“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.”

Broadrick is primarily referring to the nebulous process of writing and arranging songs into their various potential shapes, but he could just as easily be describing Godflesh’s imminent conclusion. Just three years after the hypnotic crunch of Purge, 25 years after an uncertain hiatus that nearly scuttled the band, and 38 years since Godflesh’s inception, Broadrick and bassist-at-arms Ben Green set out to mercilessly crush this cold world with their tenth and penultimate album, this year’s Decay.

Across those decades, Godflesh emerged as an undisputed metal trailblazer, perhaps even a genre unto themselves. As the 1980s crumbled into the 1990s, Godflesh hit the heavy music world with all the force of the Yucatán asteroid. Upon impact, debut full-length album Streetcleaner vaporized anything in its immediate vicinity, wholly enrapturing its initial audience, and as its ash-plume of influence reached every inhabited continent on the planet, lesser music was either rendered extinct or crept toward irrelevance. Thus began an over ten-year reign of sonic destruction through albums like Pure and Hymns that gripped the guts and colonized the psyche, through EPs like Slavestate and Messiah that detonated like expertly targeted mortar shells, and through all the experiments with beats and sampling that proved how versatile Godflesh could be while operating within its own self-imposed boundaries.

After a nine-year hiatus, Godflesh again flickered awake, and the Decline & Fall EP ushered in another fertile era that treated us to the violent return record, A World Lit Only By Fire, and its more texturally nuanced follow-up, Post Self. “It’s all just instinctive,” Broadrick says of the band’s ebb and flow over the years. “I write and create when appropriate, and as I feel and as I need.”

So when Post Self concluded, Broadrick stopped, because he no longer felt Godflesh was needed. But during the pandemic lockdown of 2020, further fires flared in Broadrick’s mind – in the middle of the night, as he tells it – and Godflesh blazed anew, this time with almost overwhelming results.

“Decay was born from the same sessions as Purge,” Broadrick declares of the new record’s six 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 of Purge being released. Unfortunately, two years passed whilst considering external labels, so that I didn't have to self-release Godflesh anymore, but it took an awful lot of time to establish a comfortable home for me. The recordings were done, but as usual for me, I did change a lot of stuff once I came back to it.”

Having joined forces now with Relapse Records, Godflesh is ready to unleash an even bolder, bleaker series of sounds in Decay. These songs arrive shortly after Broadrick released a public statement about major abdominal surgery he underwent earlier this year. “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. I was already aware that the Godflesh shout, so to speak, was exacerbating the hernia greatly, as was every Godflesh performance in the lead-up to the surgery once the hernia appeared, and the hernia was mostly caused by year upon year of shouting in Godflesh. The album was mixed post-surgery, and while I was still in some pain and considerable discomfort, but fortunately Godflesh is generally me expressing my pain, albeit [usually] mental, philosophical and existential, whereas this was physical pain.”

While the middle of the record pulses with five-minute hate-grooves, Broadrick credits the slime-wracked opener “Master and Slave” and crawling closer “Consume Me” with Decay’s true conceptual thrust. “The bookends of Decay are the most important pieces to me. They say it all, so to speak; the album could have been just those two songs alone – the duration of them is half of the total album!”

As Godflesh’s active tenure comes to a close, Broadrick expresses gratitude that it was ever his vessel to use as he willed. “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.”

In the coming months, Broadrick promises the final musical statement from Godflesh, which he says takes one last experimental sidestep, returning to the inclusion of a tremolo arm on his guitar, which he has not played with since Streetcleaner. As Godflesh began, so it will end. No decline. No fall. ’Flesh forever.