentional effort to not “overthink” what he was making. “I decided that I was going to limit the amount of time that I spent on the songs,” he says, “and I had a deadline, which is fantastic. It’s really the only way that you get anything done these days.”
The album is a departure from Lead Into Gold’s 2023 effort, The Eternal Present. “There was an overarching concept on that record,” says Barker. “I wanted to make the heaviest record that I could make without using heavy tropes, like heavy music tropes.” So he avoided power chords and high tempos. Instead, he looked towards synths and distortion, plus horn and string sounds and kept the songs in a lower BPM range. The result is a collection of songs that sound a bit foreboding, but also have an unintentionally meditative quality, at least if you’re the sort of person who can zone out to loud music.
Back to Barker’s own musical tastes. “I do like old music,” he says, from Nina Simone to soul to 1970s avant-garde composers. “That music, like Iannis Xenakis for instance, it’s like a time capsule. It’s just as weird today as it was 40 years ago, just crazy,” he says. “It’s almost unlistenable, but it’s a time capsule because nobody is doing that anymore. People are doing that sort of thing with electronic music, which is super cool, but not with orchestras like that.” He’s also a fan of currently active artists, like Cel Genesis and his pal, L.A. underground electronic musician Baseck.
But, he says, he could do without the nostalgia rush of hearing the titans of rock and punk in the grocery store. “I don’t want to hear Led Zeppelin in the supermarket,” says Barker. “I don’t want to hear the Ramones in the supermarket. I don’t want to hear the Clash in the supermarket.”
That’s part of the point of Knife the Ally. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” he says. “There’s still room to challenge yourself and not sound like the shit that we’ve heard for the past 30 years.”
Knife the Ally by Lead Into Gold is out now on Artoffact Records. Tickets for Cold Waves XIII on September 12 at The Mayan in Los Angeles are available via Eventbrite.
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Liz O. is an L.A.-based writer and DJ. Read her recently published work and check out her upcoming gigs or listen to the latest Beatique Mix. Follow on Instagram or Bluesky for more updates.
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