For those of us that grew up in the decade following bands like Ministry, Nine Inch Nails, and Skinny Puppy in the late 90s and early 2000s, there was a distinctive sound that re-emerged in the aftermath of thrasher metal and progressive rock bands in the 80s. It was a new day and age for heshers, goths and rivetheads that, much like the catalyst for any generation-defining musical and cultural movement, there was an unaddressed need begging to be acknowledged. There was a liminal space following the arrival of Seattle grunge bands like Nirvana and Soundgarden on the scene, as well as Radiohead with albums such as Ok Computer and Kid A. But who were these veritable unknowns? Those that seemed to have been archived on the shelves of obscure record labels, record store libraries and in the back room B-side broom closets of discographies on Apple Music and Spotify?
Skinny Puppy
Song: "Dig It" (Mind: The Perpetual Intercourse)
To wrap your head around the industrial music genre, you first have to understand from where it came. A mix between abstract expressionism, fluxus, surreal automatism, dadaism, futurism, and post-modernism, the genre originated from the founding members of two main groups in the UK: Throbbing Gristle and Monte Cazazza.
Their discographies consisted of numerous works from Best of Volume 1… to the satirically ironic
20 Jazz Funk Greats, as well as their Second Annual Report album, which coined the phrase “Industrial Music for Industrial People". Even though his group started in the UK, Monte Cazazza was primarily based in San Francisco and was largely credited for coining the phrase. He also developed a reputation for being an erratic, volatile performer on stage–so much so that his live performances were quoted in Re/Search Publication's Industrial Culture Handbook as “insanity-outbreaks thinly disguised as art events.”
Song: "Kick That Habit Man" (Worst of Monte Cazazza)
Because the genre began in the late 70s and can be traced back as a byproduct offspring of post-punk and nu metal, it seamlessly combines the transgressive anti-authoritarian proto-punk sensibilities and discernment of hardcore rock groups with the iconoclastic behavior in dada, as well as the applied use of technology in futurism. All this came along with the added influence of grunge that didn't actually start until the mid 1980s. These were acts that preferred playing in discrete clubs and skunky neighborhood dive bars to the yuppie watering holes on the Upper East Side or for the studio audiences of Dick Clark’s American Bandstand on ABC. They appeared in the wake of brazen trail blazers like Ministry, Skinny Puppy, Cabaret Voltaire, KMFDM, Rammstein, and Fear Factory. These groups had no regard whatsoever for any sort of stringent social structure and political correctness. The same could be said for honorable mentions Nocturnal Emissions, Nurse with Wound, Inner-X-Musick, Boyd Rice, Front Line Assembly, Front 42, and Sister Machine Gun–some of whom were signed to the Chicago-based Wax Trax! imprint label. What sets the unmapped territory of the industrial genre aside from the compositional techniques, production value, stylistic characteristics, idiosyncrasies, and tropes of electroacoustic music like DNB (Drum and Bass) is the process by which their fan base auditorily perceives and formulates an opinion about what they’re hearing.
Song: "Discipline" (20 Jazz Funk Greats)
Industrial music wasn’t like the English post-punk scene from London like Adam Ant, Siouxsie and the Banshees, or the Cure. It wasn’t like the synth wave of the Eurythmics or Talk Talk. Nor did it resemble the quirks and arpeggiated riffs of Depeche Mode with the low-placed baritone vocals of the the Killing Joke, or Ian Curtis from Joy Division. The movement went on to become acid house industrial similar to the act Paranoid London. It set itself apart in that it fit into its own esoteric category of sonic phenomena: the link between nihilistic disk jockeys and the democratization of technology.
It was a dehumanized reaction to machine ambience that stood apart from ambient and ibillient genres with groups like Aphex Twin or the angular minimalist synth-punk industrial acts that predated the early phases of IDM (Intelligent Dance Music), Chip Tune, Trance, Phonk, Jungle, House, and EBM (Electric Body Music), which sounded more like the fiddly digits and beep-boop-bop glitches from a Nintendo Switch or somebody’s steam deck than it did a song. With an array of hissing high hats and squelshy snares filtered through a delectable spread of thickly coated delay pedals and spring reverb tanks, it is often described as a type of abrasive “ogre music" due to fuzzbox vocals. These artists avoided catch-all terms like “EDM” and “Techno”, or “festival friendly” at all costs, despite the commercial success of Nine Inch Nails albums such as Downward Spiral and Marilyn Manson's Mechanical Animals, which went certified platinum by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). These types of accolades are a rare occurrence when affiliating with the stigma of the Contemporary Avant-Garde.
