Does anything have more promise than industrial music and yet so little to show for it? We could be asking this question in 1995 or 2025, but the genre and its offshoots seldom deliver anything worthwhile. The worst offender is industrial metal, which has produced nothing notable since Ministry and Godflesh. Innovations at the other end of the spectrum ended up creating the crap we now know as Neue Deutsche Härte. EBM is not much better. It’s an insult to Nine Inch Nails to pigeonhole them into this ecosystem. Which means, Virginian duo, Digital Negative, already start on the wrong foot for this reviewer to be impressed by the third EP of their career. Maybe that’s why it feels like a triumph.
Unlike the industrial noise abstractions that dominate the contemporary scene, Digital Negative take a different approach – they know and understand electronic music. The beats swerve like a cyborg aerobics session in opener, ‘Extensions’, as machine impact sounds combine in perfect unison. This is how you build an industrial beat with multiple samples. Most of their contemporaries are shapeless and enamoured with noise, but this is different. Listen to the droplets of bass scoop up from the floor. Vocalist Richard Johnson could easily be leading a platoon of anti-capitalist agitators on a raid of Wall Street. Those that admire the vision of Einstürzende Neubauten will nod their head in appreciation.
Whereas Neue Deutsche Härte and EBM embraced trance, Digital Negative go back to a different scene in the late 1990s. ‘Growth’ reminds us how to use glitch effects for big beat rhythms (e.g., The Prodigy). Listen to the pulse of the single note bass as Richard Johnson snarls his words like a vengeful scientist disowned by his peers. Here, bass drums and sampled collision effects weave in and out like blood building up in clotted arteries. In this duo’s world view, the market economy is nobody’s friend: “The invisible hand is a clenching fist, a solution that generates its own problem.”
The intrusion of metallic textures should enhance this music, but Digital Negative are wise enough to see that the imaginative machine thumps and 1990s’ synth presets can maximise the aggro on their own. ‘Oligarchy’ presents the first sign of a fuzzed-out guitar played like a syncopated metal riff, but you can hear the Skinny Puppy influence. Here, kick drums vibrate like drills perforating through steel as a square bass tone squirms underneath.
This type of electro music looked like it would break through into the mainstream in the early 2000s. The amount of audio engineering that goes into this should not be underestimated. English artists like Propellerheads and The Chemical Brothers were doing this in the late 1990s, but not with this level of industrial brutality. Observe how the beats form a jagged groove like an automaton waiting to crush a conveyor belt of sentient creatures in closing track, ‘Trapped’. “Nostalgia for something that never existed is like stuffing your head in a multi-core meat processor,” declares Richard Johnson. He’s not wrong.
JVB
Verdict
Release Date: 11/07/2025
Record Label: Self-released
Standout tracks: Extensions; Oligarchy
Suggested Further Listening: Einstürzende Neubauten – Tabula Rasa (1993) Netherlands – Severance (2023), Four Stroke Baron – Data Diamond (2024)