KMFDM’s mix of subversive political humour, modernist cover art and, of course, pounding club jams helped propel the group, as well as industrial music, into the mainstream. It wasn’t long after the project’s inception in 1984 that German-born artist Sascha Konietzko started honing a style of industrial dance music (christened “ultra-heavy beat” in interviews) that marries the gut punch of hard rock with the beats and sampling of hip-hop. Thanks to his long-running collaboration with multi-instrumentalist En Esch, Konietzko fully realised the sound on Wax Trax!-released club hits like 1995’s “Juke-Joint Jezebel” and 1997’s “Megalomaniac” that ingeniously tap the ecstatic energy of rave culture. Even when KMFDM plunge into apocalyptic industrial metal—a sound introduced on 1993’s Angst and revisited on a string of albums released well into the 21st century—they always sound like they’re throwing a dance party at the end of the world.