15. Skinny Puppy | "Assimilate"

"Assimilate" by Skinny Puppy from the album Bites (1985)

Goth and industrial go together like clove smoke and bad poetry about hating our parents. (Or was it loving our nightmares?) But opening the floodgates for the inclusion of industrial bands — Combichrist, KMFDM, their lot — on this list would’ve plunged us down a slippery slope that ended with one of the old-school ManRay people punching me in the face for suggesting Marilyn Manson be in the Top 10. However, we deemed the somehow-still-futuristic pulse of Skinny Puppy’s 1985 opening salvo proto-industrial enough to sneak into gothdom. Though synth player Dwayne Goettel shuffled loose the mortal coil in the mid-’90s, Skinny Puppy reincarnated themselves with 2004’s The Greater Wrong of the Right. Another fresh creation, HanDover, manifests right around the time of this issue’s publication.
 Barry Thompson