Origins
The genre got its name from a slogan. In 1976, artist Monte Cazazza coined the phrase “Industrial Music for Industrial People,” and Throbbing Gristle adopted it as the tagline for their new label, Industrial Records. The four members, Genesis P-Orridge, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Chris Carter, and Peter Christopherson, had spent years in COUM Transmissions, a performance art collective founded in Hull in 1969. Their final COUM project was an exhibition called Prostitution at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts on 18 October 1976. The show featured pornographic images, used sanitary towels, rusty syringes, and documentation of COUM performances across Europe. Conservative MP Nicholas Fairbairn called the group “wreckers of Western civilization” in Parliament. Newspaper clippings of the outrage were framed and added to the exhibition daily. That opening night doubled as Throbbing Gristle’s live debut.
Their studio at 10 Martello Street in Hackney, which they called the Death Factory, had no natural light and floors eaten away by dry rot. Chris Carter built much of the equipment himself. The Gristleizer, their signature effects unit, was based on a circuit published in Practical Electronics magazine in July 1975, originally designed by a fifteen-year-old named Roy Gwinn. Every band member had at least one. The device produced slow modulated filtering, metallic ring modulation, clipped distortion, and tremolo, a range no other battery-powered unit could match. Carter also built the PA by hand.
Their debut, The Second Annual Report (1977), was assembled from live recordings and studio takes, all captured in single passes with no overdubs. Industrial Records pressed 785 copies. The label’s early roster included Boyd Rice (as Non), Cabaret Voltaire, Clock DVA, and the Leather Nun.
The Sound and Its Machines
The first wave shared a method more than a style: use whatever is available, reject virtuosity, treat the studio as an instrument. Cabaret Voltaire, formed in Sheffield in 1973 by Richard H. Kirk, Stephen Mallinder, and Chris Watson, took their name from the Zurich nightclub where Hugo Ball launched the Dada movement in 1916. Watson financed their own studio, Western Works, on Portobello Street in 1977. Bands rarely owned studios then, and the space became a magnet for local acts including the Human League and Clock DVA. It was abandoned after break-ins in 1987 and demolished shortly after.
In Berlin, Einsturzende Neubauten took the ethos to its most literal extreme. Their first percussionist sold his drum kit because he was broke, bought tools and screws, and within days had assembled a replacement from found and stolen scrap metal. The band’s 1981 debut Kollaps featured power drills, breaking glass, and hammered sheet metal. At London’s ICA on 3 January 1984, they performed the Concerto for Voice and Machinery alongside Genesis P-Orridge and Frank “Fad Gadget” Tovey. Twenty minutes in, the venue halted the show: the band had begun drilling through the stage with jackhammers. They left a hole but never reached the building’s stone foundations, which had been their stated goal.
In Sydney, SPK formed in 1978 when Graeme Revell, a psychiatric nurse at Callan Park Hospital, met Neil Hill, one of his patients diagnosed with schizophrenia. They named themselves after the Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv, a German radical group that framed mental illness as a form of protest against capitalist society rather than individual pathology. Their early recordings turned institutional confinement into walls of distorted noise.
Discipline and Dance
By the mid-1980s, industrial split into two distinct currents. One pushed toward dance floors. Front 242, formed in Aarschot, Belgium, in 1981, described their sound as “somewhere between Throbbing Gristle and Kraftwerk.” They printed the term “electronic body music” on the liner notes of their 1984 album No Comment, and it expanded into its own genre. Nitzer Ebb, from Essex, stripped the formula to its bones: pounding sequencers, barked vocals, militant rhythms. In Vancouver, Skinny Puppy’s cEvin Key and Nivek Ogre built elaborate sample collages around political themes. Their 1988 album VIVIsectVI (the title a pun embedding “666” into “vivisection”) focused on animal experimentation. On tour, Ogre performed mock vivisections on a stuffed dog named Chud. After one show in Cincinnati, the trio were arrested for disorderly conduct when an audience member believed the dog was real and called police.
The other current drove toward metal. Ministry’s Al Jourgensen, who had spent years under Arista Records making synth-pop he later disowned, added distorted guitars to jackhammering drum machines and movie dialogue samples. The Land of Rape and Honey (1988) was the pivot, and by Psalm 69 (1992) Ministry had become one of the heaviest bands on any major label.
The Mainstream Collision
Trent Reznor brought industrial to arenas. Working as a janitor and assistant engineer at Right Track Studios in Cleveland, he recorded demos during off-hours after the owner gave him free studio access between bookings. Nine demos from November 1988, collectively titled Purest Feeling, became Pretty Hate Machine (1989). Reznor wrote, played, and programmed everything himself, then brought in producers including Flood, John Fryer, and Adrian Sherwood across five studios in Cleveland, London, New York, and Boston.
For The Downward Spiral (1994), Reznor rented 10050 Cielo Drive in Los Angeles, the house where Sharon Tate was murdered by the Manson Family in 1969. He named the studio “Le Pig” after the word scrawled on the front door in blood. No one had told him the house’s history when he signed the lease. After meeting Tate’s sister, who asked if he was exploiting her death, he moved out in December 1993. The album reached number two on the Billboard 200.
Chicago’s Wax Trax! Records served as the American hub for the entire movement. Jim Nash and Dannie Flesher opened it as a record shop in Denver in 1974, relocated to Lincoln Park in 1978, then started releasing records. Ministry’s Cold Life (1981) and licensed Front 242 releases established the label. At its peak, Wax Trax! put out KMFDM, My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult, Coil, Meat Beat Manifesto, and a sprawling network of Jourgensen side projects including Revolting Cocks and Pailhead (with Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat). The label filed for bankruptcy in 1992.
Afterlife
Industrial’s methods became standard practice. Sampling, noise as texture, the producer as primary artist: these ideas entered the mainstream vocabulary of electronic music. Reznor and his collaborator Atticus Ross won Academy Awards for their scores to The Social Network and Soul, carrying the genre’s production sensibility into Hollywood. The original Industrial Records catalog remains in print. The Death Factory at 10 Martello Street is now an artist’s studio. The Gristleizer circuit was reissued as a Eurorack module in 2017.
Essential Listening
- Throbbing Gristle – The Second Annual Report (1977)
- Cabaret Voltaire – Red Mecca (1981)
- Einsturzende Neubauten – Kollaps (1981)
- SPK – Leichenschrei (1982)
- Test Dept – Beating the Retreat (1984)
- Skinny Puppy – VIVIsectVI (1988)
- Front 242 – Front by Front (1988)
- Ministry – The Land of Rape and Honey (1988)
- Nine Inch Nails – Pretty Hate Machine (1989)
- Nitzer Ebb – That Total Age (1987)
- Nine Inch Nails – The Downward Spiral (1994)
- Ministry – Psalm 69: The Way to Succeed and the Way to Suck Eggs (1992)