The bleakness Static-X growl about on their underground hit "Bled for Days" and the new single "Push It" (RealAudio excerpt) is nothing new for Wayne Static, leader of the Los Angeles industrial-metal band.

Static, 28, said he's been fascinated with dark art for as long as he can remember — from the movie "The Shining," which he saw while in elementary school, to the gothic bands he played with as a teen.

But his most recent job — writing summaries of TV newscasts for the news-clipping service Burrelle's — was a bit much even for him to handle at times.

"The news is very depressing," Static said recently. It can be especially

so if your job, like Static's, was to watch the news for eight hours

straight in the middle of the night in a cold office building. But he

kept the gig for eight years, in part because his boss didn't mind his

Don King–like hairdo and gave him time off for touring.

"The news is all murders and rapes and robberies — all these horrible things," Static (who refused to reveal his birth name) continued. "You have to be careful, because you tend to get immune to the shock value of it after years of watching this news every day."

Life's ugly underbelly pulses throughout Static-X's debut, Wisconsin Death Trip, which was released in the spring. On "Push It," which debuted on rock radio this week — two weeks ahead of its official release — Static barks out a series of curt, grim lines: "My mind is corrosive, I trip on corrosive/ I freak, see through me/ My eyes are explosive." High-pitched guitars cut into the rhythms like the acid in the lyrics.

The band — Static (vocals, guitars, programming), Koichi Fukuda (guitars, keyboards, programming), Tony Campos (bass) and Ken Jay (drums) — earned underground-hit status earlier this year with "Bled for Days" (RealAudio excerpt). The song appeared on the "Bride of Chucky" soundtrack before turning up on the new album.

"Meaningless, it's meaningless. ... It's mindlessness. ... It's uselessness," Static growls on "Bled for Days," sounding almost as if he's venting his anger after a late-night news-transcribing session. Behind him, combined techno and metal beats try to make good on the band's motto: "Keep Disco Evil."

The group's earlier incarnations were harder still, according to Static: "It was probably some of the heaviest sh-- you've heard in your life, but no one liked it except for us. It was just too complicated and too brutal. So we tried to lighten things up just a little bit, and put something in the song for other people to grab onto."

It's working, radio programmers at several stations say. Listeners who once spurned all things electronic are latching onto groups such as Static-X and Powerman 5000, who share a co-producer in Ulrich Wild.

"A year or two ago, I'd say you were crazy if you told me we'd be playing Rob Zombie all day," said Nancy Palumbo, music director for WYSP-FM in Philadelphia. "It's exciting to see rock reinvent itself."

Static has undergone his own reinvention over the past decade. Before he embraced metal and grindcore, he fronted a Chicago goth group called Deep Blue Dream — whose membership, for a brief two months and one show, included guitarist Billy Corgan, who had just started his own band, Smashing Pumpkins.

"It was kind of weird when we tried to play music together, because it was my band," Static said. "I don't think he could ever be happy playing in someone else's band. He's got very strong ideas of what he wants to do."