Some context you need before the first note. Al Jourgensen has spent four decades disowning Ministry's early synth-pop records, and he did not stop at interviews.
The two-inch tapes, I had a barbecue party and I burned them on a barbecue. There's no existing original With Sympathy's. I just burned them.
Al Jourgensen, Yahoo! Entertainment, 21 June 2023
So the premise of The Squirrely Years Revisited, out on Cleopatra Records on 28 March 2025, is that the man who destroyed the masters has gone back and recorded the songs again. Nine songs on the record itself and three more on the digital edition, drawn from the 1983 Arista debut, the Twitch period and the early singles. Jourgensen sings and plays guitars, bass and keyboards, with Cesar Soto and Monte Pittman on guitars, Paul D'Amour on bass, John Bechdel on keyboards, Roy Mayorga on drums and Charlie Clouser adding programming. It reached forty two on Billboard's current album sales chart.
His stated reason, given to Blabbermouth when the album was announced in February 2025, was that since he had hated the material for decades he decided to take ownership of it and do it right. Fair enough. The question a listener has to answer is whether doing it right means anything when the songs were fine to begin with.
Because they were. That is the part four decades of self-loathing obscured. "(Every Day Is) Halloween" is a great pop song with a great synth line, and no amount of later industrial credibility changes that. "Work for Love" and "I'll Do Anything for You" are competently written mid-eighties dance pop that thousands of bands were trying and mostly failing to write. The 1983 record's problem was never the songwriting. It was a label pushing an American into an English accent and a haircut.
What arrives here is more faithful than the barbecue story would suggest. The arrangements track the originals closely, with real guitars added and the vocal delivered in Jourgensen's actual voice rather than the affected one. That is the whole modification. The synths are still the melody, the structures are untouched, and anybody expecting the early material rebuilt as The Land of Rape and Honey will be waiting a long time.
This is not a reinvention, it is a man singing his own songs in his own accent for the first time.
Whether that is worth an album is where the reviews split hard, and there is no consensus to hide behind. The Quietus called it his best record in decades. Bearded Gentlemen heard the pop songwriting vindicated. Out of Rage gave it three out of ten and complained about sound effects, cheese and a vocal on "Revenge" that sounds like it was tracked underwater, and finished by suggesting his original dismissal of this material was not entirely wrong.
Look at who was hired to play it, too, because the roster says something the press release does not. Paul D'Amour on bass, Roy Mayorga on drums, Charlie Clouser on programming, John Bechdel on keyboards: that is a heavy rock personnel sheet assembled to perform mid-eighties dance pop, and the two reviews that engaged with the playing both landed on the same observation, that the guitars are present but deliberately held back. Bearded Gentlemen heard chunky guitars and heavy percussion serving the songs; ReGen heard them kept tough but tastefully restrained. Nobody was allowed to turn these into metal songs, which was plainly the instruction.
Here is the technical verdict, since that is what this desk is for. The production is clean, modern and slightly airless. The synths are emulations rather than the machines that made the originals, and you can hear it in the attack: the 1983 versions have a stiffness that came from the hardware, and the new ones glide where they used to lurch. That stiffness was doing more work than anybody credited at the time. Adding guitars to these arrangements does not make them heavier, it makes them fuller, and full is not what this material needed.
So who is it for. Not for new listeners, who should hear the originals, whatever their author thinks of them. Not really for the industrial audience either, since nothing here has been dragged into that world. It is for people who have followed the argument, and as the final entry in a forty year argument with himself it is genuinely interesting. As a record you put on again, it is pleasant and slightly redundant, which is a strange fate for songs their own author once set fire to.