White Zombie's 1992 album, La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Volume One, is one of the most beautifully bizarre glow-ups in metal history. In the mid-Eighties, the quartet got their legs as a scraggly noise-rock band, gigging around the Lower East Side at now-legendary, then-sketchy clubs like CBGB and rubbing shoulders with fellow scenesters like Swans and Sonic Youth — bands who were reacting against the gutless pop-rock of the Seventies with unconventional song structures, confrontational energy and ear-bleeding volume. After a 1987 debut, Soul-Crusher, that sat right in that artsy noise-rock lane, White Zombie began a slow pivot toward unabashed heavy metal, emerging as a fully-formed groove-metal machine with oodles of character on La Sexorcisto.
Founding members, vocalist Rob Zombie and bassist Sean Yseult, had honed their chemistry with longtime drummer Ivan de Prume, but it was the addition of metal-trained guitarist Jay Yuenger that truly gave White Zombie's sound its metallic weight, with riffs that were hard and danceable, but also shreddy and thrashy. A song like the iconic "Thunderkiss '65" is just a stone's throw from the rip-roaring desert-rock of Kyuss, but others such as "Cosmic Monsters Inc." and "Warp Asylum" feature evil licks that are acutely reminiscent of Slayer. However, the record's unusual rhythms — bouncy even for a groove-metal band, and made weirdly erotic with all the moaning samples — prevents it from ever becoming a down-the-middle thrash LP, instead locking into a singular, woozy boogie that no other band have managed to replicate.
Having scored a Grammy nomination for "Thunderkiss '65" and a double-platinum RIAA certification for all the units they moved in the U.S., La Sexorcisto is by no means a hidden gem in the heavy-music history books. But given that White Zombie broke up in 1998 and have never reunited, nor partook in any tell-all oral histories, there's still a good deal of mystique about the magic of La Sexorcisto. Below, are seven things that you might not know — but absolutely should — about this wonderfully weird, hip-swingin', grave-diggin' masterpiece.
1. White Zombie actively wanted to leave noise-rock behind and become a "real" metal band
La Sexorcisto is White Zombie's first album to fit squarely in the metal milieu, and that wasn't a matter of happenstance. After spending half-a-decade slogging it in New York City's noise-rock underground — which only became monetarily sustainable for bands like Sonic Youth once they leapt to major labels — Zombie and Co. actively yearned to make more accessible music that would yield bigger audiences and more career opportunities. They also wanted to sound heavier and more muscular for their own enjoyment's sake, which made them misfits among the high-brow experimental peers they desired to leave behind.
"The change in sound and attitude began well before I joined," Yuenger, who became their fifth guitarist in 1989, recalled in a 2017 interview. "When I met them, they were adamant about becoming a 'real' metal band. They didn't want to become more normal, but they did want to be more accessible, to play to a wider audience. They were friends with some of the noise-rock people and they played with some of those bands, but my impression of the Lower East Side's view of White Zombie was as a curiosity, not as scene-mates or kindred spirits."
2. Beavis and Butt-head helped make the record a hit
Today, we can look back and view La Sexorcisto as one of the defining metal records of the Nineties, and people who were there will surely remember seeing the videos for "Thunder Kiss '65" and "Black Sunshine" crowding the MTV airwaves. However, the album wasn't a mega-hit right from the jump. Releasing it on the major label Geffen gave the band the momentum to sell about a quarter-million LPs in 1992, but La Sexorcisto didn't crack the Billboard 200 and start racking up millions of sales until 1993, when two crusty metalhead freaks by the names of Beavis and Butt-head started big-upping White Zombie's music during their show's debut season.
A running gag throughout the cartoon was the two couch-locked protagonists listening to metal music — either dated hair-metal trash like Winger or contemporary heavy hitters like Pantera — and offering scathing criticisms of the stuff they didn't like, which was most of it. Interestingly, whenever the two would queue up some White Zombie — whether it was their music videos or the La Sexorcisto intro track, "Welcome to Planet Motherfucker" — Beavis and Butt-head would light up and praise the music in a way that compelled viewers to head out and buy the album. White Zombie were by no means complete nobodies before this happened, but the show gave them a very real push that swiftly made a tangible impact.
"The record immediately started picking up in markets where we never played, like Wyoming and Missouri," Zombie told Entertainment Weekly in 1993. "Places where Beavis and Butt-head was the only thing happening, where it's just cows. It always seemed we needed something to give the album a kick in the butt, and I guess this was the thing."
3. Clearing samples was a huge hassle — and some didn't make the cut
One of La Sexorcisto's defining features is the more than two dozen samples that litter the album. While the practice of including sound bites from movies, TV shows and other people's music has been pervasive across most genres (especially hip-hop) ever since, White Zombie were one of the first metal bands to adopt the then-novel technology and paste all sorts of samples from obscure movies and random audio clips into their motorik metal rippers.
