How to Write Industrial And Post-Industrial Lyrics

You want your words to sound like machinery waking up under a rain of glass. You want language that is brutal and poetic at the same time. You want lyrics that bruise the listener and open a weird little wound that plays on repeat. Industrial and post industrial music are about texture, machinery, politics, ritual, and the body in a grinding world. This guide gives you tactics, imagery banks, stylistic templates, and exercises to write lyrics that feel authentic to the scene and also terrifyingly catchy.

Everything here is written for artists who want to work faster and sound smarter. You will find mindset choices, persona templates, writing devices, real life scenarios for images, and edits that make gritty words sing. I will explain any acronym I drop so you do not have to guess. Expect blunt examples, messy honesty, and the occasional bad joke that sounds like it belongs in a machine shop.

What Is Industrial And What Is Post Industrial

Industrial music started as an experimental reaction to both rock and pop. It often mixes noise, mechanical percussion, electronic processing, and confrontational performance. Bands used found sounds, factory noise, and aggressive electronics to make music that felt like a factory floor or a dystopian announcement. Post industrial expands the palette. It borrows from ambient, dark electronic, industrial rock, experimental noise, and often places the human subject back into the mechanism. Post industrial can be more melodic. Post industrial can be more conceptual. Both share a focus on texture and atmosphere.

Key terms you should know

• EBM. Stands for Electronic Body Music. This is a dance friendly cousin of industrial. Think pounding club beats with stern vocals and military rhythm. EBM is built to make a body move in a stern way.
• Noise. Unmusical or atonal material used for effect. Noise can be abrasive, harsh, or subtle depending on how it is used.
• Found sound. Any recorded sound that is not a traditional instrument. A pneumatic drill, a kettle, a page turn. These are used as rhythmic or textural elements.
• Field recording. A recording made outside the studio, often of real environments like factories, streets, hospitals, or public transit.

Think of industrial lyrics as the thing you write when your commute feels like a ritual and your office is a factory of expectation. Think of post industrial lyrics as the thing you write when you notice the human cost of that factory and decide to write a memory into the noise.

Core Themes To Tap Into

Industrial content lives in a handful of recurring emotional wells. You do not need to reinvent the wheel. You need to pick a truth and interrogate it with fresh images and precise verbs.

Machinery And Rust

Factory imagery is obvious and useful. Use it honestly. Do not reach for techno romanticism. Describe the smell of oil on a palm. Describe the way an access panel vibrates at three rotations per minute. Small details make the scene real. Real life scenario. Imagine you are a security guard at midnight. The plant is breathing in the dark. You name the machines like old relatives and list the ways they will outlive you.

Urban Decay And Infrastructure

Trains, overpasses, condemned stores, and flickering streetlights are great metaphors for abandonment and memory. The line is not original. Make it original by placing a tiny action inside the scene. The protagonist licks a rusted coin and decides it tastes like the last decade.

Surveillance And Corporate Voice

Corporate language reads like ritual in industrial lyric writing. Use memos, instruction manuals, and safety warnings as lyric fodder. A real world scenario. You find a laminated safety card in an alley and decide to read it aloud to the beat. That is a chorus idea.

Body As Machine

Wounds, implants, prosthetics, and the voice as a tool combine the human and the machine. Make the body feel mechanical without losing tenderness. Show the small human gesture inside the cold shell. Example. A repaired hand that remembers the smell of a lover even when grease covers the scar.

Ritual And Cult Like Structures

Industrial often borrows religious form. Repetition, chanting, and ritual cadence work. Use ritual to make mundane industrial life feel sacred or to critique power. Picture a night shift that reads like a liturgy. Each instruction is recited with a flourish like confession.

Choosing A Persona For Your Lyrics

Personas in industrial scenes are half performance and half witness. Choosing the right voice will give the lyric a spine.

The Operator

First person, pragmatic, precise. The operator gives you step by step actions and the sensory detail of labor. Use short sentences and technical terms. This persona is great for verses because it grounds the song.

The Corporate Announcer

Third person or impersonal first person. Speaks like a memo. Use passive voice intentionally. This is the voice of policy and propaganda. It can be used for chorus or bridge to create irony when the lyric contrasts with private confession.

The Broken Automaton

Fragmented phrasing and repetition. This voice is great for chorus or hook because it can chant a simple machine truth that becomes earworm. It can be literal or symbolic.

The Witness

A human who sees the aftermath. This persona holds memory and grief. Use longer sentences occasionally. This voice makes songs feel emotional while still anchored in industrial imagery.

Language And Rhetorical Devices That Work

Industrial lyrics love texture in language. The goal is not just clever wordplay. The goal is to make the words feel like they belong in the soundscape. Here are reliable devices and how to use them.

Found Text Sampling As Lyric Tool

Steal from manuals, safety labels, product copy, and city notices. Use one line verbatim as a hook and then turn it against itself. Real life scenario. You pull a vending machine instruction and use it as a chorus that becomes a love vow in reverse.

Repetition And Mantra

Repeat a line until the words become ritual. This works well for a chorus or post chorus because repetition becomes physical in industrial music. Keep the repeated line short and change one word on the final pass to land an emotional twist.

