Napalm Death

Napalm Death formed in Meriden, West Midlands, England, in 1981, emerging from the same anarcho-punk underground that produced Crass and Discharge. What began as a scrappy hardcore outfit built around Nicholas Bullen, Justin Broadrick and Miles Ratledge mutated, over the mid-1980s, into something with no precedent: songs compressed to seconds, guitars tuned into a churn of distortion, and drummer Mick Harris hammering out the hyper-fast blast beat that would become the defining rhythmic signature of an entire genre. That genre got its name from Harris himself — grindcore — and Napalm Death are near-universally credited as its inventors and its yardstick. Their 1987 debut, Scum, released on Earache Records, is one of extreme music's foundational documents, and also one of its strangest artefacts: the two sides were recorded roughly a year apart by effectively different bands, with Broadrick and Bullen gone by side two and Bill Steer (later of Carcass) and Lee Dorrian (later of Cathedral) taking their places. Only Harris played on both halves. Scum also contains "You Suffer", which at 1.316 seconds is recognised by Guinness World Records as the shortest recorded song ever released — a track that is simultaneously a joke, a manifesto and the band's most famous calling card. Bassist Shane Embury joined for 1988's From Enslavement to Obliteration and has been the band's constant ever since. Vocalist Mark "Barney" Greenway arrived in 1989 from Benediction, debuting on Harmony Corruption (1990) and fronting the band for over three decades, aside from a brief mid-1990s absence. Under Greenway the group widened its range — flirting with death metal, industrial texture and mid-paced heaviness across the 1990s on records like Fear, Emptiness, Despair and Diatribes — before returning to a ferocious, politically charged grind on Enemy of the Music Business (2000) and everything since. The lyrics have always been the point. Napalm Death write from an explicitly left-libertarian, anarcho-punk position: anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-fascist, pro animal rights, hostile to nationalism, religious authority and the machinery of the music industry itself. Greenway is as well known for his interviews and activism as for his roar. Today the band — Greenway, Embury, drummer Danny Herrera and guitarist John Cooke — remain remarkably vital more than forty years in, with sixteen studio albums through Throes of Joy in the Jaws of Defeatism (2020) and a continuing global touring schedule. They are elder statesmen who never softened: the reference point for grindcore, and an enduring moral compass for extreme music.