About Us
COP International is an independent alternative record label for artists who don’t fit neatly into boxes and have no particular interest in trying.
Our roster moves across industrial rock, post-punk, electronic music, darkwave, hard rock, experimental music, and whatever happens in the cracks between genres.
The current roster includes Stabbing Westward, Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, Azam Ali, The Cassandra Complex, Beasto Blanco, nolongerhuman, Chiasm and an evolving group of artists with very different sounds, histories, and creative obsessions.
And that is exactly how we like it.
Great music often comes from taking risks, following instinct, and pushing an idea further than feels comfortable.
That is much more interesting to us.
What We Believe
Find exceptional artists. Help them make great records. Take risks. Make something dangerous and exciting.
We are drawn to artists with personality, conviction, and their own universe.
Sometimes that means massive industrial rock. Sometimes it means post-punk, electronics, cinematic soundscapes, noise, beautiful voices, ugly machines, big guitars, or something we cannot easily explain without ruining it.
Genre is useful for record stores.
It is not a religion.
Our job is to build the machinery around the artist without becoming the machinery that crushes the artist.
That means distribution, manufacturing, promotion, strategy, design, video, logistics, and all the deeply unromantic things required to get an interesting piece of art out into the world.
The relationship between the label and the artists matters. We like working closely with people, throwing ideas around, trying things, occasionally discovering that something was a terrible idea, and then trying something better.
There is a direction, a lot of curiosity, and a strong preference for making something memorable.
More Than Records
Music has never just been music.
It comes with images, mythology, photography, design, film, performance, technology, fashion, strange ideas at three in the morning, and the occasional happy accident.
We are interested in all of it.
COP is a record label, but we increasingly think of it as a creative platform where different disciplines can collide.
Musicians, visual artists, filmmakers, photographers, designers, producers, programmers, and people working with new creative technologies all have a place in that conversation.
We do not know exactly where all of those intersections lead.
That is part of the fun.
A Little History
COP International started in 1991 in San Francisco and Frankfurt, originally as a home for the emerging West Coast industrial and coldwave scenes.
From there, things got bigger, louder, stranger, and considerably more complicated.
Over more than three decades, the catalog has grown to hundreds of releases spanning industrial, electronic, post-punk, gothic, alternative, experimental music, and quite a few records that stubbornly refuse to belong anywhere.
We are proud of the history.
But nostalgia is not a business plan.
The interesting part is what happens next.
There are still records to make, strange ideas to chase, technologies to experiment with, artists to discover, and a few conventions that probably deserve to be kicked down the stairs.
Independent. Curious. Making noise.