Godflesh release their tenth and second-to-last album on September 25 via Relapse, with one more to come before the band stops.
The six songs on Decay were never meant to be a farewell. They were leftovers.
Justin Broadrick wrote them during the sessions that produced 2023’s Purge, set them aside, and intended to put them out within a year. Label negotiations ate up two. In that time his body made the decision for him, and what was supposed to be a companion piece is now the penultimate Godflesh album.
Decay arrives September 25 through Relapse Records, the band’s first release for the label after years of handling their own output. “Living/Ending” is out now as the lead track. It is the tenth Godflesh album, and one more will follow before the band stops entirely.
“Music, for me, is rarely complete,” Broadrick said, “but it has to reach a point where enough is enough. Creatively, there has to be self-discipline. One has to end it.”
On how the record came together: “Decay was born from the same sessions as Purge. It was one huge pool of songs. I picked what I felt was appropriate for what I wanted to achieve with Purge, with the intention of releasing the songs that didn’t fit as a new album within a year of Purge being released. Unfortunately, two years passed whilst considering external labels, so that I didn’t have to self-release Godflesh anymore, but it took an awful lot of time to establish a comfortable home for me. The recordings were done, but as usual for me, I did change a lot of stuff once I came back to it.”
The reason for the ending was made public in March. Broadrick announced on Instagram that he had undergone open abdominal surgery for an inguinal hernia that came close to being an emergency, that Godflesh would no longer perform live, and that he would not be able to sustain the vocal delivery the band is built on. He described the procedure as debilitating, noting he has been diagnosed with autism and C-PTSD. He also said the final Godflesh studio album had already been written eighteen months earlier and would be recorded before the end of this year. Dub versions, live records and archival material may still appear afterwards; new studio albums and concerts will not.
The cause, by his own account, was the shouting itself.
“Fortunately, all of the recordings for Decay were completed long before the surgery, vocals included… although the back end of a couple of songs were recorded with the hernia itself, and that was a struggle,” Broadrick explained. “I was already aware that the Godflesh shout, so to speak, was exacerbating the hernia greatly, as was every Godflesh performance in the lead-up to the surgery once the hernia appeared, and the hernia was mostly caused by year upon year of shouting in Godflesh. The album was mixed post-surgery, and while I was still in some pain and considerable discomfort, but fortunately Godflesh is generally me expressing my pain, albeit [usually] mental, philosophical and existential, whereas this was physical pain.”
He is not treating it as a loss.
“It expresses my pain, and I’ve put my body and soul into this expression for the majority of my existence. I feel quite lucky, because Godflesh is now physically impossible for me, rendering it useless. I now wish to move out of its constraints, move on creatively with heavy/ugly music to new ground,” he added.
That new ground has a shape already. Broadrick has said a solo project is coming, built on his guitars, electronics and vocals, without the shout. Jesu and JK Flesh, neither of which puts the same strain on him, continue.
Godflesh started in Birmingham in 1988, formed by Broadrick shortly after his time in Napalm Death alongside bassist Ben Green. Streetcleaner, released the following year, remains the record most often cited as the beginning of industrial metal as a working idea, and the pair spent the next decade pushing it through Pure, Selfless, Us And Them and Hymns, alongside the Slavestate and Messiah EPs and a long run of experiments with drum machines and sampling. They ended it in 2002. Godflesh returned to the stage in 2010, put out the Decline & Fall EP and A World Lit Only By Fire in 2014, followed with Post Self in 2017, then stopped again until lockdown pulled Broadrick back to it and produced Purge.
Decay tracklist:
- “Master And Slave”
- “Living/Ending”
- “Feral Colony”
- “Fear Of Man”
- “Fodder”
- “Consume Me”
