Godflesh

Extremely pulverizing industrial music band that borrowed from SPK, The Stranglers, punk and speedmetal to co-found grindcore with Napalm Death. Lead singer Justin Broadrick screams out lyrics about rage, pain, alienation, social consciousness, and loads of other good things on top of a surgically-precise drum machine and a thundering bass that has to be felt to be believed.

Evolving from the reasonably seminal noise rock band Head of David and the death metal/grind act Napalm Death, Godflesh is an industrial tinged metal band which has essentially spawned its own sub-genre of machine driven metal. At its core, the sound is mechanical drum machine beats overlaid with ultra tuned down bass and guitar and interspersed with death metal style vocal work. Strong use of reverb and pitch shift as well as sampling gives the band a distinctive sound that has since been emulated by numerous other acts including Pitch Shifter, Soul Storm, Crawl and others. Strong overtones of doom metal as well as Big Black style harmonics add to the hypnotic concoction and mark the act has one of the more notable metal bands of the last 20 years. Although it does share common elements, this should not be confused with being industrial music since it basically guitar driven death metal using drum machine for the rhythm section. The most distinctive album is their second, Streetcleaner which firmly hammers stakes around the band's pummeling sonic payload. Later albums veered away somewhat from the dense low-end grind that made the band distinctive, instead incorporating elements of dance music and sounding more like hard rock than bone crushing industrial metal.