Unsane

New York gore aficionados Unsane helped pioneer the late-’80s noise-rock movement, blending Sonic Youth-style sturm und drang with straightforward hardcore, resulting in a small legion of fans, a short stint with Atlantic Records, and nearly 20 years on the road. Their super-sludgy 1995 release, Scattered, Smothered & Covered, spawned a video for “Scrape” that featured a slew of grisly looking skateboarding accidents pre-Jackass, which ran in heavy rotation on MTV at the time and ramped up the network’s raw aggression quotient by a good 10 percent. The band’s most recent album is 2007’s Visqueen.

Updated 11/18/2010