The Best Industrial Albums of the '90s

Trent Reznor built a studio inside 10050 Cielo Drive, the house where the Manson family killed Sharon Tate, and named it Le Pig; Flood co-produced. Closer runs on a drum loop lifted from Iggy Pop's Nightclubbing, and the arrangement keeps subtracting until only that loop and a synth bass are left standing. Nothing else in nineties industrial sold this well or hurt this much.

Spotify cannot render the Greek characters on the sleeve, so it files the record as KE*A*H** (Psalm 69). Al Jourgensen got Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers to babble an entire vocal take for Jesus Built My Hotrod, then hung it over a rockabilly gallop. Sire released it and it became Ministry's biggest seller by a distance.

Justin Broadrick and G. C. Green never hired a drummer, and Earache put out a Birmingham record made by two men and a drum machine that refuses to swing. Spite repeats one figure well past the point of comfort while Green's bass carries whatever melody exists. Broadrick had already played guitar on side one of Napalm Death's Scum as a teenager.

Vancouver's cEvin Key, Nivek Ogre and Dwayne Goettel cut it as a trio, and Goettel's death in 1995 meant only one more Skinny Puppy album followed. Killing Game is the most song-shaped thing here and still sounds assembled from tape scraps, Ogre's voice processed until the words arrive a beat late. Border case flagged: electro-industrial, not metal.

Colin Richardson produced it for Roadrunner and Rhys Fulber of Front Line Assembly handled the programming, which is exactly why a death metal band lands on an industrial list. Demanufacture, the opener, welds Raymond Herrera's double kick to the palm-muted guitars so tightly that listeners assumed the drums were triggered samples. Burton C. Bell alternates clean singing with roaring; half of nu-metal took notes.

Brussels, not Chicago. Front 242 had written most of EBM's vocabulary before American industrial got loud, and this was their first album for a major, issued through Epic. Spotify shouts the title back as TYRANNY >FOR YOU<. Rhythm of Time still clears a floor: a stiff sequencer pattern, Jean-Luc De Meyer barking across it, no groove at all and completely danceable.

Bill Leeb left Skinny Puppy in 1986 and built this in Vancouver with Rhys Fulber, making it the second British Columbia record in four places. Mindphaser runs close to eight minutes and stops dead halfway for an orchestral break before the sequencers return. Eight tracks, no filler, and the cleanest production electro-industrial had managed to that point.

Cut in New Orleans with Trent Reznor, Sean Beavan and Dave Ogilvie producing — the same Ogilvie who shaped Skinny Puppy — and it entered the Billboard 200 at number three. The Beautiful People is a stomp built on floor toms and a guitar figure that never resolves, the verses nearly spoken. Nothing and Interscope released it; American parents duly lost their minds.

Jacob Hellner produced it at Temple Studios in Malta, an improbable address for the loudest German record of the decade. Du hast opens on one held chord and Till Lindemann's rolled r, then drops into a riff too blunt to really qualify as one. Its use in The Matrix two years later made Rammstein an American concern despite the language barrier.

Five years of silence, then a twenty-three-track double that entered the Billboard 200 at number one and dropped out of the top ten the following week. Alan Moulder mixed it alongside Reznor. The Day The World Went Away carries almost no drums — a low distorted swell and a wordless multitracked chorus doing the work a hook would usually do.

Terry Date produced, John Tempesta had just arrived on drums from Exodus and Testament, and Geffen ended up with a multi-platinum album from a band that started in New York noise-rock basements. More Human Than Human hangs on J. Yuenger's pinched harmonic squeal while Sean Yseult's bass plays the actual riff. Spotify drops the hyphen and the dash from the title. Border case: groove metal with samplers bolted on.

John Balance and Peter Christopherson worked at this for roughly three years, and Christopherson had come out of Throbbing Gristle, which is more or less where the whole genre starts. Windowpane is the nearest Coil got to a single: an acid-house bassline squelching under a slurred vocal. Spotify carries only the 2021 anniversary remaster, and it misprints Lorca Not Orpheus as Lorca Not Orca.

Sascha Konietzko started the band in Hamburg in 1984 as an art-performance stunt, and it turned into the most dependable act on Wax Trax!. Juke-Joint Jezebel drops a four-on-the-floor disco kick under a choir sample and a flat shouted vocal, then repeats the trick without apology. The Mortal Kombat film soundtrack picked it up the same year.

Flood and Alan Wilder of Depeche Mode co-produced this for Mute, and it is where the Essex shouters largely stopped shouting. Godhead trades the old bark for something close to singing, over a bassline with genuine swing under it. Purists preferred the earlier records and they were wrong. Spotify closes the tracklist with Family Man in its remixed version rather than the original.