Los Angeles industrial rock act Kidneythieves has released "Winners," their first new music since 2016 full-length album The Mend. The song is a dancey alternative track pointing a finger at the billionaire class that's made it to the top and then pulled up the ladder behind them. Kidneythieves has also released teaser footage of an upcoming music video directed by Evan Stone, who directed the video for "Taxicab Messiah," the first single from the band's 1998 debut, Trickster.
"Winners" is the opening salvo in the band's revival arc, with at least two EPs and potentially a round of live shows on the way. Frontwoman Free Dominguez explained in a post that the decision to start recording and re-releasing music came out of a chance meeting at a restaurant with her former A&R:
I was at a restaurant one day, and I ran into my A&R who signed Zerospace. He signed Madonna, no biggie. But he said, "You know, your music's making a comeback." And I looked into it, we have 12 to 18 million streams on Spotify Wrapped over the years. 120,000 Spotify listeners every month. And the crazy part is that a lot of them are Gen Z on TikTok, discovering Queen of the Damned and everything else.
Kidneythieves gained a small but dedicated cult following in the late nineties and early aughts, helped in no small part by a pre-credits needle drop in Nu Metal Cinema classic Queen of the Damned with "Before I'm Dead." With a new generation of fans discovering nu metal and the cultural production that sprung up around it for the first time, the industrial rock outfit is in a perfect position to benefit from the ongoing revival.
"Winners" is available for streaming on all platforms.
