Smear Campaign (2006)

Smear Campaign (2006)

Smear Campaign is a pretty formulaic album. It’s fast and furious, the riffs and drumming all set on hyperspeed and Barney Greenway’s blast-furnace vocals coming straight at you with zero subtlety or variation. It’s the sound of Napalm Death doing what they’ve been doing for a whole lot of years, and it’s a lot like a 21st Century Motörhead release in that way — you know what you’re going to get, the only question is how much energy and craft they’ll put into it. Will it be the equivalent of a killer album like Inferno, or a relatively lackluster disc like Motorizer? Well, as you can tell from its place on this list, Smear Campaign is fucking great.

Lyrically, it’s more focused than many of their releases — basically every song is an attack on organized religion. Musically they’re locked in, too; with the exception of the intro track, “Weltschmerz” (which leads immediately into “Sink Fast, Let Go,” one of their fastest 21st Century tracks), there’s nothing midtempo or slow here. There’s only one guest, too: Anneke van Giersbergen, formerly of Dutch semi-Goth rockers The Gathering, adds creepy spoken vocals and background wailing to “In Deference.” If you wanted to give someone only one album to explain what Napalm Death were about in the 2000s, Smear Campaign would be an ideal choice. It’s not their best album of the 21st Century, but it might be their most archetypal.