Dismantled: ‘Salvaging These Emotions into Something Called Music’

Fifteen years after “The War Inside Me”, Gary Zon returns with “Endless”, the sixth studio album from Dismantled, scheduled for release on November 20, 2026, through Metropolis Records.

Since emerging in 2000, Dismantled has occupied a distinctive place in electro-industrial music. Zon’s compositions have always carried something deeply personal beneath their layers of distorted electronics, intricate programming and often abrasive arrangements. Albums such as “PostNuclear”, “Standard Issue” and “The War Inside Me” revealed an artist capable of translating frustration, alienation and emotional vulnerability into music of remarkable intensity, without entirely surrendering his sense of irony.

The road to “Endless” has been anything but straightforward. Side-Line first reported on the album in May 2020, and the record has taken years to reach completion, during a period in which Zon’s relationship with music, creativity and his own artistic identity continued to evolve. Side-Line covered the album’s slow re-emergence through the singles “Zero” in September 2026 and “Wired For War” later that same month, before the full November 20 release date was confirmed in October.

For Side-Line, Karo Kratochwil spoke with Gary Zon about the return of a project that, more than two decades after its beginnings, remains unmistakably his own.

Karo: Gary, you recently described Dismantled’s return as more of a “crawlback” than a proper comeback. That’s an interesting distinction, particularly from someone who once had such strong ambitions for the project. Fifteen years separate “The War Inside Me” and “Endless”, although you’ve continued releasing music in between. The new album was first announced in 2020, with previews appearing in 2021. What happened to your relationship with Dismantled during those years? And how much of the person who started this project in 2000 do you still recognise in yourself?

Gary Zon: Dismantled has always been a broken emotional outlet that I’ve come back to over the years because I couldn’t find anything else that worked better. Age and time definitely don’t help things either. But here I am, still doing an interview. I’ve reached a kind of obscurity with the project that reminds me of the way things used to be before I ever made music.

“The War Inside Me” was a great tumultuous period in my life that will always stay with me. But things don’t last, and time takes its toll. I had stomach surgery in 2012, and my energy hasn’t been the same since. I ended up back in the Northwest trying to complete the new album but struggled with finding myself again. After finally getting back on track, the pandemic hit.

I kept thinking I could get the album done quickly, like I did in my twenties. That was definitely not the case, and even though I kept posting previews and announcing it, the music wasn’t complete, and there was nothing I could do to speed up the process.

The energy in Oregon was horrible, and the years in pandemic isolation blended together until I lost track of time completely. I was too stubborn to give up, however, and kept grinding away at it. Moving back to California is the only thing that finally helped me finish the new album.

Karo: I have to ask you about “Exit”, because it’s genuinely one of my twenty favourite songs of all time. I’ve listened to an enormous amount of electronic music over the years, but very few compositions have affected me quite so profoundly. Even now, hearing it can feel almost like having my heart torn apart. What was happening in your creative life when you wrote it? And there’s something else I’ve noticed: from “Exit” through “No Escape” to “Mirror’s Edge”, the language of confinement and failed escape keeps returning. Are you still confronting essentially the same questions about freedom, or has their meaning changed over the years?

Gary Zon: Thank you for the compliment! “Exit” was the first song that I actually sang with clear vocals. The emotion at that time was me failing college and seeing society as a wall instead of something I could fit into. My only outlet to channel all that frustration ended up being that song. The lyric “whenever I feel / I find no way to begin” summed up my entire college experience. Going to classes every day unable to focus on anything while everyone around me seemed to thrive was how I wrote the entire “PostNuclear” album.

Years later, I heard from a fan of mine how listening to that album actually helped them finish college. That made me feel like all those wasted years at the University of Oregon were finally worth it.

And yes, I do feel the same way about “Exit” in the present day because I’m currently in the same dysfunctional atmosphere where society has become a wall that I can’t climb, but for much different reasons. I’ve come back to that feeling with the song “Mirror’s Edge” off “Endless”, which has elements of “Exit” but is channelled much differently.

Freedom has always been a tricky thing for me because the more I feel constricted emotionally, the better the music ends up being, at least in Dismantled’s case. “No Escape” was written as a gut reaction to the pandemic and the way that hope was “just a mirror” of ourselves. “Mirror’s Edge” continues that thought and looks at society as a broken mirror. “Before we kill each other blindly then say we’re not the virus, look in the mirror.”

The older I get, the more disillusioned I become with the definition of freedom. The values and things that people consider “freedom” in America are incredibly stressful and unattainable for most. “Our lives expendable, there’s nothing to believe” is another lyric from “Mirror’s Edge” that comes to mind.

Karo: The lyrics of “Endless” repeatedly return to conformity, surveillance, technological dependence and the erosion of individuality. In “Cloned”, obedience becomes a condition of belonging, while “Zero” and “Shelter” approach the disappearance of personal identity from more intimate perspectives. Are these primarily criticisms of the technological systems we’re creating, or of the human willingness to surrender autonomy in exchange for acceptance and security? Do you see any meaningful distinction between the two?