Concrete Sensory Detail

Specifics beat abstractions every time. Swap a vague word like sorrow for a thing you can taste, smell, or touch. The sound of a crowbar on a grate. The way a fluorescent light hums forty three times per minute. Concrete details plant the listener in a scene quickly.

Corporate Jargon As Irony

Corporate speech can be sung like a daemon. Use it to critique the system from inside its grammar. Example. Turn a company mission statement into a death march chorus by changing the context and the delivery.

Onomatopoeia And Noise Words

Use clicks, clanks, hisses, and static spelled out as words. These give your phrasing percussion and can double as rhythm. Example. A line that goes click click stop click can be a percussive vocal element when delivered with a beat.

Neologisms And Portmanteau

Create a few mash up words that feel like found tech terms. Be careful. Too many and you sound like a marketing executive. One or two well placed new words can give the world a lived in feel.

Rhyme, Meter, And Prosody For Industrial Lyrics

Industrial lyric delivery is often about rhythm more than melodic sweep. Matching words to the pulse of the drums makes the lyric sit in the mix. Use prosody to make your lines feel natural and mechanical at the same time.

Staccato Lines And Short Phrases

Short hard lines work like bolts. They land cleanly and give space for noise to breathe. Use them for hooks and for making commands feel like commands.

Long Drone Lines For Atmosphere

Long, sustained phrases work when the instrumentation is droning. These lines let the vocal become another texture. Stretch vowels and choose open vowel sounds that can sit over a pad.

Syncopation And Breath Placement

Place breaths like rests in percussive music. They are as important as words. If a strong word falls on a weak beat you will feel friction. Move the word or the beat until they agree. Record yourself speaking the line at conversation speed and mark the stresses. Those stresses should hit musical accents.

Rhyme That Feels Intentional

Industrial lyrics avoid sing song rhyming unless you are using it knowingly. Use internal rhyme, slant rhyme, and occasional perfect rhyme at the emotional pivot. Rhyme should support sonic texture rather than sell sentiment.

Imagery Bank You Can Steal Tonight

Here is a raw list of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and small phrases you can mix into a lyric immediately. Treat this like a fridge magnet set. Push words together and see what sounds righteous.

Nouns

• conveyor
• control room
• fluorescent bulb
• circuit board
• weld seam
• steel toe
• security badge
• acid rain
• outfall
• pallet
• service elevator
• inspection log
• transmission
• airlock
• catalyst

Verbs

• corrode
• index
• seal
• calibrate
• shudder
• stitch
• eject
• trace
• scrape
• annotate

Adjectives And Small Phrases

• oil slick
• frost bitter
• cavity bright
• approved color
• sterile hum
• authorized access
• last shift
• glare of monitors
• untested sequel
• molar memory

Mix a noun, a verb, and an adjective and you have a seed line. Example. The service elevator shudders, oil slick, last shift. Tidy that into a line that sings and you are moving.

Found Sound And Sample Based Lyrics

Samples are an obvious companion to industrial songs. You can use samples as text, as texture, or both. Here is how to use them responsibly and creatively.

Using Found Text As Lyrics

Take text from safety cards, instruction manuals, and public announcements. Use one line verbatim and build your lyric around it. Change the emotional direction by delivery. If you sing a building evacuation announcement like a lullaby, listeners will feel the wrongness immediately.

Legal Quick Notes

I am not a lawyer. Clearing samples is the safest path if you plan to release commercially. Public domain sources are free to use. Field recordings you make are yours unless they contain copyrighted music. If you sample a spoken memo from a company that is not public domain, either clear it or recreate the line yourself and process it to sound like a found tape.

Creative Techniques

• Pitch shift speech to create robotic chant.
• Chop phrases into granular fragments and use them as percussive elements.
• Layer an instruction line under a sung chorus to create tension.
• Process recorded ambient noise through a gated reverb to make it rhythmic.

Editing Your Lyrics For Maximum Impact

Industrial songs trade in precision. Long windy lines rarely survive this world. Use a strict edit pass to sharpen every image.

1. Delete vague nouns. Replace a word like pain with a concrete object or action.
2. Shorten commands and axioms. Commands should sound like commands. Make them brief and percussive.
3. Limit the jargon. One or two technical words add authenticity. More than that looks like you purchased a manual for lyrical inspiration. Be deliberate.
4. Mark the chorus anchor. The chorus should have a repeated phrase or an instruction that the listener can remember after one listen.

Real life scenario. You remove a line that explains the theme and replace it with a small object that implies the theme. The song becomes smarter by saying less.

Practical Writing Exercises

These are timed drills that produce usable lines and hooks fast. Set a timer and do them.

Ten Minute Machine Log

Write as if you are the log for a piece of equipment. Ten minutes. Use dates, times, sensor readouts, and one human memory that leaks into the log. Make one sentence weird and human.

Found Notice Remix

Find a public notice or a manual online. Copy one sentence. For five minutes, write three ways that sentence could be love. For five minutes after that, write three ways it could be a threat. Pick the best line from each pile and combine them into a chorus.

