AESTHETICS EMERGE EVEN WHEN ARTISTS BELIEVE THEIR WORK TO BE A MEANS to an end, rather than an end unto itself. In the first half of the 1980s, while industrial music retained the power to express informational struggles of the urban west (as it still does today), new audiences gave new contexts and meanings to the genre. The music’s sound and stylistic features thus became the shared commonality among fans and among makers around the world. As a sonic negotiation of what industrial music would be, this era can be understood as the genre’s first real engagement with its own aesthetics.