Storm the Studio is the debut album by English electronic music group Meat Beat Manifesto, released on 20 February 1989 by Sweatbox Records in the United Kingdom and later that year by Wax Trax!

Named for a William S. Burroughs quote sampled on the album, Storm the Studio was greeted with critical acclaim upon release, and its dark tone helped distance Meat Beat Manifesto from the hedonistic dance music of the time.

It has gone on to be considered a groundbreaking and innovative album, and has influenced numerous artists in the industrial, breakbeat, drum and bass and trip hop genres.

Swindon-based Meat Beat Manifesto began in 1987 when Jack Dangers and Jonny Stephens of the pop group Perennial Divide – who they had formed in 1986 and recorded the album Purge (1986) with – began releasing electronic side-project twelve-inch singles under the Meat Beat Manifesto name on Perennial Divide's label Sweatbox Records, the first of which was "Suck Hard" (1987).

[5] Nix Lowrey The Quietus later noted how the material on Storm the Studio was rumoured to be the subsequent resurrection and "reshaping" of the material destroyed in the fire,[6] although the band recreated what their debut album was supposed to have been like on their second album Armed Audio Warfare (1990),[7] which takes its name from the proposed debut album and among its tracks includes alternate versions of several of the songs on Storm the Studio, some in the form of remixes and others in the form of unreleased original versions.

[8] Another of the album's television-sourced samples, a news broadcaster saying "a spokesman at the Health Ministry said that to talk repeatedly about AIDS would cause the public to panic, tourism will certainly be affected," was the result of what the group called a 'random edit,' although they kept it on the album because they felt it showed how the news "sounded like they were more concerned with tourism than peoples' lives.

[17] Similarly, Ron Nachmann of SF Weekly said the album disregarded "the genre rules of the time" in its combination of hip hop breakbeats, scratch edits, bulky samples, electro tone, dub techniques and "industrial attitude.

"[18] John Bush of AllMusic felt the album combined the styles of noise rock, hip hop and "high-energy dub,"[11] while Robert Christgau made note of the "industrial-strength samples", "annihilating rhythm" and occasional detours into electro dance.

[14] The composition is noisy and funky, with the lyrics "It's genocide, can't you see?/Genocide in the first degree" being shouted by the band's then-vocalist Johnny Stephens.

[18] The first part of "Re-Animator" is a funky club track containing vocals, whereas by the fourth part, the piece has transformed into a psychedelic dub style incorporating "half-time rhythm layers of tape noise, reverberating voices, and feedback," with Jeanes noting that "[s]ometimes a bass line or a sample repeats, other times, it doesn't.

"[14] "Strap Down" begins with drums that have been compared to machine guns and numerous loops that one reviewer felt "[sound] like a marching band fighting with a circus over a breakbeat.

"[14] "I Got the Fear" repeats phrases from previous tracks, such as "reanimate" and "re-animator", turning the album "into a kind of mobius strip of samples and themes" in the words of Jeanes, who commented that "If Jack Dangers isn't literally sampling himself here, he is quite figuratively doing it by recycling his own ideas from one track to the next without any regard for which sounds or ideas belong to which songs.

[8] In the United States, it was released by Wax Trax!, which led to the group being regarded as an industrial band,[21][11] despite Dangers' and Jonny Stephens' dislike for being pigeonholed.

[25][26] Storm the Studio and Armed Audio Warfare were re-released again by Run Recordings on 22 July 2003, newly remastered by Jack Dangers and again with redesigned album sleeves by Rich Borge.

[17] Writing for The Village Voice, Robert Christgau wrote that, "Bill Burroughs having given the word, these Brit art-schoolers shape two years of 12-inches into four sides of industrial-strength samples and 'annihilating rhythm.'

He wrote that the album's titular William S. Burroughs sample upended the "get down" paradigm of dance music and "urged listeners to seize the means of production, to create chaos, to do something.

"[18] He also described the album as having "blasted the genre rules of the time, boosting hip hop breakbeats, substantive samples, scratch edits, and electro flavor with dub technique and industrial attitude.

Take Meat Beat Manifesto’s 1989 debut album Storm the Studio, which is about as seminal as it gets, a release so groundbreaking and forward-thinking that when it first came out, no one really had the vocabulary to describe it.

People called it industrial, techno, acid house, even hip-hop, which seems ridiculous in retrospect, but terms like darkcore, breakbeat, trip-hop, and that most heinous of genre names, IDM, hadn't been invented yet, so there was simply no way to pigeonhole Jack Dangers' and Jonny Stephens' dark, restless, sample-laden soundscapes.

[10] All songs written by Jack Dangers The version of "Strap Down (Part 3)" on the remastered album on Bandcamp removes the long unadorned sample of Rev.