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NAPALM DEATH BRING GRINDCORE TO NPR'S TINY DESK

Napalm Death have performed at NPR Music's Tiny Desk, bringing four decades of grindcore to a stage better known for hushed acoustic sets. The performance is almost certainly the heaviest music the series has hosted, and it arrives with the band making no accommodation whatsoever for the room. They played eight songs, closing with "You Suffer," which lasts roughly a second and a half and remains the shortest song ever recorded by a band anyone has heard of. The booking came from NPR Music producer and writer Lars Gotrich, a longtime advocate for heavy music at the network, who says he had been holding the slot for the right band. He turned down other grindcore acts or pushed them off, waiting. "The first grindcore band at the Tiny Desk had to be the founding fathers," Gotrich says, adding that there is only one Napalm Death, a band he sees as exemplary of extreme music and of what it takes to stay human in an inhumane time. Vocalist Mark "Barney" Greenway says the offer caught him off guard, in part because he has been a listener for years. He has followed Democracy Now! through NPR for decades to get what he calls unvarnished North American news, so the invitation "kind of blew my tiny mind a little bit." The band understood the reach involved, with the series pulling audiences far beyond the one they draw at a club or a festival, and decided immediately that reach would change nothing about the set. Greenway says they were never going to temper the performance to any degree, and that he hopes viewers take something from it even if it amounts to an understanding of musical abrasion pushed as far as it will go. He used the appearance to ask people to support public access broadcasting, which he notes is under relentless attack. Napalm Death formed in Birmingham, England in 1981 and are credited with inventing grindcore, the ultra-fast extreme metal subgenre that grew out of their early records. The British press initially treated the band as a curiosity, though John Peel's championing on BBC Radio 1 helped push them toward a global audience that has sustained them across 16 albums. None of the original members remain, and Greenway and bassist Shane Embury have anchored the group for most of its run. Embury joined in 1987, making him the longest-serving member, and he appears on 15 of the band's 16 albums. He is currently off the road while he addresses several health issues, including a battle with pancreatitis. SET LIST Instinct of SurvivalStrong-ArmEveryday PoxThroes of Joy in the Jaws of DefeatismAmoralDeadScumYou Suffer MUSICIANS Mark "Barney" Greenway: vocalsJohn Cooke: guitar, background vocalsMatt Sheridan: bassDanny Herrera: drums