"And you never will unwind" - Foetus
Well, Antipodean avant-garde musical Renaissance man James George Thirlwell
recently forceps-delivered the tenth and final studio album under his Foetus
moniker, Halt. It’s an epic musical journey that has taken 44 years, from his
first September 1981 Foetus album release (complemented by a phalanx of EP and satellite
remix albums over the decades) to the sonic gestation terminus album
here. Halt is is a Christmas Day-2025-released present from private and public
Hells interwined. And what an album it
is. If you’re going to go out, might as well go out with a sonic boom and bang,
and this release certainly does that.
As followers (I have been one since 1989) of Thirlwell’s awe-inspiring releases will well know, Foetus (a catch-all
rubric which has several variations) is far from his only musical babybrand outlet.
He has put out different aspects and angles of his Sensurround musical
worldview under many different constantly-evolving permutations: Manorexia,
Xordox, Wiseblood, Steroid Maximus; Hell, even under his own given name. These
are just a few of his guises and disguises.
(Photo: JG Thirlwell)
Foetus releases have changed form as they umbilical-fed on nourishing internal landscape and external news nutrients, and have to be evaluated aside from the rest of their discontent creator’s output. Thirlwell seemed genuinely melancholic and oddly deflated when talking about releasing this final work, which was eight years in the making. It’s clear that Foetus has always meant something to him deeply personal in his self-effacing, self-chasing own work canon. It’s provided him with the ever-evolving persona at the core of his starstudded-sky satellite offshoots, a fulcrum round which everything else he does turns.
The genius composer may go out on tangential project limbs, wherever his mercurial mind and ears take him. But he has always returned boomerang-style (sorry for the Antipodean analogy!) to the core Foetus coal face to chip patiently away at himself, a tireless discontent creator. The albums were always an indicator of where he was at any moment existentially, his view of the world and its whims and sandblasts and gory baggage and lack of ultimate meaning. And Halt, of course, is no different.
It’s a fascinating thing to look at the evolving multiface of the ticking biological Foetus clock. The first album (not the first Foetus release) came from 1981, Deaf (a hilarious ironic title to start off a sonic career), recorded when Thirlwell was living in London after spending the first 18 years of his life in Australia, with 12 of them at a religious school. It’s a drumsplashed, bleepy, minimalist (compared to later work) platter full of quirky puns and quips and wordplays, a self-centered bombastic explosion of confusion at the life of a young Australian not long out of his teens. It’s very much of its time, which I suppose you can say about any work of art, but listening to it today you can clearly hear English very early 80s electronic music nibbling at its anxious funny cunning linguist edges.
Deaf is a very verbose album, lyrically influenced by literature and poetry and, in some ways, early hip-hop. But even way back then Thirlwell was instantly starting to experiment with what it was (im)possible to do musically. The seeds of what I can sorta-quantify as a quintessential Foetus sound are present in embryonic (no pun intended) form on this album. It’s a signature sound I can only describe as something slightly out of focus, an angry ragged gash, a flaw in the system, a raw final nerve being mercilessly danced upon, the sound of a nervous system inches from collapse, a gleeful tinnitus symphony, the soft sibilant dangerous hissssssss of a train coming down a track being heard before it is seen. It runs right through everything the man has ever done, from start to finish line.
The years and trails of trial and tribulation rolled on. Jumping ahead a couple of years to the mid-80s, Hole and Nail (all the album titles are one-syllable four-letter words, including the last newest one) found Thirlwell fighting an eternal internal battle, his worldview darkening, the pained stormclouds building. WWII-level personal pain and religion and mass murder and victim mentality coagulated into an increasingly unhealthy mental and emotional ambulance-chasing arena of beautiful dark poetry of disgust with the human disgrace. I wrote about these two albums at length years ago:
https://dangerousminds.net/comments/nailing_a_whole_lot_of_hole_and_nail/
This increasing splitlip litany of unanswered prayers for escape from overwhelming internal angst and anger and agony reached a kind of madness crescendo on 1988’s Thaw. It’s an album that sounds like a man reaching the end of the line sanity-wise and needing to either lose it altogether or get a grip and channel all his rage and pain into more productive channels than ranting psychotic murder lullabies.
Which, of course, he did. From cliff’s-edge teeterings to a regained-equilibrium sonic fireworks explosion, Thirlwell has not given up making music for seemingly once single second for the last several decades. He has a work ethic second to none in the music business. The Foetus albums became less mental and more instrumental as their composer progressed slowly and inexorably from youthful poetic thin-skin-scraping bloodlettings to vast grand nonexistent movie soundtracks. This mirrored his listening habits and growing constant mastery of technology and methods of aurally presenting the increasingly-complex composition positions he wanted to map out.
