Fear Factory

Fear Factory were among the earliest disciples to preach industrial metal’s dystopian gospel to the headbanging masses. Though the Los Angelenos began life as a death-metal act in 1989, they grew by leaps and bounds before churning out a trio of records—1992’s Soul of a New Machine, 1995’s Demanufacture, and 1998’s Obsolete—that fully integrated cyberpunk electronics and mechanized riffage into their bulldozing grooves. Pushing them over the top was the singular Burton C. Bell, one of the first heavy-metal screamers to shift between hellish growls and clean vocals. By the late ’90s, a growing number of nu-metal, alt-metal, and metalcore acts were pulling ideas from the group’s innovatively futuristic sound. It’s an impressive accomplishment, considering Fear Factory have remained a bona fide cult act, their only modern-rock hit being a cover of Gary Numan’s New Wave classic “Cars” released in 1999. Since the turn of the century, they’ve battled through personnel changes and temporary breakups to deliver albums like 2012’s The Industrialist and 2021’s Aggression Continuum that further digitize their suffocating vision of our modern technological society.