Noise rock

Noise rock is a style of rock music that became prominent in the 1980s. Noise rock makes use of the traditional instrumentation and iconography of rock, but incorporates atonality and especially dissonance, and frequently discards typical songwriting conventions. Noise rock developed from early avant-garde music, sound art, and rock songs featuring extremely dissonant sounds and electronic feedback. The New York no wave scene, featuring such artists as Mars and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks in the late 1970s, was an essential development in noise rock. A number of noise rock bands emerged in North America in the 1980s. These included Caroliner, and Grotus (San Francisco), Big Black (Chicago), Butthole Surfers,The Jesus Lizard,Scratch Acid (Texas), The Melvins (Montesano, Washington), Dinosaur Jr. (Massachusetts), Sonic Youth,Live Skull, Swans,White Zombie, The Thing, Blow 454 and Helmet (New York), Pussy Galore and Royal Trux (Washington DC), among many others.

A similar scene also began to develop in Osaka, Japan, spearheaded by Hanatarash and the Boredoms, The British shoegazing groups developed an entirely distinct form of noise rock, largely derived from the so-called noise pop related genre. Some math rock groups like Don Caballero are also considered noise rock. The '80s noise rock bands were significant influences on Nirvana and Hole, The powerviolence scene was close to noise rock, with Man Is the Bastard eventually dissolving into unstructured noise music.