Words From The Exit Wound was Napalm Death’s farewell to Earache Records, as well as their last record with producer Colin Richardson (who’d worked on every one of their 1990s albums, starting with Utopia Banished). It also came wrapped in the single ugliest album cover in their catalog, up there with Iron Maiden’s Dance Of Death for instantly dated digital hideousness. That said, it’s a great fucking album, too often ignored by fans who favor their harder, more monochromatically aggressive material.

The music is some of the most stylistically expansive and, frankly, melodic in their catalog. Many of the songs are a blend of melodic death metal and crisp industrial; “Incendiary Incoming,” with its pinch harmonic guitar lines, could be a song by Prong. From the opening “The Infiltraitor” to the closing “Sceptic In Perspective,” the riffs have an almost space-rock energy, and across the board, Danny Herrera’s playing slower than at any other time in the band’s career, allowing a real rock ‘n’ roll swing to take over for the machine-gun battery for which he’s typically known. As with all the Richardson-era albums, there are a lot of clean vocals and very few interjections from Shane Embury, and some songs have industrial-ish intros or interludes, with spoken samples over noisy electronic backgrounds. (This was something the band had been doing as early as Utopia Banished, and continues to this day; it works remarkably well even alongside their most grinding material.) Fear, Emptiness, Despair may have been Napalm Death’s best-distributed album, but Words From The Exit Wound is their most commercial. Shockingly, it proves that they probably could have gone even farther down this road, had they so chosen. (Note: In a typically late ’90s move, the U.S. edition of the album ends with three minutes of digital silence, followed by three live tracks — “Hung,” “Greed Killing,” and “Suffer The Children.”)