Richard Patrick’s remarkable career in post-industrial and alternative rock began as a guitarist in Nine Inch Nails during its classic era from 1989 to 1993, when Patrick formed Filter. Selling millions of albums with hit singles like “Hey Man, Nice Shot” and “Take a Picture,” Patrick became a rock star in his own right as the frontman and only consistent member of Filter. Over the years, Patrick has diversified his work with collaborations, co-writing, and soundtrack work, while always returning to Filter as his primary outlet. The band recently celebrated its 30th anniversary with the 2023 release of Filter’s eighth studio album, The Algorithm.
“The Algorithm is about social media kind of overwhelming you with stuff you fall into through the algorithms, and the basic gist is, ‘Don’t let the algorithm define you,’” Patrick says over the phone from his home in Los Angeles. “The Algorithm’s a wild frontier of crazy.” Although the album was initially released in August 2023, the new The Algorithm KiTalbum from KiTbetter is a hybrid of a physical and digital album release that offers the best of both worlds, and enables artists like Filter to ‘Keep in Touch’ with fans in a new way.
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In the new digital experience of the album, KiT opens The Algorithm in the KiTplayer when you click the app in your smartphone or tablet. All the songs, plus lyrics, liner notes, photos, videos, and a Fanz forum are all available in one place, including exclusive content like the new video for “Burn Out the Sun,” also available to view in this article for a limited time.
For Patrick, the KiTalbum of The Algorithm is a more compelling way to engage with the 11-song collection, particularly for his two teenage children. “I showed it to my daughter, and I said, ‘Look at this, you get this little box filled with pictures and artwork and all that important information that goes into making a record, the liner notes, and then you use this KiT thing, and you hook it up to your phone, and it opens up the record into your KiTplayer app in your phone,’” he says. “It’s tactile, it’s something that you can sell, it’s something that people can have, but it’s actually still utilizing all the technology in your phone to make it sound great. Plus there’s like a chat room in it, and there’s all sorts of ways that your fans can meet each other. And that’s what’s really great about technology is bringing people together.”
Filter has been a fairly high tech band from the beginning with the 1995 debut album Short Bus. “In 1994, Brian Liesegang and I had a computer and we ordered a four thousand dollar, one gigabyte hard drive. And we thought we were the shit,” Patrick says. “We made Short Bus, and I used my home recording studio to do pretty much the whole record. I’ve been using this technology for 30 years now, and it is wonderful, it is absolutely wonderful.”
The Algorithm, which Brian Virtue (Jane’s Addiction, Thirty Seconds to Mars, Audioslave) co-produced with Patrick and mixed, casts a skeptical eye at the insidious side of modern technology. The lyrics skewer social media voyeurism on “The Drowning,” and the video for “Face Down” satirizes artificial intelligence with a riff on 2001: A Space Odyssey. “It’s a bizarre new world we’re headed into,” Patrick says. Still, he remains optimistic about how tech will affect music, shouting out Devil Driver as a new favorite band that he discovered through streaming music recommendation engines. “In the 1970s, someone created the drum machine. And instantly drummers were like, ‘Oh my God, are we out of a job?’ But I think people want the human element in music.”
Patrick’s social media algorithm actually helped him find a key piece of music for The Algorithm. He was scrolling through Instagram one day when he saw a video of a guitarist, Zach Munowitz, playing a killer riff through a ring modulator. “He is an amazing guitar player. I DMed him, and I said, “Dude, I don’t know what you’re doing, but I gotta sing over this,” Patrick remembers of the track that eventually became the album highlight “For the Beaten.” ”We exchanged information, boom, he sent me that song, and I took it, put it in my computer, rearranged it, and just sang over it”.
Munowitz played on two other songs on The Algorithm as well as a couple of unreleased new tracks. When those songs surface on a new Filter album in 2025, Patrick is up for making it into another KiTalbum package. “I hope so. I would love to do it again,” he says. “It’s just a whole ‘nother way of people being able to collect something and enjoy it, and physically own something from their favorite bands.”
The KiTalbum of The Algorithm is available for purchase now.
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