Industrial Pop

Industrial pop is the strand of industrial music written to pop formats: verse-and-chorus songs, melodic hooks and danceable beats carrying the machinery of the industrial aesthetic — sampled metal, distorted synthesizers, tape noise and transgressive imagery. It crystallised around 1980 on the fringes of the British and German industrial scenes, when acts on #Mute# and kindred labels compressed noise technique into three-minute singles, and it reached its commercial peak as industrial techniques entered mainstream alternative pop in the 1990s. A 2010s revival by solo pop auteurs re-established the term for abrasive, machine-driven pop songwriting.