Earworms and Earache for the Weekend Playlist

Amazing how the most random items lead you back to music and open the doorway to new artists and sounds. My pal Alanno loves to photograph backstreet counterculture and bring the grime and glamour to the most unlikely of settings. On his trails around Plymouth, he came across a random piece of graffiti that stood out, duly snapped it and posted it – fully expecting that it was a random set of words that would mean nowt to anyone.  

It was however a line from the iconic, niche, and utterly unique ‘Dopesmoker’ by Sleep – a one-hour album song, written around a single riff, that proceeds with all the urgency of a stubborn and dismantled grandfather clock whilst also having some of the heaviest and gnarliest riffage ever committed to tape... and so that as all the encouragement I needed to crack open the Earache back catalogue and explore some of the weird and wonderful things that iconic and never-to-be-bettered UK record label has brought us over the years.

So that includes bands like Carcass, Rival Sons, Bolt Thrower, Entombed, to Skindred, Dub War, my personal fav Mortiis, sadly missed Woods of Ypres, and of course big hitters like Bring me the Horizon, Misfits, Morbid Angel, and everyone’s favourite wedding and bar mitzvah band Napalm Death. Thanks to the wonders of the internet I can explore their extensive catalogue online  - unlike in my teens, when it was all down to my mate Dan from the school around the corner, with his Walkman and endless array of copied cassettes, that was the key to my musical awakening .

The most amazing thing about Earache is not just the risks they took with some of the most extreme music you will ever hear, but the all encompassing faith they put in the music – and the artwork and scene behind it – to tell its own story and to be mighty enough to carry the artists through years, fads, turmoil, and changes in music taste. 2025 is the 40th anniversary of the founding label, which started life as a collection of hardcore punk and thrash acts and has grown to encompass dub, industrial, hardcore techno, sludge, grindcore, and so much else. If it's too angry, loud and urgent for a mainstream label, but just too compelling to ignore, it will be on Earache.

No affiliations, nothing for us to gain by shouting out this awesome label, just kudos and thanks for 40 years of insane, challenging, and always heavy as fcuk music.