What does ‘industrial’ music actually mean?
Industrial music, as we know it today, has evolved in many ways. While its most famous exponents, like Ministry and Nine Inch Nails, fused it with metal, its influence extends far beyond, impacting genres such as electronic music, hardcore punk, hip-hop, and post-punk. As the definitive sound of our technological era, industrial music remains a resonant force, continuing to shape the pulse of modern culture—whether in the nightclubs of Berlin, experimental rock shows, or eclectic contemporary genres like hyperpop.
Like all culturally significant movements, industrial music has a rich history shaped by a series of highly influential groups. However, the band that ignited it all was Throbbing Gristle, the pioneering musical and visual arts collective formed in the bleak, post-industrial landscape of Kingston upon Hull in 1975 by Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti. The duo had previously been part of the experimental performance art group Coum Transmissions, which was also founded in the often-overlooked city. Throbbing Gristle would go on to lay the groundwork for industrial music, blending raw soundscapes with provocative, boundary-pushing art.
It’s important to recognise that at its core, Throbbing Gristle was a countercultural group, which in turn made the industrial genre—of which they were key pioneers—intrinsically countercultural as well. When P-Orridge and Tutti were involved in Coum, their collective was influenced by surrealism, the Beat Generation writers—philosophical precursors to the 1960s counterculture—and underground music. Their openly subversive stance, challenging the backwardness of British society, laid the foundation for what would become Throbbing Gristle when Chris Carter and Peter Christopherson joined. This ethos would deeply inform the industrial sound and its rebellious spirit.
While there were other groups that had a significant hand in what became the full-bodied industrial genre coalescing in the late 1970s, such as the nearby Sheffield’s Cabaret Voltaire, Chrome, and Clock DVA, with the genre later expanded upon by the likes of Killing Joke, Einstürzende Neubauten, SPK, and Swans, in the early 1980s, it was Throbbing Gristle that started it all by instituting, characterising and explicitly defining it. This was years before Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson would take the word to the masses, with it still a distinctly underground offshoot of the counterculture, twisted through the prism of a world that was evolving economically and technologically.
So, why is it called ‘industrial’ music?
Throbbing Gristle’s 1977 debut album, The Second Annual Report, featured the band’s slogan, “industrial music for industrial people”. The term itself was coined by the artist and composer Monte Cazazza, who played a crucial role in shaping industrial music through his recordings with the Throbbing Gristle-founded label Industrial Records in the early years. Although it wasn’t the only label to contribute to the form over the years, with Chicago’s Wax Trax! Records and Canada’s Nettwerk assisting in its expansion, it was certainly the most significant.
Simply put, the idea behind industrial music was to respond to the access and control of information becoming the primary tools of power, an incredibly sagacious outlook that was, unfortunately, bang on the money, with this a constant feature of life today. Its use of new musical technology, such as synthesisers and transgressive, often alarming lyrics and themes, was intended to challenge musical and societal standards. This created the most challenging music people had heard since The Velvet Underground burst onto the scene.
Industrial Records has consistently maintained that Throbbing Gristle aimed to reinvent rock music for a new era, reflecting the band members’ relationship with the world around them. Their sound became a form of total sonic resistance, challenging societal norms and questioning their place within the system. This desire for radical change is why the label chose the term “industrial”, intending it to evoke a genre designed for a new generation. To them, earlier forms of music felt “agricultural”, reflecting the economic spirit of the times in which they were created, whereas industrial music embodied the mechanised, post-industrial landscape they sought to confront.
Throbbing Gristle leader P-Orridge once explained precisely why, stating: “There’s an irony in the word ‘industrial’ because there’s the music industry. And then there’s the joke we often used to make in interviews about churning out our records like motorcars —that sense of industrial.”
Concluding, P-Orridge added: “And … up till then, the music had been kind of based on the blues and slavery, and we thought it was time to update it to at least Victorian times—you know, the Industrial Revolution”.
