Industrial is an experimental musical direction that arose in the late 1970s and deliberately broke the boundaries of traditional music. Its creators turned to the sounds of factories and machines, metallic clatter, noise, distorted electronics, and tape loops in order to recreate the cold aesthetic of an industrial, mechanised civilisation.
At the sources of the genre stood the groups Throbbing Gristle and Einstürzende Neubauten, who combined music with provocative performance. Later, industrial evolved into more danceable and melodic forms — industrial rock and industrial metal (Ministry, Nine Inch Nails) — that won broad popularity. Industrial expanded the very notion of what music can be, proving that any sound, even the noise of a machine, can become artistic material.
