Napalm Death brought throes of joy to extreme music fans in the NPR office, becoming the first ever grindcore band to erupt into a Tiny Desk Concert.
Today (July 15th), the public broadcaster revealed a right raging mini-set that Napalm Death recorded earlier this year while the U.K. outfit were on their North American tour. The eight-song set pulled from various parts of an epic catalogue, running as far back as Scum songs like “Instinct of Survival,” into From Enslavement to Obliteration’s “Dead” all the way up to material form 2020’s Throes of Joy in the Jaws of Defeatism.
“The first grindcore band at the Tiny Desk had to be the founding fathers. I turned down or said ‘maybe later’ to so many others — that’s how important it was to me to get this right,” NPR Music’s Lars Gotrich explains in a statement of the extreme booking. “There is only one Napalm Death, not only exemplary of extreme music but also what it takes to be human in what feels like an inhumane time.”
Vocalist Barney Greenway shared some banter with the crowd. A push-pit began stage-right, the mosh-frenzy revealed to viewers via one camera’s birds-eye angle. And yes, of course, Napalm also performed ultra-iconic split-second Scum classic “You Suffer.”
“I’ve dipped in and out of Democracy Now! via NPR Radio for decades now to get my unvarnished yet thoughtful North American news,” Greenway said in a statement. “So when the NPR Tiny Desk thing came up, it kind of blew my tiny mind a little bit. We realized that we were going to reach far more people than usual with the TD performance, but as you might expect from Napalm Death, we were never going to temper the performance to any degree.
“We hope everybody at least gets something from it, even if it’s just an understanding of musical abrasion being pushed to the nth degree. Please always support public access broadcasting in view of the ongoing relentless attacks upon it.”
Napalm Death wrapped up their North American tour last month. The band also delivered their Savage Imperial Death March collaborative album with Melvins earlier in the year.