Napalm Death Interview on New Album
Shane Embury on Grindcore Legends Napalm's Time Waits For No Slave
Aug 19, 2008
Suite 101: Why do you think Napalm have had such longevity and are so revered?
Shane: “That’s a tough question to answer. It’s been tough for us as band members but we’re very, very close – four of us lived in a house for years at one point. I think musically we’ve tried to be diverse. Even though we’re a very extreme band, I don’t think any album sounds the same as the last one. In the mid-90s we kind of moved on and changed directions but we think of ourselves as the same as the people who listen to our music. We still get off on listening to new extreme bands, people send us stuff through the mail and we have a lot of close friends in the scene and we go out, we don’t hide ourselves away. We’re as honest as we can be and even when we have made mistakes, fans of the band can hopefully look at us and know that we mean what we do. We get slagged off by certain people and there’s always that mindset of ‘oh, their first two albums were the best’ or whatever but I think we’ve proved them wrong over the last few albums. We soldier on, because this is what we believe in. There have been times when we’ve been close to everyone thinking is it time to do something else but we’ve always managed to hang in there.
Shane Embury on New Napalm Death Album Time Waits For No Slave
Suite 101: You’re currently working on the new Napalm album – what can you tell us about that?
Shane: “Well, we’ve got about seventeen songs together. I guess it’s moving on again from the last album. It’s still very fast and hopefully heavy. There’s a couple of strange kind of moments in the music, with a little more experimentation and a little more discordance in the guitar perhaps. I think Barney’s trying to move forward vocally in some areas like he did on tracks like ‘Smear Campaign’ and ‘Persona Non Grata’. The album is gonna be called Time Waits For No Slave and, yep, it’s going along rather well.”
Suite 101: Barney (Greenway, vocals) has said the album’s going to be asking ‘why we’re killing ourselves to get ahead and not appreciating the simple things around us’. Is this going to be Napalm’s hippy album?
Shane: “(Laughs) A lot of the times our lyrics are probably a lot more peaceful than people perceive. But I’ve often thought along those lines myself – I mean, I’m massively busy in the music scene and I love that but sometimes I’ll look around at my family and friends and wish that I was making more time for them. Taking a little time to step back is not a bad thing from time to time – it’s knowing when to say ‘I’ve got a thousand emails today but if I get through them all now I’ll still have another thousand tomorrow so maybe I’ll take the day off just to clear the head a little bit.”
Click here for more from Shane on his new 80s metal act Absolute Power and other side projects.