Gary Zon: I think technology has shaped society in ways that only science fiction novels could imagine, which I remember reading a lot in high school. “1984” and “Neuromancer” were the primary inspirations for my first album.

I still remember when the internet was something the general public was only curious about, compared to how it completely envelops and shapes our entire lives these days. “Nanowires run forever” from the new song “Zero” is a lyric that sums all that up for me.

I think most people have already surrendered themselves to AI and cloud computing, which is where the song title “Nano Cloud Warning” came from. Not to mention phones that warn you when the music is being played too loud. “Satellites trace each breath you’ll ever take, this is the end.”

Karo: In a 2010 interview, you spoke about instability as a source of inspiration and suggested that emotional stability could actually undermine your creativity. I’ve always found that idea fascinating, but also worth challenging. Do you still believe conflict and discomfort are necessary to produce convincing Dismantled music? Or has time taught you to access those emotions without needing to experience the circumstances that originally generated them?

Gary Zon: I don’t think anything has changed with my relationship between songwriting and personal life, but I do think it’s cooled off quite a bit because I’m obviously not in my twenties anymore, and that was the era when I wrote most of the albums.

Each of them has a colour theme that explains the emotions behind it. The self-titled is green since it’s all about the dystopian technology apocalypse. “PostNuclear” is orange-themed since that technology had begun to rust, becoming more organic and fragile.

“Standard Issue” was a very white-and-black, tongue-in-cheek album because that’s the way I felt like I was perceived in the industrial scene at the time. “The War Inside Me” was a red-and-black album that broke through all the confines of the previous albums in terms of emotional intensity.

“Endless” is blue-themed and combines all the previous album eras into something more complete and cohesive. It’s also the longest album I’ve ever written to make up for the delay in releasing it.

Karo: You’ve previously explained how the heavily processed, almost inhuman vocals of your debut gradually gave way to clearer singing because you wanted to communicate more personal emotions. Yet electronic manipulation can sometimes make vulnerability even more unsettling than an exposed human voice. How do you approach that balance today? And when working on “Endless”, did you find yourself returning to earlier production techniques for their emotional possibilities, rather than simply their association with the original Dismantled sound?

Gary Zon: I think I’ve found the balance between the vulnerable and heavily processed vocals on the new album in ways that I’ve never been able to achieve before. I’ve tried to blend them together with the music more, which is how the self-titled album sounded, at least in parts.

My favourite would have to be on the title track “Endless” because it’s all just vocoder but has so much emotion to me. That reminds me of the early days when I’d use a command-line program to make the vocals for “Dystopia”. That kind of experimentation is what I miss the most from those early days of creating music.

Karo: During the “Standard Issue” period, you were openly critical of the formulaic nature of industrial club music, while deliberately incorporating some of those conventions into your own compositions. You even seemed to enjoy the irony of audiences dancing to songs whose criticism they might completely miss. Does that contradiction still amuse you? With something as accessible as “Zero”, is it important that listeners understand the lyrics, or can misunderstanding become part of the artistic statement?

Gary Zon: I put a lot of thought into the lyrics, and that seems to be my weakness. Because I view the lyrics and the music as a complete picture, that ultimately affects the way I finish my songs.

So as soon as I hear another industrial track playing after my song on a playlist, the first thing I notice is how the music sounds much louder than mine, but the lyrics are more of an afterthought. That’s what I’ve come to expect over the years, however.

“Standard Issue” was an amazing era creatively, and there is still some of that lingering with the lyrics to “Zero”, but I think I’m content with just being ignored at this point. Irony and sarcasm are something that has sadly been lost to time and is no longer relevant in 2026.

Karo: In 2002, you described yourself as sceptical about politics and suggested that your music was more observational than activist. Yet “No Escape”, released in 2020, included an explicit call for climate action and supported Oregon wildfire relief. Now “Endless” returns to environmental destruction, technological control and humanity’s apparent inability to learn from its mistakes. Has your perspective changed? Do you still see music primarily as a way of documenting the human condition, or do you believe it can genuinely challenge the attitudes and behaviours it criticises?

Gary Zon: I believe music is at its lowest form of causing any sort of change since the dystopian corporatisation of the way artists are treated by companies like Spotify and Meta has sucked pretty much all soul out of trying to present anything unique and against the grain, in my opinion.

And yes, after the Oregon wildfires, I’ve definitely had a change of heart since it was right there in my community. When you can’t go outside for a week because you’re smoked in, and eventually the smoke starts coming into the house and you can’t breathe properly, you realise that climate change is right there in front of you, and yet nothing is being done about it.

I remember rendering the lyric video for “No Escape” just as the smoke rolled in. There was a particular campfire smell to it that made me feel like a kid again. Later that year, the fires reached California, and the entire West Coast looked like the scene from “Blade Runner 2049” when they’re in a future Las Vegas.