Before the band started recording the album in 1991, the legal liabilities of sampling weren't fully understood by all labels, so when they initially told Geffen their intention to sample a fuck-ton of audio from various copyrighted works, the label said, "Sure, knock yourself out," as Yuenger remembered. However, by the time they actually turned the record in, Geffen had just gotten caught up in a costly sample clearance situation with a different band on their roster, which led to a grueling obstacle course of legal hoops for White Zombie to jump through — and ultimately, not every sample made the cut.
"During this period, I slept on the floor of our apartment off of Sunset Blvd., starved, pretty much, played guitar endlessly, and waited for something to happen," Yuenger said of the sample clearing process. "Rob and Sean told me horror stories about aggressive lawyers demanding the origin of every sound on the record: bits of atmosphere from thrift-store albums, little things taped off TV, stuff from the radio. Ultimately, most of the samples cleared. A cool White Zombie artifact is the advance cassette of the album, which contains some samples which aren't on the actual release. I have a few of them, but I don't know how many were sent out."
4. Rush Limbaugh is sampled on a song
Most of the samples that did get the green light are clips from classic horror movies and underground exploitation films. One of those flicks, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, is a favorite of director Quentin Tarantino that Zombie cut five clips from for Sexorcisto, along with numerous snippets from 1968's Night of the Living Dead and the 1958 teen crime drama High School Confidential. However, there's also one brief audio snippet that's not taken from a movie or a TV show, but the late right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh.
At the tail end of the 24-second interlude "Knuckle Duster (Radio 2-B)," there's a snippet of the cigar-smoking radical uttering the phrase, "Homelesssness and all that," right before it transitions into a song called "Thrust." Very clever, Rob.
5. All White Zombie had to do to score a feature from Iggy Pop was ask
Outside of the samples, La Sexorcisto also includes a spoken-word part from a very special rock & roll guest. Once Zombie started his prolific solo career in the late Nineties, he transformed from a ragged stoner-rock-lookin' guy to a dreaded shock-rocker with a shtick that owes a great deal to his spiritual forefather Alice Cooper. More than just his image and general vibe, Zombie's solo music from the mid-2000s onward began sounding more and more like Cooper's glammy hard-rock, but White Zombie's music always had a lot more in common with the sound of a different Motor City legend, Iggy Pop.
Therefore, it was fitting to have the former Stooges leader and one of the godfathers of punk deliver a gravelly, scene-setting intro and outro for "Black Sunshine" and even appear in its deranged, psychedelic music video. In a 2002 interview, Yseult said that getting Pop on the record was as simple as asking, given he was a fan of Soul-Crusher, which admittedly had a lot more in common with White Zombie's NYC noise-rock contemporaries, many of whom idolized Pop's work. Getting him on their new joint was a crucial flex.
6. This time White Zombie actually chose the right producer — the guy known for Slayer
Anyone who listens to White Zombie's catalog can identify that La Sexorcisto is when they became a full-on metal band, but that transition likely would've happened earlier if they found the right producer. Their previous record, Make Them Die Slowly, was recorded with Martin Bisi and Bill Laswell, two NYC noise wizards who were known for much more avant-garde fare. In a 2019 interview, Bisi recalled that "Rob pretty much wanted a straight-up metal record," but that wasn't apparent to the guys behind the board until after the fact, which is why the album kind of sounds like a weird amalgamation of Slayer riffs and outré noise experimentation. "It totally did not sound like the kind of record he wanted to make," Bisi said of the frontman's disappointment.
White Zombie didn't let that happen again on La Sexorcisto. This time around, the band went to the source and hired Andy Wallace — who engineered Reign in Blood, produced Seasons in the Abyss, and was called in by Kurt Cobain to make Nevermind hit correctly after the first round of mixes sounded weak. Wallace's touch made Yuenger's thrashy riffage and de Prume's groovy drumming sound utterly enormous, capturing the dirgy biker-metal sound that the band would soon be blasting out of massive venue monitors.
7. The album soundtracked a violent video game
If Iggy Pop's muscle car sermon at the beginning of "Black Sunshine" didn't make it explicit, La Sexorcisto's songs are obviously a fantastic soundtrack for cruising at high speeds, preferably with the windows down and the stereo blaring. That's just the type of setting that their desert-rock riffs and wind-whipping grooves evoke, but as it turns out, the record ain't a bad score for violent beatings either. In 1994, a video game called Way of the Warrior used almost all of La Sexorcisto for its official soundtrack, placing the band's music above Mortal Kombat-style smackdowns. The game is regarded by many players as a dud, but any user review you find is bound to include a nice compliment about the badass soundtrack.
