Average Napalm Death song length, by album
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This is a graph of Napalm Death’s average song length by album. (Click it to enlarge it.) Only full-lengths of studio originals count, as well as proper songs – no bonus tracks or ambient intros. Originally I made this chart to test a theory that the shorter the Napalm Death song, the better the album. (Also, I wanted to learn how to make bar graphs in Excel.) The theory doesn’t hold true. Fear, Emptiness, Despair, my favorite Napalm Death record, is up there, with songs averaging 210 seconds in length. Utopia Banished, for which I have no special love, has, on average, relatively terse 162-second songs.
But some trends are evident. Harmony Corruption marks a 175% increase in average song length, corresponding with a foray into death metal. From there, average song lengths mostly top 200 seconds during the experimentation of the late ’90s. Then Enemy of the Music Business gets back to grindcore basics, at which point average song lengths fall below 200 seconds until this year’s Time Waits for No Slave. On the whole, Napalm Death are best off keeping songs under 180 seconds in length. Sabermetrics works in baseball; perhaps it could work in metal.