“The Fires Out West” reflects all those moments and is probably the most haunting song off the new album for me since I’ve personally experienced it.

Karo: You’ve explored music outside the industrial scene through projects such as Aerodrone and no.not.never, while also drawing inspiration from artists far removed from traditional electro-industrial music. Yet you’ve described Dismantled as the most direct expression of your personal relationship with the world. What is it about this particular musical language that allows you to communicate things you cannot express elsewhere? And after so many years, does the industrial scene still offer you creative possibilities, or do you sometimes find its conventions restrictive?

Gary Zon: Dismantled has always been a gut reaction to my environment that I come back to even though I consciously reject it.

“Endless” was the most difficult album I’ve ever worked on, and it took a lot of tries to finally get it to sound complete. It’s hard to explain except for the fact that the creation of sound and eventually recording vocals is the only way I feel fulfilled creatively and free to do other things.

I’ve started on the path of expressing myself through Dismantled long ago, and so it was only natural to finish what I started. My main goal, however, is just to show the hardcore fans that the music is very much still alive but is just taking that much longer to surface than before.

Karo: You’ve described “Endless” as your most cohesive album, and I can hear connections with different periods of your earlier work. But I also sense a change in the emotional language, particularly when comparing its more measured moments with the almost confrontational intensity of “PostNuclear” or “The War Inside Me”. Do you recognise that difference yourself? And how do you rediscover an earlier musical identity without turning it into something predictable? What does “Endless” express that the Gary Zon of twenty years ago might not have been capable of articulating?

Gary Zon: I was reading a lot of Victor Hugo during the writing of “Endless” because that’s how much my energy had dwindled being in Oregon, stuck in isolation from the pandemic. I love how his books are so epic in scope but have now become totally obscure relics that sit there collecting dust. I see a lot of myself in that energy, but even more obscure since I’ve never had much commercial success to begin with.

My favourite book by Victor Hugo turned out to be “The Toilers of the Sea”. In it, a protagonist salvages a shipwreck stuck on these two cliffs in the open sea all by himself. That reminded me of how I made all my albums, essentially just salvaging these emotions into something called music, no matter how much time it took or how broken it made me feel.

I’ve listened to a lot of the same bands while making “Endless” that I was listening to when I made “PostNuclear”, particularly Smashing Pumpkins and Radiohead. The new Silversun Pickups album was another source of inspiration.

I wanted to find a completeness to the sound that would sum up the project so when someone discovers my CD lying around collecting dust like an old Victor Hugo book, they can connect it back to my previous albums and see how it all fit together.

I’m much more fascinated with obscurity than achieving any form of success at this point. That ship has sailed and was never meant for the sort of thing I was doing anyway. In my early years, I always thought I was on the cusp of achieving something that never came.

That being said, I’m still proud of the work that I’ve accomplished over the years and excited to finally have an album done. It took a lot of willpower and determination to get to this point, as the years after the pandemic have been rough seas.

Karo: Finally, what about bringing Dismantled back to the stage? You always approached live performances rather differently from many electronic acts, insisting on the physical energy of a full band with live drums and bass. Is that still central to how you imagine Dismantled performing? Are there plans for concerts or perhaps another European tour? And looking beyond “Endless”, do you feel you’ve reopened a creative chapter that you want to continue exploring, or are you deliberately leaving the future of the project undefined?

Gary Zon: I still have amazing memories touring with the longest lineup I’ve had, which was TZA on keyboards and Jon Siren on drums. TZA sadly passed away in 2017, and a lot of grief from that is what makes “Endless” a very special album for me.

I miss her very much, and I’ve memorialised the lineup in the album artwork and added all the tours we did from that time period. This was the peak era of Dismantled live shows, especially with Nero Bellum joining on guitar, and will probably never be matched again.

That being said, I do want to visit Europe again in the future. Only time will tell.

About Dismantled

Dismantled is an American electro-industrial project founded by musician and producer Gary Zon in 2000. Emerging from experiments with layered electronic arrangements, distorted vocals and melodic synthesiser sequences, the project developed a recognisable sound combining electro-industrial aggression with atmospheric textures and deeply personal songwriting.

Following its self-titled debut in 2002, Dismantled released albums including “PostNuclear”, “Standard Issue” and “The War Inside Me”, establishing a catalogue that moved between dystopian electronic imagery, dark humour and increasingly direct emotional expression. Side-Line first reported on a follow-up album, “Endless”, in May 2020.

After a prolonged interval between studio albums, Dismantled returned to the singles chart with “Zero” in September 2026 and “Wired For War” later that month, ahead of its sixth full-length, “Endless”, set for release on November 20, 2026, through Metropolis Records. The twelve-track album includes both singles.

“Endless” is available for pre-order now on Bandcamp.