What Happens When You Slow Down Napalm Death’s “You Suffer”?

If you’re not familiar with Napalm Death’s “You Suffer,” I hereby revoke your Metal Cred Card. The song, from side B of the band’s debut album, Scum, is certified as the world’s shortest song by The Guinness Book of World Records: it clocks in at an epic 1.316 seconds long.

But what happens when you lengthen the world’s shortest song?, you may wonder. Well, wonder no more: the Internet is all over that shit! You need scour YouTube for just 1.216 seconds in order to find a variety of examples of this aural experiment. Here are the results:

When the song is stretched out to six or seven seconds, it basically sounds like a dinosaur roaring. Which is actually pretty rad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lh1qPoUw8n0

Once the song is slowed down 800%, it starts to sound more like something from a Japanese horror movie. And that effect is only amplified when slowed to 2,000%.

Drawn the track out to forty-three seconds, and suddenly Napalm Death have sound designed the next Transformers movie.

This version of the song, though, really takes the cake: it not only slows the track down eight-hundred times, but also features pitch correction. It ends up coming in at a whopping 13:49 — nearly a quarter of Scum in its entirety! — but mostly just sounds like the white noise machines they use at your shrink’s office, or maybe somebody down the hall vacuuming.

I hope you have learned as much reading this piece as I learned writing it.