Toxi Faktory, are a solid and intoxicating quintet, playing energetic metal, mixing prog, electro or punk influences. Approaching the audience with hindsight and theatrically, the group stands out with an eclectic and personal music that mixes its edgy metal with the madness of electro-industrial, all against a backdrop of dark and captivating atmospheres. Their distinctive universe, drawn from the creation of an unhealthy dystopian science fiction tale, has allowed them to stand out, and thus access the best scenes of the New Aquitaine region.
UpTheVolume: What was the spark that gave birth to the Toxi Faktory’s band ?
Toxi Faktory: Basically, the band was founded by Niko (vocals) and Tom (drums), who were high school mates. The current line-up is about ten years old. The initial concept, which we refined over time, was to create a universe in its own right, a fairly conceptual group. Toxi Faktory is kind of a post-apocalyptic sore tale. Niko and Tom were pretty crazy from the start on dystopian sci-fi literature (Huxley, Orwell…), which has always been a major influence, a kind of compass for developing the story being told.
UpTheVolume: What do you think about french lyrics ?
Toxi Faktory: For us, even though we use it a lot, rocking in English shouldn’t be dogma. Most of our songs are in English, but not especially for the style; it offers a certain form of hindsight from speaking in a foreign language, given that there is a story of dystopia. In general, for us the main thing is that any artistic choice, whether it be the choice of language, the length of the pieces or other, must be at the service of our subject. Moreover, we have sometimes mixed French and English in songs, like “Neurodicaïne” on our 1st album, and we plan to do that again on some tracks from the 3rd …
UpTheVolume: How do you definite your sound ?
Toxi Faktory: Our sound is an energetic metal mix, mixing prog, electro-industrial and punk influences. Given the complexity of our sound and our very diverse influences depending on the band members, we have long wondered how to define ourselves. Bands that put 3 or 4 sub-genre names in front of metal made us laugh, and at the same time just saying “metal” was not very meaningful. After reflection, it’s been a few years that we say that we do “dystopian metal”, which rather highlights the story that we tell with the group, and which at the same time indicates a little the atmosphere towards which we lean …
UpTheVolume: There’s a track that you prefer more than the others inside Massive Lies and The Tower Below ?
Toxi Faktory: For our 1st album “Massive Lives”, we would say Neurodicaïne, which concentrates a lot of our musical influences and which we had the pleasure of shooting as a music video with the L4AZ crew. And for our second album “The Tower Below”, come on, we’ll say Just Let Them Think! This song tells the story of the Machine God, one of the five characters we play on stage, who controls communication with the population. Musically, it’s this track that closes the album, with a finale we’re pretty proud of, we’ll let you go listen to it!
UpTheVolume: About the line up, do you prefer an add of female voice or second guitar, or … ??
Toxi Faktory: Before settling down with this line-up, we did a lot of testing. We played for a while with two guitars for example. This line-up has been going on for several years, and we make it evolve more by moving parameters within the group than by changing members again. For example, by integrating new machines controlled by Adrien (keyboards), by having different members of the group sing backing vocals, etc … Anyway, as our story develops through the two albums, we began to embody central characters of our universe on stage, so a change of line-up would have consequences beyond the music… And then, we also plan to collaborate on stage with other artists, not necessarily musicians, to enrich our subject through different artistic forms … It is in this perspective that we have been working for some time on live and video with Chouchou l’Amoureuse, a great performer of New Burlesque.
UpTheVolume: Can you tell us something about Toxi Faktory’s projects ?
Toxi Faktory: Even though we have already started to compose the first songs for the third album, the idea is not to go back to the studio right away. Already, the lockdown means that we haven’t been able to play the new show much on stage, and we want to make up for it by playing as much as possible in the months to come (we have some gigs in south-west of France until the end of 2021). Then we continue to work on a new clip with L4AZ who already produced two for us recently, with Chouchou l’Amoureuse performing. Finally, we are also working on the visuals and the texts to continue to introduce our fans to the whole universe that we are building around our music, which is very important for us!
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