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1 / 4 · Click to enlargeLore & origins
Noise Marines are Chaos Space Marines devoted to Slaanesh, mostly from the Emperor's Children Legion, but also from other Slaanesh-worshipping warbands such as the Flawless Host. Their trademark is the use of devastating sonic weapons.
Noise Marines have pursued sensation so obsessively that their senses have been dulled. Only extreme stimuli, especially overwhelming noise, reach them. Their sonic blasters and blastmasters create music and screams that can shatter bodies and armour.
Noise Marines began in the Emperor's Children just before the Heresy. On the xenos world of Laeran the 28th Expedition found a temple to Slaanesh. The Terran composer Bequa Kynska, who travelled with the Legion's remembrancers, was corrupted there. She then built new instruments to recreate what she had heard. At her great performance, the Maraviglia, the music drove audience and Astartes alike into an orgy of violence, and some of the Legion took up the instruments themselves. Every sonic weapon the Noise Marines carry descends from those instruments.
Slaanesh's gift is extraordinary hearing, and a brain that turns loud sound into euphoria. Over centuries Noise Marines become deaf to anything that is not deafening: battle, screaming and their own weapons are the only things that move them.
The Emperor's Children were first exposed to Slaanesh's power in the temple of the serpentine Laer on their homeworld of Laeran. Horus later introduced Fulgrim and his officers to feasting, narcotics and other excesses, inspired by the corrupted tribes of Davin. Their constant pursuit of sensation pushed some warriors toward sound, and the most extreme became Noise Marines. Slaanesh gives them unnaturally sharp hearing, able to pick out tiny differences in pitch within deafening noise.
Appearance & wargear
Noise Marines wear garish pink, purple and gold power armour, often fitted with speakers and amplifiers. They carry sonic blasters, blastmasters and doom sirens.
Noise Marines wear garish pink, purple and gold armour, often with speaker grilles, pipes and vox-amplifiers built in. Their weapons include the sonic blaster, the blastmaster and the doom siren, which can shatter armour and rupture organs.
Noise Marines carry sonic blasters that look like heavy bolters, and blastmasters that use overlapping frequencies to overwhelm the senses and smash armour. Some wear sonic shriekers on their helmets, which draw power from the armour's reactor and need the better part of an hour to recharge.
Weapons & Vehicles
The psycho-acoustic sonic weapons of the Emperor's Children Noise Marines, firing screaming waves of warp-charged sound that Liquefy or…
The brutal motorised tooth-bladed sword carried by Space Marines, Imperial Guard officers and Chaos renegades, chewing through armour a…
A master-crafted blade sheathed in a crackling molecular disruption field that parts ceramite, bone and steel with effortless lethality…
The signature .75-calibre rocket-propelled mass-reactive firearm of the Adeptus Astartes, firing self-propelled explosive bolts that de…
The cursed silver-and-amethyst alien sword taken from the Temple of the Laer that corrupted Primarch Fulgrim to Slaanesh, later bestowe…
The lithe, alluring, clawed lesser daemons of Slaanesh, both repulsive and impossible to look away from.
Explore all 48 entries in the Weapons & Vehicles armoury.
Battlefield role & tactics
Noise Marines are dedicated anti-infantry fire support. Their sonic weapons ignore cover and devastate massed troops.
They are mid-range infantry who soften up enemy lines with sound. They seek out the loudest part of the battlefield and add to it. Fear is just another sensation to them. That makes them hard to break, but they are often reckless.
Noise Marines are mid-range firepower that ignores most cover and suppresses infantry. They have no fear and keep fighting at full strength under pressure, so they hold their positions well. They are less effective against heavy armour than dedicated anti-tank units.
Field Modifications, Sub-Faction Doctrines & Operational Idiosyncrasies
Within the strategic threat-indices of the Departmento Munitorum, the Ordo Xenos, and the high command savants of Emperor's Children, Noise Marines are classified as a premier elites asset whose battlefield effectiveness stems from the tight integration of operator conditioning and specialized wargear. Addicted to hyper-sensory overload and psycho-acoustic resonance since the fall of the III Legion, Emperor's Children warbands wire sonic amplifiers, combat-stim injectors, and Slaaneshi daemonic gifts directly into their central nervous systems. In active campaign theatres, Noise Marines wear garish pink, purple and gold power armour, often fitted with speakers and amplifiers. They carry sonic blasters, blastmasters and doom sirens.
Veteran formations of Noise Marines develop distinct sub-faction doctrines and field modifications over decades of continuous deployment. Marius Vairosean, a captain of the Emperor's Children, took up one of Kynska's instruments during the Maraviglia and became one of the earliest Noise Marines. Whether fighting in void-ship boarding actions, ash-waste tank duels, or ruined hive-city basilicas, experienced crews and squad leaders strip away parade-ground redundancies to maximize ammunition feed reliability, target-acquisition speed, and close-quarters survivability under extreme suppression.
Field maintenance and biological or machine-spirit recovery logs confirm that sustained combat exacts a heavy toll on both wargear and flesh, yet Noise Marines maintain operational cohesion long after standard line units would collapse. Following every major engagement, recovery teams prioritize the immediate extraction of their core panoply, veterancy honors, and consecrated components so that the lineage and lethal institutional memory of the formation endure into the next warzone.
Heraldry, Battle-Damage & Community Artistry
Across the Warhammer 40,000 illustration, Golden Demon painting, and display-diorama community, Noise Marines stand out as one of the most rewarding subjects in the Emperor's Children range. Artists and miniature painters focus intently on their signature visual hallmarks: lurid magenta-pink, royal purple, and lacquered black panels contrasted with gleaming gold filigree, flayed-skin pelts, and vibrant neon-violet sonic shockwaves. Combined with the distinct silhouette described in field sightings—Noise Marines wear garish pink, purple and gold power armour, often fitted with speakers and amplifiers—every model and canvas painting offers a rich interplay of texture between rigid armour plates, weathered cloth or chitin, and gleaming weapon assemblies.
When depicting Noise Marines at the height of battle, community artists and painters push contrast through sponge-chipped battle damage, directional mud and ash pigments across the lower greaves or hull tracks, and vivid Object Source Lighting (OSL) cast by active lenses, energy coils, or muzzle flashes. Sub-faction heraldry, campaign badges, and trophy details allow hobbyists to anchor each miniature or illustration in a specific canonical warzone—celebrating both the grimdark complexity of the Forty-First Millennium and the craftsmanship of the community that brings Emperor's Children to life.
Notable battles & users
- Emperor's Children: Noise Marines are the signature troops of Fulgrim's Legion.
- Maraviglia: the performance aboard the Emperor's Children flagship where Kynska's music first drove the Legion into frenzy.
- Isstvan III: Noise Marines turned their sonic weapons on their loyalist brothers during the atrocity.
- Cacophonous Chorus: Slaaneshi warriors who join whichever warband makes the loudest and most frenzied noise.
Related
Characters (2)
Lucius the Eternal · Champion of Slaanesh
Fulgrim · Primarch of the Emperor's Children, the Phoenician
