Godflesh ensures people don’t forget their legacy as the harbingers of industrial metal with their penultimate album that hypnotises you in doom.
After a career that has spanned almost 38 years, Godflesh are returning with their penultimate album. True metalheads have always known that a lot of bands and artists like Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, and even Meshuggah would never exist if not for Godflesh. Justin Broadrick was the guitarist of Napalm Death, but the kind of sound he wanted was more melodic yet aggressive and had to reflect the industrial feel of music as technology started leaving its rusty imprint on all music getting made. Close to four decades later you’re pretty much getting handed the commandments on how the OGs made music. This is called Decay.
The painful closer
Expect little to no vocals on this album. After Broadrick’s hernia surgery, the duo have either taken a decision or left it to natural circumstances to not lean into vocals like before. Their previous album, Purge, had a lot of hip-hop beat elements and exploration. As a veteran band, Decay is almost harrowingly reflective of their lives. The mechanical percussion that Justin and B.C. Green have cemented as the canvas for their tracks evolves again, with bass taking on volume in the liminal space like something you’ve heard before.
If 2023s Purge was a revisit of Pure, this is an industrial revisit to the early years. To even imagine blending metal and electronic at that time was a far-out concept. Metal had its purest link in being viewed as a live, gritty exploration of the instruments, emotions, and people that would usually never be seen. Electronic was entering the spotlight with EDM, the opening hints of techno, and so much more. In a tiny room in the UK, Justin Brodrick finished recording Napalm Death’s debut album and turned to recording the instruments he couldn’t play or get access to by himself. The rest is history.
The atmosphere is electronic
The entire album is a resemblance of a cold steel room within which electronic elements fuse with the distorted, guttural, and visceral energy of distorted guitars and heavily purged bass. You’re in it for the scraped-clean experience, with whispers of an ominous movie theme being uttered in the DNA of the songs. The opening is with Master and Slave, which does continue strings of Purge. It uses the monotony of the beat to create a chromatic display of rhythmic, atmospheric sounds.
Percussive tendencies
Bringing back the Alesis HR-16 for percussion is reminiscent of 1989s Streetcleaner. Broadrick and Green make Godflesh feel like that reminder of retro while establishing why they created the entire genre. They have always focused on having a wall of guitar sound that is complemented by the driving bass. Living/Ending shows you the first solid groove to latch on to, and its that harrowing feeling you’ve looked for. It is in these 5-minute tracks that you get to see the 20 audios of innovation within this genre. You can definitely see why Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, Manson, and even extreme metal projects like Meshuggah have been inspired by them.
It is in Fear of Man you hear tracings of Broadrick’s voice. Godflesh remains a solid wall of sound, but this temporal break is one of the 15 or so words uttered in the whole album. If we are looking at this as a farewell, like we should be, we are going back to industrial metal bullet points to remember how this even feels. It is the sludge break in Fodder that shows you some other genre hints that this spearhead band is responsible for. The way the guitar bends and morphs with the same note is definitely skin-crawling. Fortunately, that’s always what they’re going for and the lack of vocals makes the instrumentals hit much harder.
The ones they’ve inspired
Godflesh make sure the closing chapters of their legacy have strong bookends. It is amazing that the band that takes inspiration from Black Sabbath, Whitehouse, post-punk innovators Killing Joke, and hip-hop legends like Run DMC, Rakim, and Public Enemy developed something like this out of Birmingham. Mike Patton of Faith No More also calls Godflesh a big influence, along with Fear Factory, who owe their existence to this band. They called quits on their live careers after Broadrick’s health complications.
There is perhaps no other band to learn the ups and downs of life from. This is the band from which BC Green left to focus on other things. In 2002 Godflash was kept alive with certain hopes but was proclaimed dissolved in 2002. A nervous breakdown, cancelled tour and remortgaging the house had Jason back to point zero, from which Jesu was born. Here we are 20 years later, celebrating 4 other albums they have been able to give us. The 5th one will come in no time, and maybe we get more Jesu from Broaderick.
A page to close
Closing with Consume Me, you can tack it as apocalyptic. With the pain and suffering Jason has gone through with health issues, it might be an internal scream. It is a powerful closing number and will take energy from you in ways. As the band would like me to chant it, “Godflesh is dead, long live Godflesh.”
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Self professed metalhead, moderately well read. If the music has soul, it's whole to me. The fact that my bio could have ended on a rhyme and doesn't should tell you a lot about my personality.