Song: "Avant-Après Mars" (Liasons Dangereuses)
I'd like to reference back to albums like Kid A and Ok Computer, which incorporated themes about rampant consumerism, social alienation, emotional isolation, the downsides of unbridled American capitalism, mass-surveillance, and westernized globalization through the lens of a dystopian near-future. These are topics which are thrown in the amalgam of industrial music but expanded upon to include provocative imagery and the occult.
Even Lou Reed tried his hand at the genre, with his Metal Machine Music in the 70s when he went solo and cut ties with the Velvet Underground. As did Brian Eno and Gary Numan. Throbbing Gristle later split up, but ushered in the makings of a new intermedia experimental video art and band called Psychic TV, led by P-Orridge and Christopherson, the founding members. P-Orridge referred to it during an interview with Perry Haines in 1982 as a "video group integrated with music and not a music group integrated with video." Other examples of this are bands which diverted from the original lineup and branched off to create other side projects, like mutated ligaments of arms and legs that had severed themselves from the same torso. Nine Inch Nails and How to Destroy Angels are prime examples of this, as well as the influence that the New York punk scene had on the genre as a whole.
This wasn’t unlike the gothic horror live performance antics of the time, with fishnet shirts and neon stockings, but it also fertilized the sporophyte seedlings that bloomed from the undergrowth of a style of music and approach to record-making that forced the genre's slim (seemingly arcane) but responsive demographic of listeners to rewire their ears. A testament to the thread of the movement, as well as any person that dares to venture out along with it—that it isn’t only the aesthetic that comes dual-paired with the decade, but a totally aberrant extremified way of listening to music that redefines what music could be and has gradually taken shape. Terms like “Sound Collage”, "Aleatoric", “Indeterminacy”, and “Found Sound” come to mind.
"It was borrowed from the noise art pioneers that walked so that later industrial bands could run, such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Steve Reich, Milton Babbitt, and Pierre Schaeffer with Musique Concrète."
Industrial music is a school of thought that has begun to carve its own path onto the vertices of the fragmented zeitgeist and without even the slightest hint of indecision. It was borrowed from the noise art pioneers that walked so that later industrial bands could run, such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Steve Reich, Milton Babbitt, and Pierre Schaeffer with Musique Concrète. You aren’t listening for typical song form or for catchy sing-along choruses that you can hum on your way to the grocery store or on your morning commute to a job sedated by tacky ad spot jingles and easy listening XM radio stations. Rather, it's bundles of frequencies, waveforms, timbres, and layers of diegetic processed sounds latticed into a sonic periodic table of elements.
Industrial is ascertained as a consort of separate ingredients working together to accomplish some sort of quasi-relational recipe of sonorities. Sounds smeared with a gamut of anxiety impulse-driven hyperactivity and a sort of meta-stasis that creates a dialogue between movement and non-directionality. Permutations of wet and dry, processed and unprocessed sounds, which are derived from both organic and heavily synthesized source material, tickle the senses. Source material fluctuates from rhythms that are either at the foreground of the track or become completely indistinguishable and almost altogether absent. Any listener who's heard it can nearly make out the quantized patterns of on-beats and off-beats that linger in the head, as if they were playing on some stylus in those back rooms inside some downtown record store somewhere. Yet these records aren't being gate-kept by elitist album collection snobs or smurfs (a slang term I use to refer to ravers) in an attic's vaulted hatch, but rather an unhinged trap door leading to a treasure trove rabbit hole of what you can find on the internet when you search hard enough in the right direction.
Song: "Basement Crawlers" (Untitled)
Although its first initial steps took root before the new millennium, industrial music gets a significant amount of its visibility and exposure when played in select clubs and venues still around in 2024, with the exception of more commercialized industrial artists. However, this should by no means take away from its predecessors, nor should it discourage up-and-comers or whatever may come next in the post-industrial world. Neither should its selective demographic indicate or suggest that these original undiscovered musicians didn’t strike the iron while it was hot. Artists like Beau Wanzer, Dust Belt, Oil Thief, and Deviation Social are all ones to watch in coming years of this genre. In addition the aforementioned artists are Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of Nine Inch Nails, who continue releasing albums and collaborating with other artists, when they aren't busy writing OST film scores for feature length films.
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