Justin Broadrick has said that the drum machine on Streetcleaner came out of hip hop, and that one of its beats was his attempt at copying the rhythm sample on "Microphone Fiend" by Eric B and Rakim. Hold that up next to what metal fans believe about where their music comes from. Earache put the record out on 13 November 1989, it is still one of the heaviest things the label ever released, and its rhythm section was learned off a rap single.
That single fact is the whole of industrial death metal, if you let it be. The machine did not arrive to make the music colder. It arrived because it could do things a drummer cannot, and because the men programming it had been listening to records nobody in Tampa was listening to.
The machine arrived as a subject before it arrived as a method
Tampa got there first and then did not follow it up. Nocturnus put a full time keyboard player in a death metal band and released The Key through Earache on 1 October 1990, with Louis Panzer writing synthesiser lines into the arrangements rather than laying a wash underneath them, and a story on the lyric sheet about a cyborg travelling back through time to kill Christ before Christianity can start. Mike Browning drummed and sang it. Nothing on the record is industrial in method, because every sound on it is made by hands. Everything on it is industrial in subject. The imagination of the genre reached the machine a good two years before its equipment did.
That subject is the real dividing line, and it explains why this branch sounds different even when a human is playing the drums. Ordinary death metal is about the body: what is inside it, what can be done to it, how fast it fails. Industrial death metal is about the body inside a system. Automation, surveillance, the production line, and war fought by machines with people as the raw stock going in at one end. Fear Factory got four albums out of one argument between a man and the thing built to replace him, and that is the same argument the programming is having with the drummer. When the subject and the method say the same thing, you get a genre. When only one of them does, you get a good record and no descendants.
What the machine is actually for
Death metal was already halfway to the machine before anybody used the word industrial about it. The kick drums were triggered, the click track was running, and the entire Florida project was an attempt to remove variance so that a dense riff would arrive clean. Industrial death metal did not introduce the machine. It stopped pretending the machine was not there.
There are three jobs the programming does that a human behind a kit genuinely cannot.
- It holds a tempo to the millisecond for eight minutes without breathing, which turns repetition into something that feels less like playing and more like plant equipment running.
- It plays sounds no kit produces: a kick distorted into a square wave, a snare that is a sample of metal being struck, a hit that is not a drum at all.
- It can play a figure faster than hands move, which is either cheating or an instrument, depending on how you feel about the pedal steel guitar.
Industrial death metal did not introduce the machine. It stopped pretending the machine was not there.
Los Angeles, and the version that sold
Fear Factory formed in Los Angeles in 1989, went through two names before the one that stuck, cut Soul of a New Machine at Grand Master in Hollywood in May 1992 with Colin Richardson producing, and Roadrunner released it on 25 August of that year. Raymond Herrera is credited on the sleeve as Variable Percussive Wrecking, which is a joke and also an accurate job description: a human drummer playing with the evenness of a sequencer, so that the band could sound programmed without programming anything. The record is death metal first. Everything that came later grew out of what happened to it next.
What happened next was a remix EP. Rhys Fulber of Front Line Assembly took the songs apart and rebuilt them as electronic music in 1993, and the band liked the result enough to make it the direction. Demanufacture arrived on 12 June 1995 and put Fear Factory on the American chart for the first time. A death metal band had been remixed into a different genre by an electronic producer and had then decided the remix was correct, which is not a thing that had happened before.
England had already done it, quietly
Broadrick had left Napalm Death before their first album was finished and built Godflesh around a drum machine because he could not stand what a live drummer did to the weight of the riff. That is the ancestor. Everything with a programmed kick and a detuned guitar owes it something, including bands who would not name it. Nottingham and Birmingham kept going in the same direction through the early nineties with Pitchshifter and with Scorn, the second of which was two thirds of a Napalm Death rhythm section making music with no guitars in it at all. English extreme metal spent that decade dismantling itself on purpose while Florida was still perfecting one sound.
The one with no drummer at all
The Berzerker started in Melbourne in 1995 around Luke Kenny, who had drummed in local bands and stopped playing after injuries from a road accident. He programmed instead. Earache signed the project when it was one man with a computer, and the self titled album that came out in 2000 has no human percussion on it anywhere. What it has instead is the distorted kick drum of gabber, a Dutch dance music built on exactly the same principle of overload, played at a tempo no arm could hold. Speedcore rhythm, death metal guitars, and a vocal that sounds like it was recorded through the same distortion as everything else. It should be a novelty. It is not, and twenty six years on it still empties a room faster than anything else in the catalogue.
Norway, and what became of the idea
Zyklon came together in 1998 out of the Norwegian black metal scene, with Samoth and Trym from Emperor joined by players from Myrkskog and Limbonic Art, and Candlelight released World ov Worms in 2001: death metal built with black metal hands and finished with a mechanical sheen that made everything sound assembled rather than performed. Red Harvest went further into the electronics from the same country, The Amenta did it from Australia, and the idea leaked sideways into black metal through Samael, Aborym and later Anaal Nathrakh, who put a programmed kit under a blackened death metal band and never explained themselves. The full family arrangement, with every branch given its border, is set out in the wider story.
Here is the verdict, and it is an odd one. Industrial death metal won by disappearing. Almost every death metal record made in the last fifteen years is edited to a grid, sample reinforced, and cut to a click, which means the machine argument was settled in the machine's favour and then nobody mentioned it again. The bands that still carry the label are the ones who make the machinery audible on purpose rather than hiding it under a kit. Everyone else just uses it. If you want the other direction the genre went when it wanted speed rather than weight, that is what Is Deathgrind.
