Ministry announce their final album ‘Hate To Go (Take Out Or Delivery),’ out October 30, plus a goodbye tour, and share the single ‘Burned Out’
Al Jourgensen has threatened to end Ministry before, but this time he sounds like he means it. The industrial pioneer announced on Thursday (July 24) that Hate To Go (Take Out Or Delivery), out October 30 via Cleopatra Records, will be the band’s final studio album, capping a 45-year run that turned synth-pop malcontent into the blueprint for industrial metal. It arrives with lead single “Burned Out” and the first leg of a goodbye tour, and Jourgensen’s own statement leaves little room for the usual walk-back. “I’m f***ing done,” he said. “It’s time to herd goats.”
The full quote is characteristically unsentimental. “I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished. I’m amazed at the path that it’s taken, from With Sympathy to where we’re at today, and all points in between,” Jourgensen said. “It’s been quite a ride, but I’m completely at peace with the fact that it’s done.” Coming from a man who has survived addiction, and by the band’s own count received last rites three times, the peace reads as earned rather than performed.
Four Decades in One Song
“Burned Out” functions as a summary of everything Ministry has been. Across six minutes it stacks gurgling synths, drum machines, and grinding metal guitars, then threads in sampled news audio, the technique Jourgensen weaponized on 1992’s Psalm 69 and never abandoned. The samples on this one pull from coverage of the Epstein Files, ICE, and the Russia-Ukraine war, keeping Ministry’s political fury pointed squarely at the present. The accompanying video, which blends live action and animation, was directed by Joshua Bradford, formerly of Jourgensen’s Revolting Cocks side project.
The album is Ministry’s 17th, and it doubles as a reunion. Jourgensen recorded it with the current lineup of guitarists Monte Pittman and Cesar Soto, bassist Paul D’Amour, keyboardist John Bechdel, and drummer Pepe Clarke Magaña, but the closing track, “We’re Still Here,” reunites him with former bandmate Paul Barker. Barker was Jourgensen’s chief collaborator through Ministry’s most influential era, and his return for the final song is the kind of full-circle gesture the band rarely allows itself.
One Last Ride, Every Continent but One
The farewell will stretch across two years. Before the album lands, Ministry play a handful of 2026 US dates, including Red Rocks in Colorado on September 15, Louisville’s Louder Than Life on September 20, Chicago’s Salt Shed on October 3, and Sick New World Texas in Fort Worth on October 24. The formal Goodbye Europe Tour, with support from German legends Die Krupps, opens April 2, 2027, in Utrecht and runs through May 1 in Helsinki, hitting Manchester, London, Paris, Berlin, and eighteen other cities. A full US leg will follow. Jourgensen has framed the run as one final lap across every continent except Antarctica.
The context makes the finality plausible. Jourgensen spent the past year on the Squirrely Years Tour, revisiting the early synth-pop albums With Sympathy and Twitch that he dismissed for decades, and released a companion album of re-recordings called The Squirrely Years Revisited. That project reads now like a man making peace with the whole arc before closing it. Ministry began in Chicago in 1981 as something Jourgensen would later disown, mutated into one of the most influential heavy bands of the century, and, if he holds to his word this time, will end on his own terms. Seventeen albums in, “it’s time to herd goats” is as good a last line as any.
