Until Nine Inch Nails crossed over to the mainstream, Ministry did more than any other band to popularize industrial dance music, injecting large doses of punky, over-the-top aggression and roaring heavy metal guitar riffs that helped their music find favor with metal and alternative audiences outside of industrial's cult fan base. That's not to say Ministry had a commercial or generally accessible sound: they were unremittingly intense, abrasive, pounding, and repetitive, and not always guitar-oriented (samples, synthesizers, and tape effects were a primary focus just as often as guitars and distorted vocals). However, both live and in the studio, they achieved a huge, crushing sound that put most of their contemporaries in aggressive musical genres to shame; plus, founder and frontman Al Jourgensen gave the group a greater aura of style and theater than other industrial bands, who seemed rather faceless when compared with Jourgensen's leather-clad cowboy/biker look and the edgy shock tactics of such videos as "N.W.O." and "Just One Fix." Ministry started in the early 1980s as a synth pop band, with the goth club classic "(Every Day Is) Halloween" pointing to the darker, more aggressive direction their music would soon take. 1992's platinum-selling Psalm 69 represented the peak of Ministry's popularity, and the band's sound moved closer to metal with the 1996 follow-up Filth Pig and 2004's Houses of the Molé, one of several albums aimed specifically at then-President George W. Bush. Despite several announcements that the band was breaking up, Ministry soldiered on, touring sporadically and releasing albums such as 2021's Moral Hygiene.
