Godflesh have released “Master And Slave“, the opening track from Decay, which arrives on September 25 through Relapse Records. It is the band’s tenth album and their second to last.
The six-track record follows 2023’s Purge, and came out of the same sessions.
“Decay was born from the same sessions as Purge,” Justin Broadrick said. “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.”
He has worked this way before. The Decline & Fall EP, issued in June 2014, was assembled from material left over from the sessions that produced A World Lit Only By Fire four months later.
Broadrick announced in March that Godflesh would stop performing live. Three weeks earlier he had undergone open abdominal surgery for an inguinal hernia that he said was close to an emergency, requiring a six-inch incision rather than keyhole surgery.
The cause, and the consequence, both come back to the way he sings.
“If I continue to perform and shout/scream as I do with Godflesh, then I am at high risk for more hernias, and blowing out my abdominal wall entirely. Godflesh live ended the day of my surgery, and upon the surgeon making this statement. I am now just about walking freely, but with little pace, albeit extremely carefully,” he said at the time.
The album had already been recorded, though not entirely before the hernia appeared.
“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.”
On the band’s ending, he said: “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.
The final Godflesh studio album has been written for around eighteen months and is due to be recorded before the end of this year. Broadrick has said it will not feature shouted vocals.
After that, he expects dub and live releases to continue, but no further studio albums and no more performances. His other projects, Jesu and JK Flesh, are unaffected, as neither makes the same physical demands, and he has said a new solo project is coming.
Decay tracklist:
- “Master And Slave”
- “Living/Ending”
- “Feral Colony”
- “Fear Of Man”
- “Fodder”
- “Consume Me”
“Living/Ending” was released first, in August.
Godflesh formed in Birmingham in 1988 around Broadrick and bassist Ben Green, and their 1989 debut Streetcleaner became one of the foundation records of industrial metal. Pure, Selfless, Songs Of Love And Hate, Us And Them and Hymns followed before the band stopped in 2002.
They returned in 2010, releasing A World Lit Only By Fire in 2014 and Post Self in 2017 before another pause and then Purge.
