💫Mamna Mia, Here I Go Again💫
Marilyn Manson has a new video out, and the premise is either deeply unsettling or deeply funny, depending on how much caffeine you've had. Front Toward Enemy, directed by Henri Alexander Levy, previews his upcoming album One Assassination Under God – Chapter 2, due August 14 on Nuclear Blast. The song itself has been sitting in a drawer since 2024, when it appeared as a CD-only B-side to Raise the Red Flag. Now it's been dusted off, remastered into a lead-up single, and handed a visual that nobody asked for, but everyone will remember.
The video's central bit: Manson performs on a stark, white soundstage flanked by two child-sized doppelgängers, one on guitar and one on drums. Elsewhere he's doing pull-ups on a chrome-plated cross, prowling around in a cape like a warlock who forgot his own Halloween party, and at one point lying half-conscious on a gurney, while one of the mini-Mansons appears to prep for surgery on him. It's the kind of imagery that reads less like shock theater and more like a succession drama with worse lighting.
A franchise doesn't need to believe in the mission anymore. It just needs someone small enough to keep wearing the mask.
Which brings me to a fan theory, and it's a good one: that the older Manson figure is a clone of the original, with two smaller clones cued up to continue whatever the mission was supposed to be — except by now they're sharp enough to see through it! The gurney-and-operation imagery supports this nicely. So does the pull-up-on-a-cross bit, which plays less like devotion and more like maintenance. Keep the artifact running. Keep the legend serviced. Nobody in the frame looks like they're having a religious experience; they look like they're clocked in.
What the song's actually about: Critics have read it as a straightforward kiss-off to enemies real and imagined — defiant, boastful, unbothered by hell itself. Nothing in the lyric sheet points to succession or cloning. That's all in the video's staging, which is doing its own separate work.
That gap between song and video is the interesting part. The lyrics are pure bravado; the visuals are about inheritance, obligation, and whether the person carrying a legacy forward actually still wants it. Manson's own real-world timeline — the lawsuits, the dropped label, the slow-motion comeback via Nuclear Blast — makes the, "going through the motions to preserve the first self," reading land harder than it probably should for a song that's mostly about not dying to your haters.
Sometimes the clones are smarter than the original. Sometimes they just look hangry in better lighting.
