Fear Factory

California's Fear Factory formed in 1989 and over the course of the 1990s became hugely influential, blazing a path for turn-of-the-millennium alternative metal like Korn and Deftones. Originally playing a brutal take on death metal that verged on grindcore – death metal growls, contrasted with clean vocals, remained a key element of their sound – they began a lifetime flirt with industrial aesthetics on their 1992 debut Soul of a New Machine. Noisy samples and the mechanically precise playing of drummer Raymond Herrera defined their sound in the years that followed; by the end of the 1990s they had released two albums and played alongside Black Sabbath, Slayer, Iron Maiden and Megadeth. Fear Factory split up in 2006; a new version of the lineup was formed in 2009, and after a series of personnel rotations, the sole original member left in the band is guitarist Dino Cazares. A total of ten albums have been released under the Fear Factory banner, the latest of which is 2021's Aggression Continuum.