If there's anything to be said about the coming Napalm Death album, it's that it doesn't sound like anything they've ever done. The band's recent single "Amoral" was more noise rock than anything else, and now the new single "A Bellyful of Salt and Spleen" is just outright creepy, atmospheric sludge.
“’A Bellyful of Salt and Spleen,’ you could say, is about building and breaking down in the same discordant breath," explains vocalist Mark "Barney" Greenway. "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 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 & Khaled Lowe, directing the video, really focussed 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."
The video for the single was directed by Sam Edwards and Khaled Lowe (a-sidefims.com). Throes of Joy in the Jaws of Defeatism is out September 18 and pre-orders are available here.
