Born in Paris in 1993, James Kent is the son of noted rock journalists Nick Kent and Laurence Romance. He was given a Pantera album at the age of three, and a guitar at 11. After learning Tool and Slayer riffs on the guitar, he began writing his own music, but Mom and Dad's synth collection was also calling, and the younger Kent took to the keyboards with both metal and cyberpunk attitudes. He debuted his sound with the 2012 EP Night Driving Avenger while two albums, Terror 404 and I Am the Night, arrived that same year. The combination of retro-techno and aggression attracted the developers of the campy and violent video game Hotline Miami, who added Perturbator to contribute to the 2012 game's soundtrack. The Sexualizer EP followed in 2013. Finnish extreme metal label Blood Music issued Perturbator's concept LP Dangerous Days in 2014, then reissued most of his previous releases. Work on the Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number soundtrack followed in 2015, then Dangerous Days' story of a religion using technology to persuade followers was continued on the 2016 concept album The Uncanny Valley. The following year, Kent issued the electro-industrial-leaning EP New Model.
Two volumes of B-Sides Remixes appeared in 2018, as Kent continued developing new Perturbator material. He collaborated with HEALTH that year, releasing the song "Body/Prison" in October. Kent appeared in the John Carpenter-narrated synthwave documentary The Rise of the Synths in 2019. Lustful Sacraments, a more guitar-driven, goth rock-influenced Perturbator full-length, arrived in 2021. ~ David Jeffries & Paul Simpson, Rovi