REVIEW: Melvins with Napalm Death - Savage Imperial Death March

Coming to your speakers tomorrow is a true collaboration from two truly legendary acts within heavy music. MELVINS and NAPALM DEATH have joined forces to create a band built out of some of their current members in order to bring to life this amalgam of noise, sludge, unease and riffs. Taking the name Savage Imperial Death March from the two tours of the same name in 2016 and 2025, the album is the first studio project to be given that same moniker. The album was recorded at the MELVINS’ Los Angeles studio, with Buzz Osborne (vocals/guitar) and Dale Crover (drums) joined by NAPALM DEATH’s Barney Greenway (vocals), Shane Embury (bass), and John Cooke (guitar).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keJ3HDQgYDw

The album itself is a groovy, psych-infused mix of guttural heaviness, freight train riffs, sludgy headbanging passages and plain-old heavy metal fun. Lead single Tossing Coins into The Fountain of Fuck contains a bridge that is as catchy as anything you’ll hear this year whilst still having bags of heft and being comfortably able to withstand any worries of not being ‘heavy enough’.

It’s not only a new artistic venture for both sets of musicians, but also clearly a passion project with two sets of fans of each others’ output. In discussion about the album with Embury, Osborne and Greenway they all showed plenty of love for the other band: “I have loved the Melvins forever and their outlook on music,” Embury explains. “A chance to make an album of eclectic musical madness with them was truly an honour and a whole lot of fun, which surely is the whole point! Let’s do another one soon.”

“Napalm Death are one of my favorite bands ever,” Osborne says. “It was an absolute pleasure and a dream come true to do this collaboration with them. We wrote songs together. I would write a riff and we would learn it and record it right there. They wrote stuff and we would learn it immediately as well. It was truly a 50/50 partnership.”

"Funny how life turns out sometimes... collecting hard-to-find MELVINS 7-inches on Bleecker Street in 1989, and then touring twice and doing an album with them within the following 35 years,” Greenway adds. “Had a great time with it all, and nice to work with fellow travellers in the MELVINS who also couldn't care about pandering to 'demographics'. I felt myself almost babbling lyrically during the recording, and that alone made for very fun recording times."

This sense of fun and freedom pervades the record, which - whilst on the surface doesn’t have much of a sense of enjoyment at all - is as exploratory and experimental as anything either band has created in a long time. Track two, Some Kind of Antichrist, is a nine minute plus piece that twists and turns with multiple vocal styles, synths, rollicking guitars, and more across its fantastic length, whereas finale Death Hour has a brief sample that every listener will recognise coming after plenty of murky, semi-spoken word synth gloom.

Savage Imperial Death March is certainly not the most overtly NAPALM DEATH-esque record you could ever hear, and doesn’t complement every end of the MELVINS’ catalogue either, but perhaps that’s absolutely the entire point. This band isn’t a direct split of the two musically, it’s a collaboration between like-minded musicians who worked together to create something that they’re all proud of and clearly had a riot doing. Each song feels new and interesting, each choice feels conscious - there’s nothing here that feels particularly derivative or boring or generic, it’s all fun and exciting and fascinating. That alone makes it absolutely worth the ticket price.

Score: 8/10

Savage Imperial Death March will be released on 10th April 2026 via Ipecac Recordings.

Words: Jasmine Longhurst

Photos: Chris Casella