There are no bad Napalm Death records. Like Motörhead, they’ve experimented more than you probably think (you could easily put together an entire CD of Motörhead songs that don’t sound like Motörhead songs), but they’ve never strayed far enough from their core sound to truly shock or alienate their fans. At the time of its release, though, Harmony Corruption came damn close.

The follow-up to their path-breaking twin masterpieces, 1987’s Scum and 1988’s From Enslavement To Obliteration, Harmony Corruption documented a period of major transition for the band. Vocalist Lee Dorrian had left after 1989’s Mentally Murdered EP, to be replaced by Mark “Barney” Greenway, formerly of UK death metal act Benediction. Guitarist Bill Steer had also departed to make his other band, Carcass, his full-time gig; he was replaced by Mitch Harris (ex-Righteous Pigs) and Jesse Pintado (ex-Terrorizer). And surprising basically everyone, Napalm Death’s third album turned out to be …a death metal album. They left their native UK and headed to Morrisound Studios in Florida, where they wrote and recorded a bunch of bottom-heavy, moshable songs that sounded more like Deicide or Obituary than anything previously associated with the name Napalm Death. (In fact, John Tardy of Obituary and Glen Benton of Deicide add backing vocals to the song “Unfit Earth.”)

Where Scum had packed 28 tracks into 32 minutes, and From Enslavement To Obliteration had maintained the pace with 27 tracks in 34 minutes, Harmony Corruption had only 10 tracks, and was 40 minutes long. And those songs had guitar solos, and breakdowns, and mosh parts, and Greenway’s vocals were lower and more brutish, but also intelligible in a way they’d never been before. Heard now, Harmony Corruption is every bit as aggressive as anything that came before. The primitivism of the early albums is still there, just spread across a slightly broader canvas. And it was a good move to make so early on, as it gave them the creative breathing room that would eventually allow them to make the even more exploratory albums they’d release in the mid- to late ’90s, like Diatribes and Words From The Exit Wound. But Napalm Death were never meant to be Malevolent Creation, and it’s a good thing this orthodox death metal version of the band only lasted one album.