#prong

4:24 PM EDT May 29, 2026:

Prong - "Banned In DC" From the album Songs From The Black Hole (March 31, 2015)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm

Killing Joke: Killing Joke (1980)

Much as I love any music that's provocative, challenging, and hard-to-pigeonhole, Killing Joke is one of the bands that got away; I never got around to collecting their albums (in part because they weren't always available in Brazil) and I'm too old to start now!

But I absolutely love a song or three from each of their LPs, the first of which arrived almost 45 years ago to a pretty tepid critical and popular reception, only to be retroactively worshipped for its innovation and influence, a few years later.

As you can probably guess, my first introduction to Killing Joke came through Metallica, when they covered this album's creepy, cryptic, and apocalyptic "The Wait" on 1987's $5.98 E.P. -- Garage Days Re-Revisited.

What the original version lacks in heaviness, it easily compensates for in the clinical, controlled intensity conveyed by Kevin 'Geordie' Walker's tight guitar and Paul Ferguson's mechanical drums, which of course influenced so many industrial bands still to come.

Come to think of it, a lot of Killing Joke's "humanity" emanates from Martin 'Youth' Glover's distorted bass heartbeat (see "Tomorrow's World" and "Primitive") and Jaz Coleman's pulsing keyboard effects (most elaborate on the instrumental "Bloodsport").

Coleman also tests a variety of vocal styles, ranging from the corrosive croaks of "Wardance to the cold detachment of "S.O. 36" and the oft-covered "Requiem" (Godflesh, Foo Fighters, etc.), to the clean melodies of the shockingly catchy "Complications."

Obviously, there's a lot going on here considering there are just eight songs amounting to barely more than half an hour, and maybe that's why the album feels like a highly unstable radioactive isotope, dangerously close to meltdown.

In many ways, Killing Joke wasn't a unified musical collective so much as a tenuous truce among four mavericks -- each committed to his own anarchic agenda, which just so happened to coalesce into a semi-consistent but combustible musical molotov cocktail.

That same rebellious spirit and obstinate confidence in their personal visions led the band to produce this first album (and their second) themselves, with technical support from engineer Phil Harding, but minimal fixes or overdubs along the way.

And it's another reason why, like many groundbreaking works, Killing Joke's debut was widely misunderstood upon release before proving its far-reaching impact on a multitude of divergent bands and music genres, including the aforementioned metal-heads in Metallica.

Thanks to them and other inspired peers, a lot of us who might have never looked into this band of volatile history and persistent mystery were at least exposed to their indefinable sounds over these past many years.

p.s. -- Even the LP's artwork courted controversy with a photo of young rioters fleeing from tear gas released by the British Army during the Troubles in Derry, Northern Ireland, site of the infamous Bloody Sunday massacre.