Stabbing Westward

Stabbing Westward is an American industrial rock band that Christopher Hall and Walter Flakus started in 1985, having met at a college radio station in Macomb, Illinois. Their sound pairs corrosive guitars and electronic programming with lyrics of anguish and want, a formula that carried two records - 1996's Wither Blister Burn & Peel and 1998's Darkest Days - into Gold territory and set them alongside Nine Inch Nails in the late-'90s industrial mainstream. The band dissolved in 2002, reunited in 2016 for its thirtieth anniversary, and has kept working since, releasing Chasing Ghosts in 2022 after a twenty-one-year gap between studio albums. In 2026 they circle back to their breakthrough with Wither ReWired, a ground-up re-recording of the original rather than a remaster, reshaped by three decades of playing the songs.