Field Recording Haiku

Take a ten second field recording of a street or an alley. Listen and write one three line haiku that captures the recording. Focus on sensory detail and personification.

Operator Monologue

Write a two minute stream of consciousness from an operator on night shift. Include one secret and one routine. Keep the language mostly short and direct.

Case Studies And Models You Can Learn From

We will not copy lyrics verbatim here. Instead I will describe what makes examples work so you can borrow the technique not the text.

Nine Inch Nails Style

Technique. Mix personal confession with industrial imagery and direct address. Use ring phrases that repeat with slight variation. The contrast between intimacy and machine language sells the shock. How to model it. Place a private confession at the end of a verse and then answer it with an instruction style chorus.

Einsturzende Neubauten Style

Technique. Use literal industrial percussion and found sounds as structural elements. Lyrics can be fragmented and tied to physical actions. How to model it. Write lines that describe a specific object being used in a ritual then turn that ritual into a metaphor for a memory.

Skinny Puppy Style

Technique. Use collage, samples, and jagged edits. Lyrics often suggest a paranoid inner world. How to model it. Collage short imperatives, machine noises spelled out as words, and iterator style repetition to create claustrophobia.

Working With Producers And Live Performance Tips

Lyrics are only half the job. In industrial music, delivery and processing are essential. Communicate with producers like you are issuing technical spec. Be both specific and open to sonic play.

Communication Tips

• Bring reference tracks. Point to the exact moment the vocal behaves how you want it to behave.
• Describe your vocal not just with adjectives. Use physical images. Say I want the vocal to sound like it was sung through a locker door rather than I want it to be gritty.
• Offer choices. Say keep this line dry or send this line into a pitch shift for the second pass.

Live Performance Notes

Industrial shows lean on atmosphere. Use staging, light, and tactile props sparingly but with intention. A single well timed noise sample or a piece of smashed glass on stage can carry more meaning than complex visuals. If you plan to scream, practice alternate techniques that preserve the voice. The music world is small and losing your voice is a career problem.

Common Mistakes And How To Fix Them

• Too literal. Fix by zooming into a private detail that implies the larger truth. One small action beats an angry paragraph.
• Overusing technical terms. Fix by choosing one anchor term and making it do the heavy lifting emotionally.
• Sounding like a press release. Fix by adding a human slip or an accidental image that undermines the corporate voice.
• Chorus that does not land. Fix with repetition, a short command, or a found line that the listener can repeat.
• No breathing spaces. Fix by inserting rests and short percussive words so the production can breathe around the vocal.

Advanced Moves For Concept And Album Writing

If you want to build a larger world, think like a curator. Create artifacts. A fictional operation manual, a set of public notices from a ruined city, and a journal from a worker will give you material that you can reuse across songs.

World building tip. Keep a single contradiction in your world. Maybe the city worships productivity and hides a ritual of silence. That contradiction becomes your narrative engine and keeps songs connected without needing a linear story.

Action Plan You Can Use Tonight

1. Pick one persona from this guide. Write a one paragraph backstory for that persona in plain language.
2. Do the Ten Minute Machine Log exercise with a timer. Capture one image you want to return to.
3. Choose one line from your log and make it the chorus anchor. Repeat it three times with a one word change on the last repeat.
4. Replace every abstract word in your chorus with a specific object or action.
5. Record a raw voice memo of you speaking the chorus at conversation speed. Mark natural stresses and align them with a simple drum loop.
6. Play the demo for one person who is not in your band. Ask them one question. What did you feel? Use that answer to refine the final line of your chorus.

FAQ

What makes a good industrial lyric

A good industrial lyric pairs specific sensory detail with a strong persona and a repeatable anchor. It uses found text and machine imagery sparingly and with intent. The vocal should become another texture in the production rather than just telling the listener what to feel.

Can I write industrial lyrics if I am not political

Yes. Industrial music often examines power and systems. You can write about internal systems like memory, addiction, and habit without making a political manifesto. The important thing is honesty. If your lyric reads like a sermon you do not believe in, it will not land.

How do I make my chorus memorable in a noise heavy track

Keep the chorus short and repeatable. Use one line that can be chanted or sampled. Contrast the chorus delivery with the verse by changing range or by sending the chorus through a different vocal treatment. Repetition is your friend.

Should I use technical terms to sound authentic

Use a few technical terms as texture. Too many will read as fan service. Pick one meaningful term and let it resonate. Always prefer a human detail over an encyclopedia entry.

How do I stop sounding derivative

Derivative lyrics often mimic surface images. Avoid copying famous lines. Instead lean into a private detail from your life. Swap the cliché for a particular object. That single honest detail will make the song feel new.

Get Contact Details of Music Industry Gatekeepers

Looking for an A&R, Manager or Record Label to skyrocket your music career?

Don’t wait to be discovered, take full control of your music career. Get access to the contact details of the gatekeepers of the music industry. We're talking email addresses, contact numbers, social media...

Packed with contact details for over 3,000 of the top Music Managers, A&Rs, Booking Agents & Record Label Executives.

Get exclusive access today, take control of your music journey and skyrocket your music career.

Unlock Instant Access