Star Industry, the Belgian gothic rock band, are giving their 2007 album “Last Crusades” its first-ever vinyl pressing. It arrives on 30 November 2026 on Alfa Matrix as a limited run of 500 copies worldwide.
The vinyl edition is available now on the Alfa Matrix store, and the album’s digital version is still listed on Bandcamp.
The album that brought the band to the label
“Last Crusades” first appeared on 20 April 2007. It was the third full-length by Star Industry and their introduction to the Alfa Matrix catalogue, and a live album, “Black Angel White Devil”, recorded in Madrid in 2008, came next.
Another entry in the Essentials reissue run
As part of the label’s 25th-anniversary celebrations, Alfa Matrix is moving catalogue albums onto vinyl for the first time under the Essentials banner, and this LP is one of them. Star Industry have been here before: their 1997 debut, “Iron Dust Crush”, was first put on vinyl in 2020. Alien Vampires’ “Harshlizer” gets the same treatment on 30 November. Meanwhile the band is busy in the studio, with its next album scheduled for March 2027.
Sides and track order
The record splits the album’s ten tracks over two sides and comes with artwork that has been adapted to suit the LP format.
Side A
- “Lost Generation”
- “Pray”
- “Forever”
- “Out Of My Head”
- “Sin”
Side B
- “Last Crusades”
- “The Return Of David Gun”
- “Substitudes”
- “The Spirits Within”
- “Fall From Grace”
About Star Industry
Today’s lineup features Peter Beckers on vocals and guitar, Xavier Vranken on lead guitar, Kurt Lantin on drums, Rich Vanderhoven on bass and Joël Vranken on synths. The bass and synth roles changed hands in 2021, when co-founder and bassist Stijn Kuijpers died: Vanderhoven switched from synths to bass and Joël Vranken came on board for the synth parts. By the band’s own account, completing a new studio record has been its focus ever since.
The story began in Maasmechelen, Belgium, in 1996. Peter Beckers, Stijn Kuijpers and Xavier Vranken, friends from the Arts Academy, bonded over early New Wave and started the group, with drummer Marc Haerden and synth player Peter Gerits following shortly after. Debut material was recorded at Galaxy Studio, and the first live show took place at Ghent’s Black Easter Festival on 12 April 1998. The first album, “Iron Dust Crush,” was an independent release in 1997 that Purple Moon Records adopted later, and the single “Nineties” went to the top of Israel’s alternative chart a year after the album appeared.
The EuroRock Festival label issued the “New Millennium E.P.” in 1999, the year Lantin took over the drums from Haerden, and “Velvet” followed as the second album in 2001. After the move to Alfa Matrix with “Last Crusades,” the band played Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing on a 2011 China tour and debuted in the US in 2012 with a show at Tammany Hall in New York. In 2015 Vanderhoven replaced Gerits, and the group released the “Eilyne E.P.” alongside “The Renegade”, tracked at Motor Music Studio. In 2019 its version of “Stripped” landed on Alfa Matrix’s Depeche Mode tribute compilation. More from the label can be heard on the Alfa Matrix Bandcamp.