The strange ties between industrial music and erotic album art
In a playlist of the best industrial albums ever made, a pattern emerges. Even if the songs are fully instrumental, it still feels like they should be marked with an “E” for explicit, all thanks to the cover.
The entirety of Throbbing Gristle’s discography should be marked up just for the insane, vulgar name. But beyond that, you have cartoon boobs on the cover of KMFDM’s Naïve, two creepy demons going at it on Pigface’s Fook, or even a BDSM scene of a man in a dog mask on a leash gracing Death Grips’s The Money Store.
The content regularly matches up. Even if the lyrics are somewhat tame or disguised behind metaphors and imagery, there is something about industrial or heavier rock music that always seems to lean towards the sexual. But why is that?
The immediate response feels like a simple, ‘duh’. Sex, drugs and rock and roll was the prevailing attitude from the very first moment that electric guitars were plugged in. Just because the decades moved on past the initial 1960s boom, and just because the music began to shift into different subgenres like punk, metal or industrial, it doesn’t mean that the attitude ever went anywhere.
There is undeniably something seductive about music making in all its forms, but especially in loud music, where guitar playing always kind of comes from the crotch. Any act of creation essentially comes from the deepest most animalistic part of us, and that’s exactly where sexuality lies too.
But as the music got heavier, the somewhat taboo that first charged rock and roll’s sexual edge sure stepped up too. Especially with industrial music, where the entire point is to be abrasive in the boundarylessness of the sound, incorporating elements from a vaster melting pot of music, it lends itself to people keen to push the limits on all fronts, with the sexual content of an album cover seemingly included.
Ethel Cain once provided a great take on it all. While Perverts leans more towards ambient music, there is undeniably industrial elements in its heavier moments or in moments from across her discography where the influence of her love for rock is obvious. On Perverts, sex and taboo feel present even in the wordless moments, even simply in the vibrations of the sounds as she said, “It’s deeply indulgent and euphoric for me, in different ways for different tracks.”
When you’re going all out, leaning into big bold sounds or interesting choices like industrial artists so often are, Cain is right that it is indulgent, and indulgence is only ever a splinter away from the realm of sexual and sensuality. So it’s really no wonder why so often the choice of visuals these artists use to dress up their records ends up straying towards the erotic when, in some way, the entire genre, or even the entire act of music making is.
