(With pride, we present Todd Manning’s review of the the tenth and penultimate album from Godflesh, which is out now on Relapse Records.)
If nothing else, 2026 has provided the metal world with “return-to-form” albums from two of its most endearing and long-lived acts. Neurosis is probably the first to come to many people’s minds, but the new Godflesh album, Decay, should not be overlooked. For me personally, as a fan, a musician, and a writer, these two groups have easily been the most influential in shaping how I see underground music.
Godflesh has never made a bad album. How one parses out their discography probably depends more on personal taste than anything approaching objective considerations. I tend to rank their more abstract work as their best. Albums such as Streetcleaner, Pure, Slavestate, and Selfless do not sound like they were made by humans, while Songs of Love and Hate and Hymns contain at least a sliver of humanity. Decay returns to the former sound.
photo by Kim Sølve
“Master and Slave” opens the album and sounds like an alien, perhaps inorganic, being surveying the shattered remnants of our civilization. The vocals are pushed into the background like a distant transmission. Instead, the emphasis is placed on the methodical pounding of the guitar, bass, and drums. Strange noises float above the mix like noxious clouds. It’s a bold statement, as many would place this piece of destructive atmosphere later in the album, but Justin Broadrick and Ben Green have been at this long enough to know what they’re doing.
“Living/Ending” brings the aggression to the forefront. It’s reminiscent of the mechanized assault of 1991’s Slavestate, a body-horror retelling of industrial dance music. The neck-snapping oddness of the main beat plays tug-of-war with a steroid-infused funk beat in the chorus while a menacing buildup interjects itself at key moments. This is contrasted with “Feral Colony”. While still extremely heavy, Justin Broadrick utilizes his patented clean vocals here, sounding as cold and desperate as ever; the vocal style lends itself to the mood shift.
“Fear of Man” also utilizes Broadrick’s clean vocals, this song conjuring Godflesh’s more abstract sound on 1994’s Selfless. There is a disembodied feeling to the song, with the slightly slower tempo and slowly evolving guitar figures evoking a soul cut adrift into the void. Meanwhile, “Fodder” brings to mind the very first Scorn album, Vae Solis, which, unlike Scorn’s later dark techno sound, was a punishing slab of industrial metal that featured Broadrick on guitar. “Fodder” is definitely the nastiest piece on Decay, utilizing slabs of atonal guitar to drag the listener straight to hell.
The album closes with the epic “Consume Me”, an eleven-minute dirge that provides the perfect bookend to the album. Here, doom metal tempos dominate, but with the posthuman atmosphere that Godflesh has mastered. It’s an exercise in minimalism, primarily consisting of two sections. The first is a desolate rhythm, echoing the wide, burning vistas of album opener “Master and Slave”. The voice of an uncaring techno-god narrates, and bleakness prevails. Eventually, this section seems to wind down, like the world slowly ending. Just when the world seems to be out of its misery, the second section kicks in. Pounding, earthquake-like drums are joined by a simple but devastating chug-riff. The vocals begin howling in agony and the end is truly descending down upon us.
Knowing Godflesh is coming to an end, I’ve been reflecting not only on my love for the band, but on what exactly Justin Broadrick and Ben Green have been trying to say with this project. Streetcleaner is arguably their defining statement, and it was the first record of theirs I heard. It is devastatingly bleak, pointing to a far future of civilizational collapse. It’s been thirty-eight years since the band’s inception, and it seems Godflesh’s warning, along with so many others, has yet to be heeded. The distant future doesn’t feel so far away anymore. Godflesh has said what they had to say. Now, their legacy and their vision are left to us to grapple with.
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