Spanning the past thirty years and counting, the Agathocles discography is one of the most extensive in all of grindcore and, more broadly, the entire extreme music underground. With fourteen full-length albums and several hundred EPs, split releases, and live albums, the band is rivaled by few others in terms of the sheer volume of its output. Such a prolific catalog can prove daunting to those interested in an initial sampling of an artist’s work, since there is not always an obvious point of departure from which to begin the process of familiarization. Then again, one could always argue that the only logical launching pad would be from where the band itself started. In this spirit, Nuclear War Now! is proud to release “If This Is Gore, What’s Meat Then?,” a compilation of Agathocles’s first two proper studio demos from 1988, as well its tracks from the 1990 split LP with Drudge. These recordings provide the most direct window into the birth of “mincecore,” a term coined and adopted by the band to describe its raw and minimalistic form of grindcore, which stands in stark contrast to some of the more modern, polished, and technical varieties that have since arisen and to some extent drawn the genre away from its roots.
