Revolting Cocks - No Devotion / You Often Forget

Before industrial rock became a major-label phenomenon, Revolting Cocks were already turning dance floors into wonderfully disreputable places. No Devotion / You Often Forget brings together two early examples of the band's sleazy, mechanical approach to electronic music, capturing the Wax Trax! era when industrial, EBM, and alternative dance music were beginning to collide.

Formed in 1985 by Al Jourgensen, Luc Van Acker, and Richard 23 of Front 242, Revolting Cocks emerged from the same transatlantic network that helped establish Chicago's Wax Trax! Records as a center of industrial music. While Jourgensen's Ministry was becoming increasingly aggressive, Revolting Cocks offered an outlet for something more irreverent, mixing programmed rhythms, distorted vocals, abrasive electronics, and an almost gleeful disregard for good taste.

“No Devotion” captures the group's early sound in all its stripped-down, dance-floor-oriented glory. Built around insistent electronic percussion, repetitive bass patterns, and confrontational vocals, it reflects the influence of European EBM while introducing the unruly personality that would become a Revolting Cocks trademark.

“You Often Forget” pushes that approach further, combining a relentless mechanical groove with warped vocal treatments and an atmosphere that is equal parts menacing and absurd. Its combination of industrial textures and club-ready rhythms demonstrates why the band became such an important part of the emerging American industrial scene.

These recordings belong to a period when the boundaries between industrial music, synth-pop, electronic body music, and underground dance culture were still remarkably fluid. Revolting Cocks embraced that freedom, borrowing the precision of European electronic music and filtering it through the chaotic energy of the Chicago alternative scene.

The result was a sound that could be genuinely abrasive without sacrificing its sense of rhythm or humor. That tension between discipline and disorder would become central to the band's identity, eventually informing albums such as Big Sexy Land and Beers, Steers + Queers.

Raw, provocative, and built around irresistible mechanical grooves, No Devotion / You Often Forget revisits the early Revolting Cocks at their most direct, before industrial rock became a recognizable mainstream genre.