Napalm Death

Or, the founding of grindcore

“To grind” means to crush, pulverize, shred, and to Mick Harris, drummer of Napalm Death, it must have seemed the most fitting verb to describe a music that tended towards swirling chaos and the hyperkinetic shattering of any kind of harmonic structure. “It was the only word that came to mind after I bought the first Swans record in 1984. Then, around 1985, when that new sonic movement started to take shape, I thought ‘grind’ could work well to describe a music that had speed as one of its most important traits”.

The earliest warning signs of grindcore can already be traced back to the start of the Eighties, when numerous bands were heading towards a radicalization of punk and hardcore, often so extreme that it spilled over into so-called chaos-core, where noise and improvisation reigned supreme. A few names? The Finnish Sekunda, the Slovenian Odpadki Civilizacije, our own Wretched, the Brazilian Brigada Do Odio, the Dutch Lärm. In any case, what preoccupied those bands above all was sheer playing speed. Bands intent on flooring the accelerator as hard as possible sprang up more or less everywhere.

In this melting pot, a prominent place must be given to Sweden's Asocial, who in 1982, with the demo “How Could Hardcore Be Any Worse”, put forward what is very likely the first glimmer of proto-grind. In barely ten minutes, this demo presented genuine walls of sound launched at insane speed and propelled by an absolutely furious drummer (Johan), pounding away like a man possessed in what can effectively be read as an early codification of the blast-beat (a hyperkinetic percussive explosion that would later be used, before Napalm Death, by D.R.I. (“No Sense”), S.O.D. (“Milk”), Sepultura (“Antichrist”) and Repulsion). Also worth noting is the slurred, visceral vocal delivery and the razor-blade guitars that create an intimidating electric flow.

Interviewed by Daniel Ekeroth, guitarist Mats Svensson recalled those times like this: “Originally, the songs had been written for a normal 'two-beat', but then someone thought they'd be more violent if I hit the snare on every beat. Back then nobody had ever heard anything like that, but we were young and pissed off, and we did it. (…) We certainly didn't know anyone who played as fast as us at that time. Only later did bands like D.R.I., Siege and Napalm Death catch the speed bug. In fact, we heard that Napalm Death listened to our demo and then decided to change their style. I don't know if it's true, but if it is, it's a great honor!”. It's hard to say whether the English band was really inspired by these four wild kids from Hedemora, a tiny town in central Sweden. The fact remains that in 1982 it was genuinely difficult to come across anything faster, more chaotic or more violent than that savage demo.

Setting aside a whole series of bands more or less close to the extremes of hardcore, thrashcore and speed-metal (Discharge of “Why” and “Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing”, Deep Wound with their self-titled 1983 EP, Septic Death of “Need So Much Attention”, the little-known Cyanamid of “I Love NJ”, Youth Korps of “'82”, Stark Raving Mad of “Mx” etc.), another essential building block for the development of grindcore was laid down by “Drop Dead”, a self-produced tape by America's Siege, hailing from Weymouth, Massachusetts, and made up of vocalist and saxophonist Kevin Mahoney, bassist Henry McNamee, guitarist Kurt Habelt and drummer Rob Williams. In this handful of tracks, recorded in Boston in February 1984 and produced by Lou Giordano (who would go on to work with Hüsker Dü and Goo Goo Dolls), everything already seems to be in place to speak, without hesitation, the word “grindcore”: stormy bursts of speed, a voice that digs into itself in search of a primal scream, guitars as ultra-distorted and cutting as a rusty blade, drums seized by shattering fits of madness, and production just dirty and unhealthy enough. In the background, naturally, echoes of the hardcore era can still be heard, but it's above all the evolved, paranoid hardcore of Flipper, whose ghost looms sinister across all 7 minutes and 23 seconds of “Grim Reaper”, where, at a solemn pace, they let horns spiral in free fall, noise distortions, a Mephistophelean growl, breakneck stops and restarts, and ragged bass all run wild. All things considered, the last “intellectual” residues had to be stripped away in order to finally step into the bounds of a new sonic era. Residues that, little by little, Napalm Death helped erode, turning what was still a more or less homogeneous mix of many influences into a sound that would represent one of the greatest musical revolutions of the Eighties.

