Four days in July 1999, six songs written by other people, and a sleeve that calls the thing a mini album, as if it were apologising for its own height. That is the whole of Leaders Not Followers, out on 25 October 1999, and it is a better joke than it looks: Napalm Death, a band that had spent much of the decade experimenting its way out of grind, walked into a studio in Surrey and fed its own teenage tape collection into a woodchipper, label side first.
Some context, because grind without context is just noise with a haircut. Freshly out of an acrimonious split with Earache, the Birmingham quintet of Barney Greenway, Shane Embury, Mitch Harris, Jesse Pintado and Danny Herrera booked Jacobs Studios from 21 to 24 July, sat Simon Efemey and Russ Russell behind the desk, and handed the result to Dream Catcher, who put it out one day short of a year after Words from the Exit Wound. Russell never left. He has produced them ever since.
The menu is a family tree with the bark ripped off. Raw Power from Poviglio, in the province of Reggio Emilia. Slaughter from Toronto, not the American hair band, thank you. Pentagram from Santiago de Chile, not the Virginia doom lords either. Repulsion from Flint, Michigan. Death from Florida. Dead Kennedys from San Francisco. Two of those songs had never made an album or an EP by their own writers by 1999: the Chilean one lived on a 1987 demo and a seven inch, and "Back from the Dead" was the title song of a Death demo from October 1985. And Chuck Schuldiner played guitar in two of the six bands, having passed briefly through Slaughter in 1986, which tells you how small the tape trading world really was.
Embury put the idea plainly in a piece published by Decibel on 1 March 2012: "We had just done the Leaders Not Followers EP, which was a bunch of covers of bands that we'd grown up on." No manifesto. Just homework, done loudly.
The homework mostly gets top marks. A good deal more concussive than the Italian original, "Politicians" comes in at one minute forty five and flattens the old hardcore song into something angrier and wilder, grind's elder cousin dragged out of 1985 and fed through the woodchipper by the grandchildren it never asked for. It is the right opener and the best argument for the whole demolition. "Maggots in Your Coffin" keeps every bit of the filth while the tightened playing and the bigger sound bolt extra weight onto it, which is a neat trick: cleaner and nastier in the same ninety six seconds. And "Demonic Possession" gets a slab of death metal muscle added to the Chilean demo, so a song once passed around on tapes dubbed from tapes arrives sounding like it owns the building.
Then there is "Incinerator", the longest proper song here at three minutes twenty and the one that got a promo video. Here the record trips over its own feet. "Incinerator" is a Toronto thrash song built for a different engine, and a grind band can play it perfectly and still never quite move in. Played straight and faithful, it is a museum piece handled with clean gloves, admired rather than set on fire.
"Back from the Dead" is the gesture of the record. Rescuing a song from Schuldiner's earliest days, one that never got past the demo stage, and giving it a real studio sound is a lovely thing to do. Nothing new comes with it, though, and the faithful approach that tames "Incinerator" keeps this one polite too. The gesture still earns its place.
Now the bill. The drums are the weak joint of the production: loud, triggered to the point where the kit sounds less like wood and skin and more like somebody stapling cardboard at speed, a sound that sits on top of guitars and vocals that otherwise come through with real bite. And then the closer.
"Nazi Punks Fuck Off" is listed at six minutes forty. The song itself is over in about a minute and a quarter. The rest is silence, minutes of it, before a hidden half minute turns up near the end, like a burglar who knocks. The message of the song was as necessary in 1999 as it was in 1981 and as it is now, and the band had already put it out as a single six years earlier. A second recording padded out with dead air is the moment the EP stops being a statement and starts being a stopgap.
A second recording padded out with dead air is the moment the EP stops being a statement and starts being a stopgap.
Which is what it is, finally: a stopgap, under twenty minutes, from a band clearing its throat after leaving Earache. Three of the six covers come back sharper than they went in, two come back more or less as they left, and one comes back with a long pause stapled to it. The real comeback arrived eleven months later with Enemy of the Music Business, same producers, same label, and the fire these sessions only found in patches. Grind collectors and Napalm completists need the opener and the Repulsion cover; everybody else can borrow those two from a friend and lose no sleep over the rest.