The seventeenth Napalm Death album exists, but not soon. Shane Embury told the Pod Scum podcast that the band are back at Parlour Studios in Kettering with Russ Russell, who has produced them for two decades, and that the record is unlikely to surface before the end of next year. “I think [it's] probably not gonna be until the end of 2027, maybe, because of touring,” he said, in remarks transcribed by Blabbermouth.
What exists so far he called the bare bones. Embury, who plays drums himself, recorded the guitars and the bass first and handed the results to Danny Herrera with a suggestion rather than an instruction. “Maybe this beat, but you try what you wanna try,” he told him. Nothing is fixed, and he expects the drummer to lengthen or shorten parts as he goes.
It is an odd order of work for a band whose songs are often over before a drummer has settled into anything, and Embury said as much. The advantage is a large pile of ideas to sort through rather than a finished frame to fill in. Russell has engineered Dimmu Borgir, At the Gates and Amorphis among many others, and his studio has been the band's home long enough that going back to it is the least surprising part of the news.