All this shoveling and shuffling
Toward the same outcome
Watchful eyes on new product
While the world becomes undone
The endless pursuit of material possessions, a hollow echo of humanity’s most misguided desires, traps us in a futile cycle. We shuffle mindlessly toward each new product, each new object of fleeting satisfaction, as if the next purchase might fill the growing void within. But in this compulsive race, we lose sight of the world crumbling beneath our feet, a world steadily unraveling while our eyes remain fixed on meaningless novelties. The marketplace of materialism offers no true nourishment, only distractions—trinkets that sedate the mind while the soul withers.
In chasing these illusions, we blind ourselves to the deeper, more enduring truths of existence. We erode not just the natural world, but our own humanity, slowly becoming mere consumers, shackled to an insatiable appetite for what can never truly fulfill. And so, the world decays, not from neglect, but from our obsessive need to possess what we do not need, to fill the emptiness within us.
Los Angeles industrial trio Fact Pattern has unleashed a new single and video about this collective madness: The Same Outcome.
Drawing on the raw energy of NIN, Skinny Puppy, Front Line Assembly, and Type O Negative, the trio—Flux (vocals, guitars, keys, programming), Jack Lowd (bass, vocals), and Corey Hirsch (drums)—fuses thunderous guitars, pounding percussion, and driving bass lines with jagged, metallic samples that pulse with a cold, mechanical menace. There’s a roughness, a tension, that courses through their music, something hard and unyielding, like machinery grinding against the edges of despair.
In The Same Outcome, they turn their focus on the barren pursuit of material gain. The lyrics cut through the shiny facade of consumerism, speaking to the hollow act of chasing product after product as the world slips away, eroding beneath the weight of our collective ignorance. The song urges a reckoning—a demand to face the pain we’ve bred rather than turn away. There’s a call to let go of society’s false promises and take a moment to reflect, for the root of our struggle lies not in what we lack, but in how we perceive it. Employing melancholic and enraged electronics, heavy riffs, and massive drum sounds, The Same Outcome explores a wide range of tones and emotions in the midst of a declining world.
The surreal, self-directed video flickers like a half-forgotten dream. Through fogged glass, the band moves like specters, each figure shadowed by a crawling, unsettling creature. Whether these intruders are dangerous or merely curious, we can’t say for sure, but their presence gnaws at the edges of comfort. It’s a reminder, like the creeping black mass from The X-Files, that something unseen and insidious – be it greed, hunger for power, or a victim mentality – is always lurking, always seeping into the cracks of our fragile reality.
Here, the lines between menace and mystery blur. The creatures slip in unnoticed, like nightmares creeping into the waking world, as if to remind us of the silent invaders in our own lives. The fog thickens, the glass blurs, and what’s on the other side—whether a threat or a mere reflection of our fear—remains just out of reach, a warning as much as a question, unanswered but ever present.
Watch the video for “The Same Outcome” below:
Fact Pattern was born in the early 2010s from the creative mind of Ian Flux, has gone through several transformations. Their 2017 EP Structures marked the beginning, but it was their 2019 full-length debut Fallen Language that truly defined their sound and lineup.
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