There are artists who mellow with age, embracing understatement, tasteful restraint, and the occasional acoustic guitar. Raymond Watts has apparently looked at that trajectory, laughed, and set another amplifier on fire. More than four decades after helping shape industrial music through PIG, KMFDM, Schaft and countless collaborations, Watts remains gloriously committed to excess. Thankfully, "Hurt People Hurt" proves that excess, when handled by someone who actually knows what they're doing, can still feel like an art form rather than a personality disorder.

Watts has always occupied a peculiar corner of industrial rock. While many of his contemporaries leaned into dystopian severity or mechanical aggression, PIG injected cabaret, glam, black humour and unapologetic sensuality into the machine. His records have often resembled decadent theatres where metal riffs, electronic programming and theatrical vocals coexist like aristocrats drinking champagne during the apocalypse. "Hurt People Hurt" continues that lineage while sounding remarkably energized rather than nostalgic.

The partnership with longtime collaborator Jim Davies once again pays dividends. Davies, whose résumé includes The Prodigy and Pitchshifter, understands how to construct riffs and electronic frameworks that remain muscular without becoming predictable. The production is dense but never suffocating, allowing guitars, synthetic textures and Watts' unmistakable voice to wrestle for attention without reducing everything to an undifferentiated wall of distortion. Industrial music often mistakes loudness for impact. This album remembers that contrast can be far more violent than constant volume.

Opening with "Tosca's Kiss", inspired by Watts' enduring fascination with opera, the record immediately establishes its taste for melodrama. Not melodrama as empty spectacle, but as emotional amplification, where desire, decay and theatricality become inseparable. It feels less like quoting classical music than adopting opera's emotional architecture: everything is heightened because moderation has already left the building.

Elsewhere, "Sex & Suicide" balances obsession and vulnerability beneath its provocative title, revealing that Watts remains more interested in psychological tension than simple shock value. Even when the lyrics flirt with grotesque imagery or decadent fantasy, they rarely become caricatures. There is always an undercurrent of loneliness beneath the leather and latex, an awareness that performance often hides wounds rather than confidence.

The title track encapsulates one of the album's central ideas. Rather than presenting cruelty as abstract evil, it reflects on cycles of damage that reproduce themselves. Watts never slips into moralising, preferring ambiguity over easy conclusions. Pain here is contagious, seductive, marketable, even entertaining. Human beings have always been remarkably efficient at turning trauma into both identity and spectacle. Social media merely gave the circus better lighting.

Musically, "Hurt People Hurt" thrives on movement. Tracks such as "Monkey See Monkey Do" and "Quid Pro Quo" pulse with dancefloor instincts inherited from electro-industrial and EBM traditions, while "Scars" and "Ruins" reveal a more reflective atmosphere without sacrificing momentum. The closing "The Reaper's Lament" provides an appropriately cinematic conclusion, allowing the record to dissolve into something resembling exhausted triumph rather than nihilistic collapse.

One of the album's greatest strengths is its refusal to chase contemporary trends. There are flashes of modern production aesthetics, certainly, but Watts isn't attempting to reinvent industrial music for streaming algorithms or TikTok attention spans. Instead, he sharpens a language he has spent decades refining. That confidence gives the record a refreshing authenticity. It sounds like an artist interested in making "his" next album, not someone desperately auditioning for relevance.

If there is any criticism to be made, it is that listeners unfamiliar with PIG may occasionally wish for moments of greater restraint. Watts rarely believes a chorus cannot become bigger, stranger or more flamboyant. Then again, asking Raymond Watts to be subtle is rather like asking a cathedral gargoyle to smile politely for a passport photo. It misses the point entirely.

"Hurt People Hurt" ultimately succeeds because it understands a paradox that has always defined PIG: darkness can be irresistibly entertaining without becoming superficial, and theatricality can reveal uncomfortable truths precisely because it exaggerates them. Beneath the swagger, the hooks and the gloriously overdriven machinery lies an album about fractured identities, compulsive desires and the strange resilience of damaged people who continue dancing anyway.

Not every wound heals. Some become songs. Raymond Watts has spent decades proving that those songs can still bite.