Across their nearly 40-year career, grindcore stalwarts Napalm Death have encountered and overcome just about every hurdle a band could face. The latest is the delay of the vinyl release of their new album, Throes of Joy in the Jaws of Defeatism, till October 16th (from the original September 18th) due to a malfunction at the manufacturing plant, but Napalm are taking it in stride. As a bit of recompense to fans, the band has offered up a new single, the harrowing, industrialized diatribe "A Bellyful of Salt and Spleen," along with its stunning, live-action-meets-animation music video, directed by Sam Edwards and Khaled Lowe. Watch and listen above.
Throes of Joy in the Jaws of Defeatism is available for pre-order in an array of collectible formats including a particularly tasty Revolver-exclusive edition pressed to "Mucus With Envy Swirled" vinyl and limited to just 250 copies. Get yours before they're gone.
"'A Bellyful of Salt and Spleen,' you could say, is about building and breaking down in the same discordant breath," Napalm Death vocalist Mark "Barney" Greenway said of the song and accompanying video. "The building came in the sense of many layers of coruscating industrial ambience, all marching to the beat of a home-made drum kit consisting of rubbish bins, oil drums and industrial screw parts and other bits that Shane [Embury, Napalm Death guitarist] could find littered around the studio grounds. The scope and gravity and density just demanded a vocal that was as baritone and anguished as I could push out of myself.
"The breaking-down side of it was the intention to just focus minds to understand that people who traverse continents, suffocate in confined spaces or drown grasping for assistance are as keen to live in dignity and peace, and without violence and hunger, as the rest of us. As ever, quite simply, we are all human beings and if that means anything anymore, a helping hand is the least we can offer.
"Sam Edwards and Khaled Lowe, directing the video, really focused our minds in the way they wanted to drill down into the indifference generated around these things — via some incredible animation and suchlike married to the stuttering engines of unseaworthy vessels and the precision shunt of our industrial pounding. The whole visual concept of beach life going on around bodies washed up on the shore is a grotesque scenario that illustrates how meaningless those we can't connect to our own small universe can become."
