Alfa Matrix released “Totems In A Field Of Pain” on 26 June 2026, a new digital album from the Hungarian electro-industrial project First Aid 4 Souls led by István Gazdag. Its 25 tracks go back to the abrasive style of the project’s first years and draw on roughly twenty years of work as well as pieces newly written in 2026.
“Totems In A Field Of Pain” is available now on the Alfa Matrix store as a digital release, and it can also be streamed on Bandcamp.
Back to the hard edge after ‘Progenitrix’
Roughly seven months separate the new album from “Progenitrix”, released in December 2025. That record took the project toward darkwave and post-punk with a line of women guest vocalists, whereas this one swings back to an aggressive electro-industrial heart. Gazdag talks through the ideas behind “Progenitrix” in an earlier interview.
How the album is built
Some tracks are completely new, while older ones have been reworked, remixed or remastered into heavier versions. What links them is an abrasive sound, from harsh electronics and martial beats to machine-like moods.
Mortum of Human Vault, a vocalist based in the US, appears again on several tracks, among them “King Of Filth,” “Binary Defect,” “The Fate Of The Tormentor” and “Pre-Rendered Biological Evolution.” Collaborators on the record come from the wider underground industrial scene: Svoid, V.E.N., Tor Marrock, K.I.F.O.T.H., United Gods, Stahlgeist and Impurfekt.
About First Aid 4 Souls
The project has released on Alfa Matrix since 2019, when it signed with the Belgian label for “Keep This World Empty”, a dark EBM album that marked its first collaboration with the American vocalist Mortum. Earlier releases include the EPs “Dancing At The Abyss” and “Laudator Temporis Acti”.
The project is the work of Hungarian musician István Gazdag, active in electronic and industrial music since the late 1980s. He founded it in 2007 following his earlier band Vacuum, which played industrial and EBM, and he writes all the music himself and invites a changing roster of guest singers, so much so that some regard it as an international supergroup. Gazdag has also remixed acts such as Coil and Soft Cell.