Even faster!

Formed in Meriden, near Birmingham, out of the passion of two local teenagers (Nic Bullen and Miles Ratledge), Napalm Death (the moniker was chosen out of the pair's reverence for "Apocalypse Now!", the masterpiece by Francis Ford Coppola) were initially drawn to the anarcho-punk movement, whose undisputed standard-bearers were Crass. Around 1983, the arrival of Justin Broadrick gave the band quite a shake-up, bringing with him a listening diet of Killing Joke, Swans, Throbbing Gristle and some of the hottest names in the then-nascent power-electronics scene. Demo after demo, the band began forging an intriguing sonic blend, capable of pulling off acrobatics between hyperkinetic punk, thrash-death and metallic darkness of post-punk descent. Proof of this is "Hatred Surge", a self-produced 1985 cassette that certainly gave no hint yet of the radical turn to come in the following years. Broadrick wasn't too satisfied with drummer Miles Ratledge, mainly because he couldn't play at insane speeds, and this was a growing concern since, in the meantime, Bullen too had become obsessed with a few bands who wielded sheer performance speed as a menacing banner ("back then," he would later recall, "we were also listening to a lot of Japanese hardcore, stuff like Gay Akura, S.O.B., Systematic Death, Geza"). That's how Mick Harris entered the picture. "One day, after one of our gigs," Broadrick recalls, "this small guy covered in tattoos and sporting a psychobilly haircut came up to me. He seemed pretty aggressive and said: 'I'm a drummer and I play in a psychobilly band that goes really fast!' So, after talking it over with Nic, we decided to give him a try and, damn, he really was fast!".

"When I joined the band," Harris recalls, "Nic and Justin's idea was to move toward more thrash-metal territory [also spurred by hearing the demo "Slaughter Of The Innocent" by Repulsion, ed.], something their previous drummer wasn't too keen on. I, on the other hand, was very much into those extremist solutions, because I really appreciated bands that played fast, stuff like Siege, Deep Wound, but also Chaos Uk and so on." So, when Nic and Justin went to Mick's house to tell him he was in the band, Justin, to make it crystal clear what they wanted from him without beating around the bush, asked him point blank, while they were listening to a few Siege tracks: "How fast can you play stuff like this?". "Even faster!" was Mick's immediate reply. And that's how the next demo, "From Enslavement To Obliteration", turned out to be far more interesting, especially because it's on these tracks (some of which were later re-recorded to appear on the first two official albums) that, for the first time, you can hear the first stirrings of what, before long, everyone would come to call grindcore.

The next step was the decisive one. It's 1986, and the trio is busy recording a dozen tracks intended for a split album shared with Atavistic, a crossover thrash outfit. But despite the agreement struck with Bristol's Manic Ears Records, both bands ended up with nothing to show for it. So, while Broadrick and Bullen exited the scene (both already tired of the musical direction the band had taken), Harris alone found himself sole owner of the name and, determined to carry on, began looking for new allies. The first to be contacted was multi-instrumentalist Shane Embury, but the partnership lasted very briefly, since Embury, not yet confident in his six-string abilities, preferred to join Unseen Terror full-time as a drummer. Next up was Frank Healy, but things went even worse given his inexperience. Finally, Harris met guitarist Bill Steer, already active in the then still-unknown Carcass, and bassist Jim Whitely. And the right magic clicked into place.

A singer was still missing, but it didn't take long to solve that problem with the arrival of Lee Dorrian, who would later form a doom-metal legend, Cathedral. Dorrian knew Napalm Death extremely well, having seen them live at least fifty times! Due to the geographical spread of the four members (Harris and Whitely lived in Birmingham, Steer in Liverpool and Dorrian in Coventry), this new quartet only managed to rehearse once before heading into the studio to record the new songs Harris had just sketched out on a two-string guitar... Despite all the obstacles, all the tracks were recorded in a single night at Rich Bitch studio in Birmingham. It was May 1987.