Halt is the culmination of this journey…to a degree. Where more recent Foetus albums were becoming vocals-free, there are no instrumental pieces on this terminal piece of detaching-placenta work. If Halt is to be the termination of JG Thirlwell’s 44-year-long ectopic pregnancy, he has a few things to say on the way out to the birthday carriage of silence.
Halt is a very overtly political album, which is a relative rarity for Foetus/Thirlwell. Songs on other albums have touched on political themes before – like, say, Oilfields or O Putrid Sun, from Hide – but normally in a more oblique, poetic, slightly hidden way. The songs here bear similarities to that methodology, but are more straight-up, in-your-scared face. Here we have Thirlwell not wearing his usual unfairground distraction mask, but being more open and despairing.
Right from the get-go, with the staccato batter of militaristic drumbeats opening the album, we instantly find ourselves in a very contemporary nightmare in existential Hell. This is a right-now horrorshow, Trump derangement sins driven home by disbelieving headshaker lyrics. America is falling apart, dragging the world with it, and this album is both an internal and external view of that potential eternal planetary dissolution.
Lyrically, this is a pretty damned good album, naked in its intent. “I keep a suitcase full of naloxone and ransomware” is a line only Foetus would write. “I could not look the other way/fifteen children died today” is a far more sensitive, vulnerable, open line than we have been used to Foetus writing. His lyrics are often about his own internal self-abusive musings, or shadowy guttersnipes at people he wants to get back at. But this wounded sensitivity has always lurked beneath Thirlwell’s surface.
From the song Cold Day In Hell, from Hole (1984): “I’ve been impaled by the sins of World War Two/Can’t sleep for the skins of six million Jews.” What’s singularly missing on Halt is the gallows humour Foetus (to me the name is interchangeable with Thirlwell, he’s been known by it for so long) has often used to lighten and brighten his epic darkness, like the lyrics following those preceding: “I’d join the Ku Klux Klan just to get the uniform/or a good night’s sleep.” This is a shame, because Thirlwell can be absolutely hilarious (“When it’s one man against the world/I shouldn’t have so much time to complain/I found that there’s a hole in my parachute/after I jumped from the astral plane” – from Cold Day In Hell) but, given the utterly horrendous, extremely depressing state of the world today, who can blame him for laughs being in short supply in the tunes?
Overall, Halt is a snapshot of both the modern world and of JG Thirlwell’s own career and life. The World Is Broken, one song title (“Born of a Scot and a convict” Thirlwell sneers here, with reference to his Scottish mother and Australian father) declares. The aerial view of the album, rife with strife and paranoia (a constant Foetus trope over the years) and conspiracy theories and internet madness and military actions from madmen, certainly unfortunately matches our lives right now, and that’s a groaning load to have lifted aesthetically for eight years. Or since 1960, for that matter, the year of Thirlwell’s birth. Artistic brilliance and extreme intelligence are heavy intertwined twin crosses to bear, and he has both in spades.
Critical thinking is the human appendix of modern thought, in that it has evolved into obsolescence. The more you think about things these insane, Hellish days, the worse off and more depressed you will be. Anybody with a brain in their head will tell you the same. People were not meant to have knowledge of all the world’s miseries and pains and horrors and sicknesses and evils and stupidities and perversities at our beck and call 24/7 365, to wallow in like a baby in a gore-filled bathtub whenever we obsessively, addictively feel like it. Life is bad enough on a singular human level, let alone trying to take the worthless weight of the world on our weak, feeble, hunched shoulders.I do wonder to what degree this ceaseless sentience and work and thinking about things has left JG Thirlwell as depressed and trapped as he seems during the last song on the album, the last ever Foetus song. It’s called The Many Versions Of Me and is, as the title suggests, the brilliant composer looking back over his life and image and work and sense of self-worth. As he coldly puts it:
“My life is at an end/All that lies before me is a blackened void/My mind has been condemned/All I see behind me are the things I tried to avoid/My life is at the end/When I look back I see the faces of the ones I loved/I owe you an amends/I see disappointment and the wrong turns I made so clear.”
