Like many lovers of extreme music, I was surprised and delighted to see NPR posting the latest instalment of their Tiny Desk Concert series yesterday featuring a blistering, sub-twenty minute set from grindcore pioneers Napalm Death. For a series that’s featured the likes of Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan, to it’s previous heaviest from Turnstile and Gwar, it seems like a hell of a departure. But Birmingham’s finest are the ideal band to represent the furthest extremes of heavy music on such a large platform.

Sure it’s great to see such a storied and formative band to many people performing an incredibly tight and uncompromising set, but that’s not why I think they’re such good ambassadors. To begin with, Napalm Death believe in things and aren’t afraid to say so. You can easily see their politics throughout their career, but like all the best bands to have come from punk, they also walk the walk. During their set, frontman Barney Greenway takes the time to acknowledge the threat public access broadcasting is facing in the UK and US, describing it as “precious”. Doing so in a performance fundraising for a public access broadcaster demonstrates their commitment to their ideals to even the most casual observer, before leading into Everyday Pox, a song with a related political message.

But as much as Napalm Death can be very serious about their beliefs, extreme metal and punk has an inherent silliness to it. This can often be hard to overcome for newcomers when everyone in the seem is so self serious all the time, but Napalm Death treat this inherent silliness with dry humour to acknowledge it without ever detracting from how much people truly love this kind of music. From describing Amoral as “something resembling musical niceties” and immediately following it with micro-song Dead, to finishing the set with You Suffer – a song as brief as it is iconic – really captures the inherent humour in this genre of music.

Finally, on a more personal note, I have been floating a theory for a few years that I refer to as the Napalm Death effect. My theory posits that when confronted with sufficiently extreme music for the first time there are two possible reactions. “What the fuck was that? That was horrible, I never want to hear anything like that ever again”, tends to be the most common and is where that story ends. On the other hand you have reactions like mine when I first heard Napalm Death as a teenager: “What the fuck was that? That was horrible, I want to find out what that was all about”. And here I am many years later, writing about how great Napalm Death are on the Internet. Sometimes, I think, fans of heavy music incorrectly think we need nice, accessible, polished bands to coax people into our world. Sure, that can sometimes help, but often it’s better to give someone something to work towards without sugar coating it, if we want to create really entrenched fans. Napalm Death are ideal for this because of the depth of their discography and the amount of different levels of extremity you need to travel through to get to them. Even if you never end up getting into them properly, you’re very likely to find your ideal level of heaviness or your journey to understanding them. And really, what more could we want from a band representing extreme music on such a large platform?