"Music, for me, is rarely complete," says GODFLESH mastermind Justin Broadrick, "but it has to reach a point where enough is enough. Creatively, there has to be self-discipline. One has to end it."
He is describing how songs get finished. He could just as easily be describing the band. GODFLESH will release "Decay", their tenth and penultimate album, on September 25, 2026 via Relapse Records — three years after "Purge", 25 years after the hiatus that nearly finished them, and 38 years after Broadrick and bassist Ben Green started.
First single "Living/Ending" is out now.
Few bands have earned the trailblazer label as completely. As the 1980s crumbled into the 1990s, "Streetcleaner" hit heavy music with the force of the Yucatán asteroid, vaporizing everything nearby and pushing lesser music toward irrelevance. What followed was a decade-plus of sonic destruction: albums like "Pure" and "Hymns" that gripped the guts and colonized the psyche, EPs like "Slavestate" and "Messiah" that landed like targeted mortar shells, and a run of experiments with beats and sampling that proved how far GODFLESH could travel inside their own self-imposed borders.
After a nine-year silence the band flickered awake with the "Decline & Fall" EP, then delivered the violent "A World Lit Only By Fire" and the more texturally nuanced "Post Self". "It's all just instinctive," Broadrick says of the ebb and flow. "I write and create when appropriate, and as I feel and as I need." When "Post Self" was done he stopped, because GODFLESH was no longer needed. Then, mid-pandemic in 2020, fires started again — in the middle of the night, as he tells it.
"'Decay' was born from the same sessions as 'Purge'," he explains of the six new tracks. "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. Unfortunately, two years passed whilst considering external labels, so that I didn't have to self-release GODFLESH anymore." The recordings were finished, but he changed a lot when he came back to them.
The album's timing is bound up with Broadrick's health. He underwent major abdominal surgery earlier this year for a hernia caused, by his account, by year upon year of shouting in this band. "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." It was mixed post-surgery, in pain. "Fortunately GODFLESH is generally me expressing my pain, albeit usually mental, philosophical and existential, whereas this was physical pain."
He sounds oddly at peace about the ending. "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."
"Decay" track listing: 1. Master and Slave / 2. Living/Ending / 3. Feral Colony / 4. Fear of Man / 5. Fodder / 6. Consume Me
Pre-order "Decay": orcd.co/godflesh