Thanks to the interest of the far-sighted Earache label, run by Digby "Dig" Pearson (with this very record he began his long run of releases orbiting the extreme metal universe - previously, the label only boasted two titles in the thrashcore/crust-punk sphere: "The Return of... Martha Splatterhead" by Americans The Accüsed, and a split album shared by Englishmen Heresy and Concrete Sox), "Scum" (28 tracks; 33:04) saw the light of day the following June, distilling an entire extremist universe into just over thirty-three minutes.

You suffer… but why?

Despite the differing line-ups, with only Harris as the connecting thread, "Scum" sounds remarkably cohesive sonically. On side A, marked by a more punk-oriented guitar approach, starting with the anti-capitalist invective of "Multinational Corporations" (let's not forget that the sinister cover art drawn by Jeff Walker of Carcass features the logos of some of the era's biggest multinationals: Union Carbide, General Motors, Ford, Coca Cola, British Petroleum etc.), we witness a radical brutalization of crust-punk, d-beat and hardcore, passing through violent blast-beats, inhuman accelerations that seem to smear the sound across the walls of an iconoclastic vortex, and primordial grunts that pulverize the lyrics, turning them into a siege of nihilistic ferocity, with the odd acidic whiff of doom. While tracks like the legendary "Siege Of Power" (which, at a mere four minutes, is the longest song on the record) bring in marching death-metal undertones, exaltation and delirium are pushed to the point of paroxysm on tracks such as "Polluted Minds", "Sacrificed", "Born On Your Knees", "Human Garbage", right up to the ultimate condensation of "You Suffer", a track that made it into the Guinness Book of Records as the "shortest song ever recorded", clocking in at 1.316 seconds (according to Nic Bullen, the inspiration for this track came from listening to "E" by German thrashers Wehrmacht, a song that ran for a full two seconds). In short, "You Suffer" (whose lyrics read You suffer… but why?) could be the perfect soundtrack for the great thermonuclear collapse yet to come.

"When I first heard 'You Suffer'," Beau Beasley of Insect Warfare once said, "it was like hearing the sound of two huge rusted pieces of metal colliding with each other. Fast, brutal and destabilizing. Like a car crash [...] I like the primitive aspect of songs like this. Everything you have to say can be said very simply. Think about the power of the word 'NO'. When you hear it, you immediately understand its intent. Well: now imagine that power with a blast beat behind it...". "You Suffer" isn't just Napalm Death's most extreme gesture, it's also the perfect embodiment of the grindcore universe's Holy Grail: a track so concise and fast it borders on absolute instantaneity. The punk imperative to say everything you had to say in the shortest time possible thus reached its culminating point.

For the record, this very track opened "Earache: World's Shortest Album", a limited-edition 5" vinyl that the English label would release in 2012, collecting some of the shortest grind tracks of all time (besides Napalm Death and Brutal Truth, you can hear "blips" from Wormrot, Pain Killer, Anal Cunt, Insect Warfare, Lawnmower Deth and Morbid Angel). The record's total length? 87 seconds...

With "Life?", the track that opens side B, we enter an even darker and more chaotic sonic dimension. Thanks to a murkier production that plunges the tracks into a climate of raving vehemence, the various influences are diluted into an even dirtier, more depraved sound. Bill Steer's guitar (tuned two and a half steps down), Lee Dorrian's voice and Jim Whitely's bass make you forget all about their predecessors, relentlessly grinding out riffs, obsessive pulses and subhuman vocalizations (often punctuated by demonic screeching) without a moment's respite. The blazing "Success?", the psychedelic, sickly "Deceiver" and "Stigmatized", the alienating chaos of "Parasites", the punishing devastation of "Divine Death" and "Moral Crusade", and the out-of-control pow-wow of "Dragnet" are other moments worth remembering.

After its release, the record - which reached an astonishing number seven on the UK indie chart - became something of a mysterious object, opposed by many critics and adored by many other industry insiders, first and foremost the enlightened John Peel, who would invite the band into the BBC studios to record their "Peel Sessions". The grindcore revolution thus began with quite the blessing.

In 1988 (the year the New Musical Express put Napalm Death on its cover, calling them "the fastest band in the world"), "From Enslavement To Obliteration" would then arrive, an album that helped make the stronghold built by "Scum" even more majestic and solid.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

23/11/2014