History of Grindcore Music
Napalm Death
A wild, chaotic style of music that mixes genres, uses both shock and speed, and rattles the status quo, grindcore has been around since the mid-1980s. Though it’s often based on the harsh sounds and rough beats of industrial music, hardcore punk, death metal, and noise, grindcore can include almost any genre. Traditional music types, however, are normally distorted into twisted groundbreaking sounds when used in grindcore music.
Grindcore is famous for being used in “microsongs,” extremely short songs that are only seconds in length. Currently, the shortest recorded song in history is Napalm Death’s “You Suffer” of 1987, which is four seconds in length.
The first grindcore recordings were completed on a network of tape trading. Musicians relied on themselves for their own production needs. Hardcore punk band Siege and death metal group Repulsion are credited with playing the earliest grindcore sounds. The former was famous for taking the fastest, most hardcore sounds around and creating their own inspired from them–but faster.
But actual grindcore music is said to have begun in the UK during the mid-1980s. Napalm Death, at the time considered a hardcore punk band, is credited with coming up with the term “grindcore.” The band’s drummer Mick Harris says the term came from the word “grind,” which was the word he thought of when describing a Swans album. It fit, he thought, because of the speed of the music.
However, Harris alone isn’t the only one credited with coining the term. Shane Embury, bassist of the same band, says that their group thought of the term because the music they were into–from Siege to Swan to Celtic Frost–sounded like so many different kinds of music meshed together.
Digby Pearson, founder of Earache Records, says that grindcore isn’t just about the speed; it’s about the “heavy, downturned, bleak, harsh riffing guitars [that] ‘grind.’”