GODFLESH have released "Master And Slave", the track that opens "Decay". It is the second piece of the album to surface, after "Living/Ending" in August, and Relapse Records put it out as official audio ten days ahead of the record itself.
The title is not an accident, and it is not new territory. Justin Broadrick has been circling the master-slave relationship since "Slavestate" in 1991 — the industrial grind of a body owned by something else, whether that something is a machine, a system or a person. Thirty-five years later he has made it the first thing you hear on the second-to-last GODFLESH album.
That "second-to-last" is the part worth sitting with. "Decay" is the tenth GODFLESH album and, by Broadrick's own account, the penultimate one — not because interest ran out but because the body did. He underwent major abdominal surgery earlier this year for a hernia he attributes to year upon year of shouting in this band. The recordings were finished before he went under; the mix was done afterwards, in pain.
"I feel quite lucky, because GODFLESH is now physically impossible for me, rendering it useless," he said when the album was announced. "I now wish to move out of its constraints, move on creatively with heavy/ugly music to new ground."
The arithmetic around this record is brutal in its own right: 38 years since Broadrick and bassist Ben Green started, 37 since "Streetcleaner" flattened everything within range, 25 since the hiatus that nearly ended the band permanently, and three since "Purge" — the 2023 return that proved the second act had more in it than anyone had a right to expect. "Decay" was written from the same pool of songs as "Purge", the material that did not fit what that album was trying to be.
"Decay" arrives September 25 via Relapse Records on deluxe LP, standard LP, CD and cassette, and can be pre-ordered here.
"Decay" track listing: 1. Master and Slave / 2. Living/Ending / 3. Feral Colony / 4. Fear of Man / 5. Fodder / 6. Consume Me