Godflesh - Decay [Indie Exclusive]

"Music for me is rarely complete," Justin Broadrick has said, "but it has to reach a point where enough is enough. Creatively, there has to be self-discipline. One has to end it." He was talking about arranging songs. He could just as easily have been talking about Godflesh, because Decay is the tenth album and the penultimate one. Thirty-eight years after the band's inception, twenty-five after the hiatus that nearly ended it for good, and three after Purge, Broadrick and bassist Ben Green are winding it down deliberately rather than letting it drift.

The machine runs exactly as it always has across these six tracks. A drum program with no sympathy in it, bass tuned to structural damage, guitar used as a blunt instrument rather than a voice. "Master and Slave" and "Feral Colony" grind past the point where a normal band would move on, until the repetition itself becomes the payload, and "Fear Of Man" and "Consume Me" close things out with the weight Godflesh have been applying since 1988. Broadrick mixed the record after surgery, still in real pain and discomfort, and whether or not that shows in the sound it is hard to unhear once you know.

Their influence runs improbably wide, through Fear Factory and Isis and Broadrick's own Jesu, and through most of what got called post-metal in the two decades after Streetcleaner. With live performances now finished and one album left, this is close to the last word from a band that invented its own genre by refusing to hire a drummer.

This indie exclusive pressing is on clear vinyl with white, black, and gold, out September 25, 2026 through Relapse. Limited to independent retail.