Nobody agrees how long "You Suffer" is. The Bandcamp listing says four seconds. Other pressings say three, or one, and the figure that gets quoted in the record books is one and a bit. That is very funny and it is also the correct introduction to this album, because a record where the running time of the most famous song is a matter of opinion is not a record that was made carefully.
Here is what happened. Side one was recorded in August 1986 at Rich Bitch in Birmingham, on eight tracks, across two overnight sessions booked overnight because overnight was cheaper. Around twenty mates were in the room. The whole side cost fifty quid. Nicholas Bullen played bass and did most of the shouting, Justin Broadrick played guitar and was sixteen, Mick Harris played drums.
Then the band fell apart, as bands do, and side two was recorded in May 1987 in the same studio by four people, three of whom were not on side one: Lee Dorrian on vocals, Jim Whiteley on bass, Bill Steer on guitar, Harris still on drums. There had been exactly one rehearsal, three hours, the night before. The mix was finished between four and eight in the morning because the drums sounded weak and somebody had to fix it before the studio wanted its room back.
Napalm Death released the results as one album on Earache on 1 July 1987, twenty eight songs, just over thirty three minutes, a pressing of about two thousand. It is, by any normal definition, a split record by two bands who share a drummer, and nothing true can be said about it that does not start there.
It's two different line-ups, two different recordings, two different sounds, but everyone who pulled in together on it can be proud of it.
Mick Harris, Decibel, 27 February 2012
Which side wins is an argument that has been running for four decades and shows no sign of stopping, because the record is built to start one. Side one is the real one, looser and funnier and more alive, and side two is a rushed mess. Or side two is the step up, Steer's guitar pointing straight at the album that followed, and side one is two teenagers and a tape machine falling downstairs. Or the two sides are doing different jobs and ranking them is a category error. All three positions are sitting there in the grooves, and all three are right, which is the annoying thing. Side one is a hardcore band discovering that if you play the fast bit for the whole song, you have invented something. Side two is a band that already knows this and is trying to build songs out of it. Fourteen of them, most under a minute.
The genre exists because four teenagers could not afford a proper studio and stopped pretending they wanted one.
"The Kill" is twenty seconds and does more damage than most bands manage in a career. "Life?" opens side two and takes the blame for a seam it did not create, which is the fate of any song unlucky enough to be first after a join. "Siege of Power" is the longest thing here at just under four minutes and functions as an actual song, riff and everything, in case anybody was worried. And "You Suffer" is the joke that outlived everyone who told it, a song so short it broke the format it was recorded on.
Is the production bad? Yes. Objectively, measurably, cheerfully bad. The guitars are a wet crackle, the cymbals are a suggestion, and you could sit down with a scoring sheet, mark it one out of ten for fidelity and not tell a single lie in the process, provided you want music to be listenable. Listenable is the wrong thing to want from this record. The mess is the whole point. Fifty quid, no rehearsal, a drummer inventing the blast beat because he could not think of anything slower to do. Clean this up and you do not get a better record. You get a worse one made in 1994 by somebody with a budget.
What it did next is the bit that matters. John Peel played it on Radio 1 that September, ten thousand copies went out within weeks, and a Birmingham label that had bet its savings on the thing did not go under. Everything that came after, every grind band, every band with a song under thirty seconds, every powerviolence seven inch made in a garage since, comes from a pressing of two thousand copies made by two bands who never once played together.