Throbbing Gristle - D.o.A. The Third And Final Report (LP) - Green Vinyl

Throbbing Gristle’s D.o.A. The Third And Final Report arrived in 1978 on their own Industrial Records, and it still feels like a dare. Plenty of bands claim to be confrontational. TG took the idea further, treating the album as a document from the edge of art, noise and lived trauma. It was only their second album-length statement, but they were already treating the record as a manifesto for “industrial music for industrial people,” complete with the coolly perverse promise of a final report that wasn’t final at all.

Everything you need to know about their approach is packed into Hamburger Lady. It’s as harrowing as fans warn, but it’s not just shock tactics. Genesis P-Orridge’s voice hovers like a witness, reading text adapted from a letter by mail artist Al Ackerman about a woman with catastrophic burns. The words land plainly, almost clinically, while the music smears and wilts around them. Chris Carter’s electronics shiver and smear, Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson manipulates tape and found sound, and Cosey Fanni Tutti finds this queasy middle ground between guitar feedback and a ghosted cornet tone. The track isn’t loud in any traditional sense. It’s hollowed out, the silence between tones doing as much damage as the noise itself.

What makes D.o.A. so enduring is the range inside its bleakness. There’s the glimmering pulse of AB/7A, where you can hear a proto synth-pop heartbeat peeking through the fog. There’s also the notorious album version of United, altered from their 1978 single into a time-stretched, molasses-thick smear of tone. It reads like a joke at first, but it says plenty about the band’s distrust of easy consumption. Then there’s Death Threats, assembled from recorded phone calls, the menace in the voices doing more than any distortion pedal could. The record keeps flipping the power dynamic. One minute you’re a curious listener, the next you feel like an intruder who’s picked up the wrong line.

Part of the power here is practical as much as philosophical. TG’s HQ in Hackney was nicknamed the Death Factory, and the album sounds built from parts scavenged there. Carter’s home-built Gristleizer unit adds warped tremolo and fuzz. Tape splices turn speech into percussion. Shortwave radio chatter slips into the mixes like passing sirens. Christopherson’s eye for unsettling imagery becomes an ear for texture. Cosey’s guitar sits just off pitch, and when her cornet appears it feels like a flare on a dark coastline. Genesis holds the centre not as a belter, but as a narrator who refuses to blink.

If you’re hearing this on Throbbing Gristle vinyl, that physical presence underscores the point. The grooves carry air and grit in ways digital can’t fake, and you get that tactile pause when you flip sides. Original Industrial pressings are collector territory now, but the 2011 reissue campaign on the reborn Industrial Records, manufactured and distributed with Mute’s involvement, did right by the catalogue. If you’re hunting D.o.A. The Third And Final Report vinyl specifically, the more recent pressings are sturdy, with artwork reproduced with care. It’s the sort of record you want in arm’s reach when a friend asks where industrial music actually started.

Context helps. This came between The Second Annual Report and 20 Jazz Funk Greats, and you can hear the band closing one chapter of pure abrasion while setting up the next phase where deceitfully pretty surfaces hide knives. D.o.A. is where they test how far song form can bend without breaking. Plenty of later artists took notes, from Coil’s textural séances to the colder edges of Nine Inch Nails. But the blueprint sits here in a form that still feels unstable.

If you’re browsing a Melbourne record store and spot a copy, pick it up, feel the sleeve, then go home and listen with the lights low. It’s not casual listening, yet it’s oddly replayable once you tune to its frequency. For those of us who buy Throbbing Gristle records online, it sits near the top of the must-own pile, right alongside the notorious green hills of 20 Jazz Funk Greats. Collectors looking for Throbbing Gristle albums on vinyl know this is the one that explains the myth and the method at once. And if you’re outside the big cities, there are great options for vinyl records Australia wide that will get it to your turntable in one piece.

D.o.A. isn’t about shock for its own sake. It’s about honesty in an ugly century, processed through tape heads and circuitry. Put the needle down and it still feels like a report from the front line, filed without sentiment, stamped Industrial, and strangely humane in its refusal to look away.