Napalm Death Bring Grindcore To NPR’s Tiny Desk For A Historic Performance

Napalm Death have made history as the first grindcore group to appear on NPR’s Tiny Desk concert series. View the performance below.

The British grindcore veterans recently visited NPR’s acclaimed live music programme, delivering a packed eight song set that sounded completely different from the performances normally featured on the series.

The programme has welcomed major artists such as Adele, Tyler, The Creator, Weezer, Turnstile, Taylor Swift, Anderson Paak., Pulp and many others. While most guests present quieter and more polished versions of their songs, Napalm Death chose a different approach and unleashed a powerful, memorable performance.

During a set lasting less than 20 minutes, frontman Barney Greenway and his bandmates raced through ‘Instinct Of Survival’, ‘Strong-Arm’, ‘Everyday Pox’ and several other tracks. They also used the opportunity to voice their support for public broadcasting.

The group closed with ‘You Suffer’, the track recognised by the Guinness Book Of World Records as the shortest commercially available song in history, lasting less than two seconds.

“I’ve dipped in and out of Democracy Now! via NPR Radio for decades now to get my unvarnished yet thoughtful North American news. So when the NPR Tiny Desk thing came up, it kind of blew my tiny mind a little bit,” said the singer.

“We realised 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.”

Greenway continued: “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.”

NPR Music producer and writer Lars Gotrich arranged the session and explained why bringing the grindcore legends onto the programme mattered to him.

“The first grindcore band at the Tiny Desk had to be the founding fathers,” Gotrich said. “I turned down or said ‘maybe later’ to so many others – that’s how important it was to me to get this right.

“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.”

Napalm Death are not the first musicians to create a memorable moment during the Tiny Desk Concert series. Turnstile appeared on the NPR programme last September and introduced its first stage dive. More recently, Amaia attracted attention by playing a flute shaped like a folding chair.

Elsewhere, Napalm Death joined Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore last year to record a Ramones cover. Shortly before that collaboration, Yard Act teamed up with the band’s Shane Embury for a live rendition of Motörhead’s classic ‘Ace Of Spades’.