Not a single note of constructive criticism is struck. You have to admit, that’s a pretty grim, depressing existential self-examination for most of a lifetime, which may well yet go on for decades. Quality versus quantity, I suppose. This extremely negative auto-evaluation, which I personally put down to Thirlwell’s childhood religious indoctrination (though I may well be wrong), and the inescapable nature of it, has run right through his work.
Like, say, from Negative Energy, from first album Deaf in 1981: “I am full of negative energy/and I deserve to die/I am full of negative energy/That is the atavistic urge of human nature.” 44 years separate those two lyrics, and yet there’s not a hair’s breadth between the self-flagellating sentiment. You’d have to say that is a pretty damned sad self-assessment, if it’s 100% meant, and not ‘just’ Foetus self-defence real-feelings hiding (to nothing). But, sadly, I don’t think it is. Fearless self-loathing always seem to have been a fun-damn-mental component of Thirlwell’s art and personality and worldview.
“My life has been condemned/To drown in an ocean of shame and fear and regret,” as he says here. What a tragic and melancholic way to look back on decades of peerless artistic creation. You might argue that this is only a view of his own life, and not the work created by him, but in this artist the two have always been inseparable (“I am the music,” as Thirlwell said to me when I met him in London in August 2023), and the harsh disapproving view on one can only morbidly negatively reflect on the other.
Thus at the end of The Many Versions Of Me, right at the end of the album, right at the end of Foetus, Thirlwell’s art and life coalesce into a seamless interlocking portrait of how his music and lyrics and life connect and collect into shrugged-at art:
"The many versions
Versions of me
A six inch guarantee
The throne of agony
Time marches endlessly
Things ain't what they seem
You feed the need machine
The wild one will return
The many versions
Versions of me"
As any follower of Thirlwell’s work will know, this final stanza includes lyrics and song titles from tunes from over his Foetal career:
“A six inch guarantee” comes from I’ll Meet You In Poland, Baby (Hole, 1984).
“The throne of agony” comes from the song of the same name (Nail, 1985).
“Time marches endlessly” comes from Time Marches On (Love, 2005).
“Things ain’t what they seem” comes from Paredolia (Love, 2005).
“You feed the need machine” comes from The Need Machine (Flow, 2001).
“The wild one will return” comes from Oilfields (Hide, 2010).
(Photo: JG Thirlwell)
The song title is a way to comment on Thirlwell’s personal evolution, how he has changed and the music that has been produced by that change, the arty sparks thrown up by his tired ever-racing mind dragging its exhausted exhaust along the superhighway of constant creation. But it seems that there has only ever been one single version of the man, a suffering constantly-producing dynamo, hardly even ever able to enjoy or rest on the laurels of the beautiful and dynamic sounds produced over the bountiful life decades.Which is a deeply poignant and painful conclusion to come to, literally and figuratively.
When Thirlwell says that his life is at an end in the first line of the last song, it does make you wonder if, having framed the first part of his life like this, the rest of the production he comes away with from this moment on will be any different, if that gangrenous self-hating nihilism lightning has been captured in any sort of poison-containing bottle. The work he produces for the rest of his post-Foetus career and life will tell us everything we need to know about that. But he’s definitely putting a tombstone on the end of a part of his life, at least.
Let’s hope that things do improve for him in the self-esteem stakes. There can’t be a single other composer working harder on the planet earth right now. James George Thirlwell’s sonic production rate has been without equal, be the arenas personal or commissioned art installation or soundtrack, and surely it’s about time he gave himself a (maybe a half-hour-) long rest.
It’s tiring just to read about what he’s up to online, the countries he’s zipping round, the films and telly series he’s scoring, the multiple bands of his own he’s playing with, the side projects for other people he does, the commissioned public gallery installations…and on and on…it’s a crazy rate of unstoppable, unstopping self-mining. Having a mind like Thirlwell’s stay on the wire for all that time can’t be entirely healthy, surely? Or maybe it’s the other way around. Sure the man has ways and means of relaxing and unplugging we who don’t know him except mostly through his work know nothing about.
If the need machine he has had to feed in the past might have been more chemical, as well as artistic, it will be a revelation to see what it now puts out. Whatever it is, it will certainly be unique and brilliant and thought-provoking. I for one can’t wait to hear what comes next, what bullets will be spitting and spilling from the machine gun. And I salute James George Thirlwell for being an inspiration, whose perverse uterine screams and amniotic dreams have guided me through some dark times. It’s clearly done the same thing for him. And long may that continue.
THE END (OF THE FOETAL BEGINNING)
Part two of this piece can be found here:
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