{"id":904306,"date":"2026-09-24T23:38:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-24T23:38:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/904306\/"},"modified":"2026-09-24T23:38:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-24T23:38:10","slug":"godflesh-decay-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/904306\/","title":{"rendered":"Godflesh, ‘Decay’: Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tOver the course of Decay, Godflesh<\/a>\u2018s 10th and supposedly penultimate album, frontman Justin Broadrick<\/a> utters less than 150 words total in just 42 minutes. When you do hear his voice, he shouts, whispers, and growls. His words are at once part of the rhythm section and profoundly personal poetry. So when he sings, \u201cForlorn\/evermore\u201d on the song \u201cLiving\/Ending\u201d in a way that stretches two words into four \u2014 \u201cfor \u2026 lorn \u2026 ever \u2026 more\u201d \u2014 you feel his pain. He sings in a way that makes you want to listen closely, and not just because Broadrick will never sing like this again.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis past spring, the singer-guitarist announced that hernia repair surgery left him with a six-and-a-half\u2013inch scar and doctors\u2019 orders never to growl again. If he did, he could rupture his abdomen, crippling him for life. Fortuitously, he had already recorded Decay\u2019s vocals in the same sessions as Godflesh\u2019s previous album, 2023\u2019s Purge<\/a>, so all he and bassist Ben Green had to do was polish off Decay\u2019s music. Broadrick has said that Godflesh\u2019s forthcoming final album, The End, will be more avant-garde \u2014 no yelling necessary.<\/p>\n

\n\tPerhaps because they knew the end was near, the duo turned Decay into a perfect farewell to the unique fusion of industrial, techno, and rap\u2019s mechanized rhythms and the downtuned guitar riffs of sludge metal that they have been chasing since the Eighties. Broadrick\u2019s music has influenced Faith No More, Korn, Fear Factory, Living Colour, Metallica, and countless other headbangers, as well as Phoebe Bridgers, who liked Broadrick\u2019s playing so much she enlisted him to play on her recent Lost Weekend album. But Godflesh never embraced pop song structures or melody in the same way as those that followed them, instead toying with musical form and resculpting the sound of heavy music into dystopic expressionism.<\/p>\n

\n\tUnlike Purge, which hit hard right out of the gate with a barrage of forceful metal songs, Decay plays more to Godflesh\u2019s experimental side, and its half a dozen tracks are some of the band\u2019s most sophisticated and emotional songs. Opener \u201cMaster and Slave\u201d inserts and removes musical motifs like a Jenga tower, sliding one sound out and adding others at a slowly uncoiling pace. There\u2019s eerie synthesizer, trembling bass, and gut-checking guitar, all as Broadrick whispers, \u201cThere is no we\/There is no me.\u201d Then \u201cLeaving\/Ending\u201d comes in with a Schoolly D\u2013style drum machine rhythm and Broadrick shouts, \u201cBring about hard change\/Soft wired, being boiled.\u201d In contrast, \u201cFeral Colony\u201d is the sound of motion sickness with its pumping one-two-one-two drum-machine rhythms and undulating guitar.<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\tThe second half of the album is even denser. \u201cFear of Man\u201d starts with techno-inspired bass-heavy drums, played at half speed, until piercing synthesizers hover atop them and Broadrick\u2019s guitar squeals. It\u2019s tough to listen to. There\u2019s no midrange in the tone, only the most aggressive sounds your subwoofers and tweeters can muster. Then \u201cFodder\u201d pushes even more bass frequencies until Broadrick starts sliding his hand up and down his guitar neck for disorienting sound; the drum machine serves as a nail gun here, holding listeners in place. There are house-music keyboard motifs in the background, but they\u2019re easy to miss in the maelstrom. \u201cWhat you say doesn\u2019t matter,\u201d Broadrick sings. \u201cWhat you know doesn\u2019t help.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\tThe album closes with \u201cConsume Me,\u201d a 12-minute descent into hell, Broadrick\u2019s final recorded fury. It begins slow and atmospheric and altogether unsettling. Broadrick sounds like a monster when he sings: \u201cSurrounded by razor tongues\/Circling like sharks\/Bleeding for your vampires\/Sweating you shit out.\u201d The intensity increases as the song progresses, leading to a final growl: \u201cBait, I am your bait, consume me.\u201d It\u2019s gutting and it\u2019s emotional in its pureness. But from the sound in his voice, it\u2019s clear that his own personal pain is what has been consuming him. You can almost sense the relief when he\u2019s done, and it\u2019s easy to share a sense of near satisfaction with him. The only thing that might have improved the album would\u2019ve been if they\u2019d dug into more rigid metal riffs, as they did on Purge, but that would\u2019ve taken away from Decay\u2019s general unease, the uneasy mood they can conjure up through experimentation.<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n

\n\tBroadrick has always been one of metal\u2019s most prolific compartmentalists, and his legacy is diverse. In the same decade Godflesh formed, he also helped pioneer grindcore as Napalm Death\u2019s guitarist on their debut LP, and he dabbled in other kinds of industrial music and gloomy rock with Final, Fall of Because, and Head of David. He incorporated dub into Godflesh, explored EDM with Techno Animal and the Curse of the Golden Vampire, and shoegaze with Jesu, and he\u2019s released music under the names of at least a dozen other projects. And he\u2019s said he\u2019s already been playing guitar on new recordings with Bridgers. He\u2019s an artist who never shows all of his capabilities at once. So Decay isn\u2019t the last the world will hear from Broadrick. It\u2019s just the last time the world can treasure hearing him like this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Over the course of Decay, Godflesh\u2018s 10th and supposedly penultimate album, frontman Justin Broadrick utters less than 150…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":904307,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[64,63,134,137733,472445,136],"class_list":["post-904306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-godflesh","tag-justin-broadrick","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/904306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=904306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/904306\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/904307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=904306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=904306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=904306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}