NovaFuture Blog

out for a while: Front 242 – Headhunter (40 Years Of PIAS Anniversary Re-issue) [PIAS]

Artist:
Front 242

Title:
Headhunter

Label:
PIAS

Cat#:
RRET6DA

Release Date:
12th September 1988 (original release date)
December 2022 (40 Years Of PIAS Anniversary Re-issue)

Format:
vinyl, download & streaming

Tracklist:
01.
Headhunter
(V1.0)

02.
Welcome To Paradise
(V1.0)

Press Info:
EBM is a real time bomb. A time bomb because this sound will continue to influence a lot of other groups in the years that follow. It’s an important album in the discography of the founding fathers of EBM. A cult album in the evolution of electro music. These precursors created a new genre which they themselves baptized “Electronic Body Music”: a set of sounds, collages and extracts gleaned here and there, dynamized by intense vocal parts. Front 242 creates its own path and then lays the foundations of industrial electronic music. A development of rhythms which will be resampled in turn by a number of eurobeat or technoid bands afterwards.

For Einstuerzende Neubauten, it was ‘Haus der Lüge’, for Depeche Mode, it was ‘Music for the masses’ and for the Cure, it was ‘Head on the door’, i.e. the moment when an honest album reveals itself to a wider audience and yet another group with an already solid reputation. This passage is called ‘Front by Front’ for Front 242. His shocking weapon? A hit called ‘Headhunter’ served by a magnificent video, signed off by the photographer and director Anton Corbijn. Boosted by the success of the single “Headhunter” which remains their most famous title to this day, Front 242 finally emerged from the shadows. So, we have here a very avant-garde album for its time, in the electro/cold-wave vein with personal elements which constitute the real hallmark of Front 242. An album of consecration, Front by Front is also the most accessible of popes of the EBM.

Without Front by Front, there would never have been Nine Inch Nails, the team of 4 from Aarschot will thus have delivered a rhythmic and dancing album. Perhaps their best album!!!

Snippets: