From Enslavement to Obliteration

The second album is the record that fixed what the word grindcore points at. It was recorded in July 1988 at Birdsong studio in Worcester and released by Earache that September as the 12-inch MOSH 8. It is the last Napalm Death album with singer Lee Dorrian and guitarist Bill Steer, and the first with bassist Shane Embury, who would go on to be the band's longest-serving member. That line-up had only a handful of rehearsals before going in with twenty-two songs. Most of them run under a minute, and pieces like "Evolved as One", "Lucid Fairytale" and "Unchallenged Hate" are placed less as songs than as single blows. Speed and brevity are the form itself here, which is what made the record the measure for everything that followed it in the genre. It went into the UK Indie Chart at number one and put Earache Records in front of a general audience. The running order here is the twenty-two tracks of the 1988 original, as printed.