*** 1/2 Einsturzende Neubauten, “Ende Neu,” Nothing/Interscope.

When it began, industrial music was about subverting rather than celebrating modern technology and industrial culture. Germany’s Einsturzende Neubauten was among the genre’s earliest practitioners, artfully pounding out primal rhythms on scrap metal, shopping carts and even buildings and blending them with power drills, cement mixers, modified conventional instruments and anything else that would yield noise.

Neubauten’s first U.S. release in five years (in stores Tuesday) may not be as clangorous as the work that first put it on the map, but it adheres faithfully, if more subtly, to the original concept. The lead track, “Die Explosion Im Festspielhaus,” opens with a hushed vocal entwined in a pulsing bass line and the scraping of a pencil on paper. “NNNAAAMMM” escalates from a simple a cappella chant and syncopated hand-claps into an intoxicating melange of sounds driven by a mesmerizing groove. “Installation No. 1” generates an equally intense rhythmic dynamic with a colder, more electronic edge. Even when the focus is on melodic development, as in “Stella Maris,” the balmy tune is suspended between graceful, metronome-like guitar lines and insistently ticking percussion.

A glowing example of the less-is-more principle, the less strident approach on “Ende Neu” makes for a more evocative display of the forces behind Einsturzende Neubauten’s music.

Albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars (fair), three stars (good) and four stars (excellent). The albums are already released unless otherwise noted.