Godflesh “Decay” Review: Industrial metal titans wind down their unholy reign with an album both apocalyptic and transcendent.
There has always been something inherently hostile about Godflesh. Since Streetcleaner detonated into the industrial-metal landscape in 1990, guitarist/vocalist Justin Broadrick and bassist Ben Green have made music that sounds less like something designed to entertain than something designed to endure. Their guitars grind in cavernous distortion, their electronic drums pound with mechanical precision, and Broadrick’s vocals emerge from the wreckage like transmissions from some subterranean prison.
Yet even by Godflesh’s notoriously caustic standards, Decay sounds frayed and tattered. There is a sense throughout the album that the machinery is still running, but barely. Everything feels worn down, corroded and pushed toward some inevitable breaking point. Considering that Broadrick has described the album as part of Godflesh’s concluding chapter, that feeling is difficult to ignore.
Decay, due September 25 via Relapse Records, is the band’s tenth and penultimate album, and potentially its final sonic statement. Broadrick has said that years of performing and shouting in Godflesh contributed to the physical problems that eventually required major abdominal surgery. The vocals and recordings were largely completed before the surgery. The album was mixed afterward, while he was still experiencing pain and discomfort.
That context adds another layer of weight to Decay, but the record doesn’t need a biography to justify its existence. This is Godflesh doing what Godflesh has always done: turning pain, alienation and existential dread into something brutally physical and psychically spiritual, with just a faint hint of optimism beneath the sooty sonics.
The album opens with “Master and Slave,” where plodding drums and grinding guitars are surrounded by ghostly atmospherics. It’s an appropriately bleak introduction to a record that seems perpetually caught between mechanical force and spectral emptiness. The riffs don’t so much move forward as drag themselves through the rubble like a zombie Neanderthal.
“Living/Ending” immediately sharpens the attack. It begins with heavy breathing before erupting into almost Terminator-style drums and a scything, granulated guitar riff. The combination is quintessentially Godflesh, but there’s something particularly desperate about it here.
Then comes “Feral Colony,” which may be the closest thing Decay has to an outright banger. Imagine a more caustic version of Killing Joke’s “Eighties,” stripped of any remaining sense of uplift and left to corrode in an industrial wasteland. It’s a depressed, distressed industrial-gothic anthem, and its infectiousness provides one of the album’s biggest sugar highs. In a Godflesh context, of course, even the sugar is laced with poison.
“Fear of Man” finds the album reaching a strange miasma of despair and uplift, fueled by a majestic central riff and John Carpenter-esque synths, which lend the song a distinctly dystopian atmosphere. Godflesh has always understood that heaviness doesn’t only come from volume or distortion. Sometimes it’s the space around the noise that makes it feel enormous.
But it is “Consume Me” that ultimately makes the strongest case for Decay as a final chapter. The song, which runs nearly 12 minutes, sounds like a guided tour through hell.
It begins in a blast of blistering noise and doom-laden guitar before slowing into an ominous, plodding crawl. From there, it gradually builds in intensity until a molten metal riff takes over, accompanied by jackhammer drums, while Broadrick’s distorted vocals echo from an existential void.
An eerie synth motif runs throughout the song, sounding almost like the wail of a lost child buried underneath the wreckage. It gives “Consume Me” an unsettling emotional dimension that the sheer brutality of the music might otherwise obscure. By the time the song finally begins to dissolve into sullen ambient synths, it feels less like the end of a track than the aftermath of some terrible event.
That contrast is what makes Decay so effective. It is uncompromisingly bleak and oppressive, but it isn’t emotionally one-dimensional. Beneath the grinding guitars, inexorable percussion and suffocating noise are occasional flashes of grandeur, melancholy and even something approaching transcendence.
For a band that has spent nearly four decades exploring the intersection of industrial music, metal, noise and gothic atmosphere, Decay feels remarkably cohesive. It doesn’t attempt to rewrite the Godflesh formula, nor does it need to. Instead, it distills the band’s most enduring qualities into six tracks that sound simultaneously familiar and exhausted, massive and claustrophobic.
Broadrick has described Godflesh as having expressed his pain for the majority of his existence. On Decay, that expression feels particularly tangible. There is foreboding sense of finality that makes it all the more affecting.
Broaderick has hinted at a “final musical statement” before Godflesh ends on its own unforgiving terms. But Decay has a sense of finality that seems difficult to top. But I have every faith that he will deliver.
