The 13th Napalm Death studio album, and their third for Century Media, starts off as a fast and furious barrage of riffs and blast beats. There are some tempo changes here and there, to keep the listener’s attention from wandering, and the fourth track, “On The Brink Of Extinction,” is surprisingly thrashy, but as the album gets going, it initially feels like more of the same, a possibly disappointing follow-up to 2006’s breathtaking Smear Campaign. But then, on the title track, things get weird. Barney Greenway adds a weirdly tuneless style of clean singing to his usual enraged bark, almost working against the melody expressed in the riff. That’s followed by “Life And Limb,” which begins by chugging in an almost groove-metal manner, has maybe the most melodic chorus on the whole album, and ends with clanging clean guitars over atmospheric feedback.

The longer the album progresses, the more adventurous it gets. There’s a trilogy of tracks in the second half — “Passive Tense,” “Larceny Of The Heart,” and “Procrastination On The Empty Vessel” — that could have been outtakes from 1996’s dubby, post-punkish Diatribes. Then we get the high-tech thrash of “Feeling Redundant,” and two final tracks of blazing grind, “A No-Sided Argument” and “De-Evolution Ad Nauseum,” just to remind you that you’re still listening to a Napalm Death album from 2009. The ability to encapsulate all the growth they’ve undergone in the two decades since this lineup first began to come together, bring in all the best bits from the weird tangents they’ve gone down, and still sound 100 percent like themselves is the mark of a genuinely great band. Napalm Death are a genuinely great band, and Time Waits For No Slave is their best album. (Note: There are three bonus tracks on various deluxe editions, and they’re as good as the album tracks, especially the insane distorted bass on “Suppressed Hunger” and the atmospheric dub-doom of “Omnipresent Knife In Your Back,” which sounds like Kevin Martin of Techno Animal and The Bug remixing Napalm Death, is great, too.)