Napalm Death take the elements of thrash and ramp them up to eleven – this is the birth of “grindcore”, utilising the speed and noise of punk, but going even faster. Even here, although some tracks are mere seconds long (in the case of You Suffer, a single second), they still produce some relatively long tracks of four minutes or so, even blending in changes in tempo, intros, verses, choruses, especially on the A-side.
A lot of the chorus parts, especially, are drummer Mick Harris going hell for leather while the guitar riffs become a rush of white noise. Vocals are delivered in a hoarse roar – by “Nik Napalm” Bullen on one side, and Lee Dorrian on the other (only Harris is constant between the line-ups on either side of the LP). Dorrian is slightly more throaty and phlegmy than Bullen, and the guitar mix for the B-Side line-up is a lot deeper and muddier (Bill Steer rather than Justin Broadrick).
Lyrics are hard to make out in the feral growling, but they tend towards political protest - “Multinational corporation, genocide of the starving nations” from Multination Corporations, for example. Or
“Siege of power inside your mind
Outward restrictions to keep you in line
You're a slave of their power, you never questioned why
You were made to suffer, you were born to die”
from the comparatively epic-length Siege Of Power.
Napalm Death are a primal scream in the face of Eighties capitalism, noise to drown out the grim realities of Thatcher’s Britain (which, to be fair, was beginning to recover from the upheavals, but settling into the new normal of haves and have-nots even while unemployment was starting to creep down). Once you’ve heard one of their tracks, you’ve pretty much heard them all so, like much of these kinds of extreme genres, the impact wears off.
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