Industrial Metal
1989
The hellish album cover, adapted from one of William Hurt’s hallucinatory visions in the 1980 film Altered States, is perfectly apropos for the sonic pulverizer that is Streetcleaner. At a time when metal records focused on speedy riffs, tight drumming and technical precision, Godflesh’s debut was a complete outlier.
The guitars crawl at a glacial pace, with pinch harmonics and steel picks frequently employed to create a scraping, dissonant rhythm that could cut glass. There’s no drummer, just an Alesis HR-616 drum machine providing a steady throb of percussion that adds to the cold, mechanical feel of the record.
