The noise comes out of nowhere, panning in from left to right, before stopping abruptly and giving you a split second's silence in which to ask yourself:
What in the holy name of fuck was that sound?
The unidentifiable rasping comes back. Twice. A few more times. You lose count. After a few more hits of this precisely clipped burst of some unknown sound (perhaps a guitar, digitally mangled beyond recognition a la Chemlab or Ministry in their salad days?) things turn truly nasty, with a layer of bitcrushed feedback joining the fray. You clock the track title: "Chainsaw". Oh right, you think. That makes sense. You're on comfortably familiar ground here, an industrial band naming their songs after the power tools whose sound they most closely resemble.
Don't get too comfortable. The vocals are about to kick in.
"HEY BABY."
The rasping continues.
"I SAID HEY, BABY."
We are less than a minute into HIDE's sophomore album Hell Is Here (2019) and already all bets on exactly what kind of album we're in for are off.
"YOU'RE TOO GOOD FOR ME, BITCH?"
It dawns on the (male) listener at this stage that this song is meant to be a harrowing taste of what it's like to be sexually harassed by a stranger in public. To compound the psychic overload, it ends on the sound of vocalist Heather Gabel heaving their guts out, seemingly overwhelmed and nauseated from roleplaying the aggressor. And then, well, then there's the video:
Cards on the table: n0teeth is happy to stake our global reputation as the internet's number one source for informed opinions on industrial music on the claim that HIDE is one of the least cliched industrial bands to come along since the cliches were first established. Bucking just about every trend or preconception, it's this wildly heterogeneous approach that has set them apart from some of their equally aggressive & intense but nowhere near as sonically diverse contemporaries.
You might argue that it does HIDE a disservice to pigeonhole them so firmly and confidently as An Industrial Band, but hear me out.
Both members of the Chicago duo are resolutely original, experimental and forward thinking in their respective approaches, and this, paradoxically, is what makes them fit the "industrial" tag to a T. "pure" industrial music has never existed. It's a contradiction in terms. There is nothing "pure" about any of the genre's greatest exponents. HIDE may at times hit you with a thumping great EBM beat here, a vicious blast of power electronics there, or tease a liminal Ministry moment before plunging into a pool of the darkest dark ambient, but everything HIDE does sounds like it was discovered through organic experimentation, rather than reverse-engineered from anyone's expectation of what an industrial band (from Chicago, no less) should sound like.
(If you've read this far, you probably don't need telling that yes, some of us do in fact listen to this kind of music for fun!)
n0teeth isn't terribly well clued up on that "punk rock" music the kids are into (it's not electronic and you can't drop pingers to it) but we're gonna take a wild stab in the dark here about Heather Gabel's background in punk and hardcore informing their lyrics and attitude. As with many other industrial and industrial-adjacent acts, sheer Horror abounds, but rather than simply staring blankly at The Horror and reporting it back to the listener with the deadpan of Bliss Blood or the outright clinical detachment of Throbbing Gristle, Heather sounds genuinely enraged and distraught at what they've seen and experienced. That's how it works in punk, I think? Sounding like you mean it, man. Heather can't let The Horror simply parade past them and comes off just a touch more engaged and passionate than Ogre spitting his disgust at the state of the world, let alone Genesis P-Orridge describing a murder as as "just a bit more information". Without a background in media studies n0teeth may well be talking out of our arse here but it's possible that the well-worn industrial music trope of mutely taking in The Horror and dispassionately describing what you see no longer flies in an age when our planet's days are numbered, and allowing The Horror to get to you, allowing it to provoke a reaction that you then record in the hopes of your audience letting it get to them in turn, is the only sane and appropriate response by now.
Of course, if I was only in it for the message and didn't care if the music was anodyne indie rock, I could just as happily be sat here listening to the Manic Street Preachers, but fortunately the lyrical and vocal venom of Heather Gabel meets its match in the musical inventiveness and extremity of Seth Sher. Still on Hell Is Here we have the left-right-quick-march of Trash 1/2, a mutant technoid stomper that could almost be a beefed-up Syncom Data or Consumer Electronics joint. Going back to HIDE's 2017 debut album Castration Anxiety we have 5 minutes of punishing beats and juddering bass in Fucked (I Found Heaven) where if my (admittedly fairly war-weary) ears don't deceive me a horribly detuned old school UK rave horn enters play around halfway through, bent and manipulated out of shape to greatly unnerving effect, not a million miles from the violins imitating sirens in Midsommar when the fire brigade arrives at the scene of Dani's sister's murder-suicide.
I could drone on and on, but out of respect for HIDE's knack for keeping it short and sweet, I leave you with Nightmare (less than a minute of faintly Nitzerish sheet metal slamming kick drum) and the strong recommendation that any London heads who didn't manage to get tickets for their Assembly Hall show with Lingua Ignota get yourselves to the Waiting Room (a favourite n0teeth haunt, as I may have mentioned in passing once or twice) the following evening:
