Rewind album: From Enslavement to Obliteration, by Napalm Death
Arguably the world's most extreme musical genre was born in the mid-1980s when heavy metal collided with hardcore punk and gave birth to the grossly mutated offspring known as grindcore.
Napalm Death
Earache
Arguably the world's most extreme musical genre was born in the mid-1980s when heavy metal collided with hardcore punk and gave birth to the grossly mutated offspring known as grindcore.
Grindcore took the distorted, downtuned guitars of heavy metal, the incredibly fast drumbeats and political lyrics of hardcore punk, added demonic growls and shrieks as vocals, put everything into an industrial-sized blender and turned it onto 11. If Phil Spector made a wall of sound, grindcore produced a wall of sheer, terrifying noise.
One of the originators of the sound were Napalm Death, a band who formed as teenagers in Birmingham in 1981, and were originally inspired by Britain's anarcho-punk movement, particularly groups such as political punks Crass.
Napalm Death first came to global attention with their blistering 1987 debut Scum, which features 28 tracks crammed into 33 minutes, and contains what Guinness World Records has recognised as the world's shortest song: You Suffer, a 1.3-second blast of noise with the lyrics, "You suffer/But why?"
On the band's second album from the next year, From Enslavement to Obliteration, everything was ratcheted up a notch further: the metal elements were more pronounced, the blast beats were even faster, the lyrics focusing on conformity and mental enslavement more extreme.