Music for the Dark: The 33 Best Industrial Albums of All Time - Pitchfork

In October 1976, the performance arts collective Coum Transmissions debuted Prostitution, an exhibition at the London Institute of Contemporary Arts. The opening night boasted a strip show in lieu of an introductory speech; alongside nude photos of Coum member Cosey Fanni Tutti, the troupe displayed used tampons, soiled bandages, and bottles of blood. The opening night marked the first performance from Coum’s ad hoc house band Throbbing Gristle, whose vocalist Genesis P-Orridge sang about castrating men and cutting the fetuses out of their pregnant wives. News of the show rang far. It was so disturbing to mainstream British culture that a conservative Member of Parliament declared Coum Transmissions the “wreckers of civilization.”

The ICA catalog from 1976 describes Throbbing Gristle as playing “DeathRock Music.” By the time the group had issued their first album, which included recordings from Prostitution’s opening night, they had settled on a different descriptor: “Industrial Music for Industrial People,” the tagline for their newly founded label Industrial Records. The term resonated on several frequencies: It spoke to the landscape of Throbbing Gristle’s native Hull, one of many English cities with architecture that had been transformed by the Industrial Revolution and then hollowed out by a decline in manufacturing work. It called back to Andy Warhol’s Factory, the studio where the New York artist smeared the imagery of capitalist mass production into the world of fine arts. Throbbing Gristle’s music often literally sounded like factory work, too, with its searing electronic noise and clattering percussion; however, P-Orridge’s squalling vocals tended to upend the image of the docile worker laboring away under capitalism. Androgynous, playful, and sinister, h/er voice traced a line of escape away from the suffocating constraints of h/er environment.

This was the sound of work, but it was also the sound of the refusal to work. Throbbing Gristle—and the many industrial acts who followed in their wake—funneled that metallic uproar into music that was not, at first, intended to move units. Caustic and provocative, it had little market value, but it found its intended audience. Across the Atlantic, a record store in Chicago called Wax Trax! started importing the sound of English disenfranchisement to the Midwest, a region similarly marked by industrial boom and decline. Run by Jim Nash and Dannie Flesher, who were business partners and a gay couple, Wax Trax! formed its own label in 1981. Its first pressing was a 7-inch single by the iconic drag queen Divine.

Throughout the ’80s, Wax Trax! would cement the sound of industrial with releases by both local and international bands like Ministry, Front 242, and My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult. The shop and label also served as a haven for a certain subset of Chicago’s queer community. “Wax Trax! was a community of people, all kinds of people, who didn’t feel like they belonged or were appreciated, or acknowledged or accepted in other places,” Nash said in an interview this spring. “That label, it welcomed everybody. The gay community, I think it was just along the same lines of they were outcasts. Any of these little subsets were outcasts, and they all found a comfortable place and a home at Wax Trax!”

For people who were considered to be abject and disposable, cast outside the standard narrative of a heteronormative life, industrial music supplied an abrasive and volatile voice. In the ’80s, openly gay synthpop acts like Culture Club and Frankie Goes to Hollywood filled the radio, but their songs mostly homed in on undiluted pleasure and candy-coated escapism. It was fabulous, but for many, gay pop was not enough. It didn’t speak to the visceral anxiety of living as a queer person through the Reagan and Thatcher eras. It wasn’t nearly violent enough.

From its root, industrial music was informed by a queer and trans perspective. After Throbbing Gristle disbanded in 1981, synthesist Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson joined his boyfriend John Balance in the seminal act Coil. Genesis P-Orridge began h/er gender transition after marrying Jacqueline Breyer, known professionally as Lady Jaye, in 1995. For P-Orridge, transition was not just the expression of a long-dormant “true” identity but an art project in itself. S/he and Breyer both had surgery to resemble each other more closely in what they called the Pandrogyne Project.

Of course, industrial music also became a home to a torrent of straight male anger. Because no taboo was too extreme to be left off the table in the genre’s lyrics, many albums ended up recreating the patriarchal misogynist violence that still simmers barely masked beneath mainstream culture. There are artists on this list who sing about rape, and there are artists who have been accused of it. Art that sets out to disgruntle the powers that be always carries the risk of reinscribing the oppressions it tries to unsettle.

In the late ’80s and early ’90s, as industrial got packaged for the mainstream by Nine Inch Nails, it ended up breeding with the synthpop from which it once stood so resolutely apart. It turned out that pop and industrial weren’t so diametrically opposed after all, even if Johnny Cash covering “Hurt” still sounds like a bad joke on paper. But industrial survived its sanitization. It oozed into the 21st century, where artists like Mica Levi, Pharmakon, and clipping. are channeling its chaos into some of the new millennium’s most exciting music.

Late capitalism continues its gallop toward oblivion, and full-time work is still draining out of the U.S. and UK with only the hellish gig economy to replace it. It’s as good a time as any to scream and bang household items together and overdrive a shitty amp. Industrial came out of a dark period whose shadow might never really ebb away. But it was proof that even in dire conditions, people who recognized capitalism’s hostility and heteropatriarchy’s limits could always band together and make a hell of a lot of noise. –Sasha Geffen

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