Birmingham, 1987: Napalm Death welded hardcore's politics to the fastest drumming anyone had yet attempted and called the record Scum. Songs measured in seconds, lyrics measured in slogans, and a blast beat every extreme genre since has borrowed. Carcass turned up two years later with a medical dictionary.
Label Histories
Six companies decided which death metal records existed, and only one of them was founded to release death metal. Roadrunner, Relapse, Nuclear Blast, Century Media,...
Essential Albums
Ten songs judged at the scale they actually work at: the moment, the ten seconds, the exact place in the running time where the thing you came for happens.
Explainers
Two records five weeks apart in 1987, two completely different sets of intentions. Seven differences that hold up, the one everybody gets wrong, the politics that ac...