Extreme Noise Terror (often abbreviated to ENT) are a British extreme metal band formed in Ipswich in 1985 and one of the earliest and most influential crust
bands. Noted for one of the earliest uses of dual vocalists in
hardcore, and for recording a number of sessions for BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel, the band started as crust punks and helped characterize the early, archetypal
grindcore sound with highly political lyrics, fast guitars and tempos, and often very short songs.
Extreme Noise Terror originally consisted of dual vocalists Dean Jones and Phil Vane, guitarist Pete Hurley, bassist Jerry Clay and drummer Darren "Pig Killer" Olley. Prior to ENT, Vane and Hurley had played with
Discharge-influenced
… Read more acts Freestate and Victims of
War, whilst Jones had been singing with Raw Noise. Hurley claims that the band name came from an insert for an album by the Dutch band Lärm: "It featured a bandanna-ed
hardcore kid with '
Extreme Noise Terror' surrounding him. Those three words summed up exactly what we were aiming at." Aside from
Discharge, the band cite as early influences Anti Cimex,
Rattus and
Antisect, another early proponent of the "one high, one low" vocal approach. ENT signed to the small UK-based indie label Manic Ears after a solitary gig supporting
Chaos UK.
Their first release for the label was a split LP with
Chaos UK in 1986, entitled Radioactive Earslaughter. Although there were still musical similarities between the two
bands, ENT were already beginning to twist
hardcore into what would later become known as "
grindcore". ENT have however expressed misgivings about the use of the term: We were known as
hardcore punk. Then it became this 'Britcore' thing that Sounds and NME came up with, with the
Electro Hippies, Napalm, Carcass and Bolt Thrower all rolled into one, all playing the same shows and then Napalm Death made the word 'grind' up. But they were always a bit more metal than us and we didn't really know what this word 'grind' meant.