Industrial icons Godflesh share 'Decay' album opener 'Master And Slave' • GRIMM Gent

Over three plus decades, Godflesh have existed as an undisputed metal trailblazer, perhaps even a genre unto themselves.

In 1989, the band landed with their debut full-length Streetcleaner which vaporized anything in its immediate vicinity. Thus began an over ten-year reign of sonic destruction through albums like Pure and Hymns that gripped the guts and colonized the psyche, through EPs like Slavestate and Messiah that detonated like expertly targeted mortar shells, and through all the experiments with beats and sampling that proved how versatile Godflesh could be while operating within its own self-imposed boundaries.

After a nine-year hiatus, Godflesh flickered awake in 2014 with the Decline & Fall EP and the violent return full-length A World Lit Only By Fire, followed by its more texturally nuanced follow-up, Post Self in 2017. When Post Self concluded, Justin Broadrick stopped because he no longer felt Godflesh was needed. But during the pandemic lockdown of 2020, further fires flared in Broadrick’s mind, and Godflesh blazed anew, this time with almost overwhelming results on the hypnotic crunch of Purge in 2023.

Now, 25 years after an uncertain hiatus that nearly scuttled the band, and 38 years since their inception, Broadrick and bassist-at-arms Ben Green have set out to mercilessly crush this cold world with their tenth and penultimate album: Decay. With this album, Godflesh unleash an even bolder, bleaker series of sounds and today they’ve shared the record’s vicious opening track “Master and Slave.”

“Music, for me, is rarely complete,” says Broadrick, “but it has to reach a point where enough is enough. Creatively, there has to be self-discipline. One has to end it.” Broadrick is primarily referring to the nebulous process of writing and arranging songs into their various potential shapes, but he could just as easily be describing Godflesh’s imminent conclusion.

Decay arrives shortly after Broadrick released a public statement about major abdominal surgery he underwent earlier this year. “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. 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.”

As Godflesh’s active tenure comes to a close, Broadrick expresses gratitude that it was ever his vessel to use as he willed. “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.”