Vegan Salad are a UK grindcore / powerviolence / fastcore abomination allegedly formed in 2017 after a noise complaint at an illegal benefit show held in the back room of a closed garden centre somewhere between the Midlands, South Wales, and total administrative confusion. No one agrees on the exact location. The first rehearsal is said to have taken place in a condemned polytunnel lit by a work lamp and powered by an extension lead borrowed from a man selling homemade seitan and bootleg Discharge shirts.

According to local legend, the band began when three members of separate failed hardcore projects simultaneously quit during an argument about tempo, ethics, and whether breakdowns longer than eight seconds constituted collaboration with the enemy. They reconvened later that night behind an overflowing skip full of supermarket produce, where a pact was made over a broken snare, a half-functioning distortion pedal, and an out-of-date bag of watercress. By dawn, the first Vegan Salad demo had supposedly been written, recorded onto a handheld dictaphone, partially erased by accident, and then declared finished on principle.

Their earliest material circulated in the usual sacred formats: mislabeled cassettes, corrupted file transfers, badly ripped rehearsal videos, and one CDR wrapped in cling film and posted inside a takeaway menu. A now semi-mythical first tape, Croutons of Wrath, is rumoured to have contained 18 songs in under 6 minutes, although surviving copies disagree wildly on track order, sound quality, and whether Side B was in fact a rehearsal, a bus journey, or an unrelated recording of somebody angrily chopping cabbage. The band have never clarified this and have at various times denied the release existed, claimed it was stolen by a distro in Leeds, or insisted that all copies were accidentally mulched during an anti-food waste workshop.

By 2018, Vegan Salad had become a minor problem for promoters across the DIY hardcore and punk underground. Shows were short, loud, and unstable. Set times were treated as abstract suggestions. Songs began before line checks ended. Microphones were destroyed at a rate that suggested either contempt or deep philosophical commitment. One notorious basement show allegedly ended after 4 minutes when the vocalist disappeared into the crowd, the drummer snapped a pedal, and somebody tripped over a crate of reduced-price lettuce that had been brought as “stage decor” and immediately weaponised by gravity. Attendees still refer to it as the “Salad Incident,” though accounts differ over whether any actual injury occurred beyond emotional improvement.

Musically, Vegan Salad occupy that glorious collapsing corridor where grindcore, powerviolence, hardcore punk, fastcore, crust punk, mincecore, d-beat, sludge, and noise crash into one another without signing the proper paperwork. Their sound has been described, not always kindly, as “Dropdead playing inside a refrigeration unit,” “Infest if they worked in produce logistics,” and “Siege rewritten by people banned from three separate rehearsal spaces.” Influences frequently named by critics, promoters, and people trying to make sense of the damage include Napalm Death, Spazz, Crossed Out, Charles Bronson, Man Is the Bastard, Magrudergrind, Weekend Nachos, Wormrot, Siege, Heresy, and the wider UK DIY hardcore underground.

Lyrically, the band’s concerns include animal liberation, ecological collapse, labour exploitation, anti-fascism, food systems, police violence, consumer hypocrisy, class resentment, moral fatigue, and the psychic corrosion of late capitalism. They have, however, always resisted being filed neatly into any one current of political punk. Their songs are less manifesto than compressed shrapnel: brief, ugly, bitter little units of refusal delivered with the energy of a freezer door kicked open at 3 a.m. and the emotional intelligence of a snapped shopping basket. There is humour in Vegan Salad, but it is the kind of humour that arrives with a split lip and leaves before the lights come on.

Their second tape, Leaf Warfare, expanded the project’s reputation beyond local scenes after a badly duplicated run of 50 tapes somehow travelled through crust networks, student houses, squats, vegan cafés, bike co-ops, and one entirely bewildered emo distro in Belgium. The release featured what some fans still call the definitive Vegan Salad line-up sound: blasts like industrial accidents, bass distortion resembling structural failure, and songs with titles that sounded like pamphlets written during a supermarket fire drill. The final track, “Ethics of the Knife Drawer,” was briefly banned from being played in one rehearsal complex after another band complained that the snare tone was “psychologically unreasonable.”