The titans of industrial terror Godflesh return with the bombastic bete noire of Decay.
Release date: September 25, 2026 | Relapse | Instagram | Bandcamp
It’s hard to parse how influential Streetcleaner was back in the pre-90s, but Godflesh‘s industrial hellscape (along with fellow noise-makers Ministry) seemed to be foreshadowing the ugly demise of popular music. Gone were the days of Southern California singer-songwriters or hit machines like Huey Lewis and the News. Entering at the cusp of a new world order were the abrasive sounds of pre-programmed drum machines and metal upon metal. It was unforgiving stuff, forward moving in the same way laser guided ‘smart’ bombs lit up the sky over Iraq in 1990, the ominous foundation of a blood-shattered new century.
Nearly forty years later, and Godflesh‘s new release Decay looks back on these bleak decades with not so much remorse as opposed to an I-told-you-so attitude. The band seems as if they’ve caught a musical ankle in the bear trap of the twentieth century. The Alesis HR-16 that Justin Broadrick used to compose his ‘drum riffs’ back in the day are front and center; the industrial cacophony created by the machine is a warning that any progress we think we’ve made as humans is all in our tiny, fucked up heads.
All this being said, there’s a fundamental question to be asked when a new Godflesh album comes out a quarter century in. And if the forward progress of man has been hindered by our own stubbornness and stupidity, Decay seems to drag the noise along this same pot-holed road to hell. In 2026, is the world asking for more songs of love and hate—mostly the latter—or are Broadrick and collaborator B.C. Green just tossing our bodies into the proverbial wood-chipper?
Opener “Master/Slave” exists in this place, that moment when the choke is pulled and the engine rares up, teeth rotating back and forth in mechanical desperation. The song seems almost under-realized, the riff reminiscent of one that any sludge band in the past thirty years has whipped out while trying to get levels right in the garage. Over the inhuman, robotic drums, the organic nature of the riff itself sticks out. Perhaps there was intention behind this: in a world moving towards the gluttonous bowels of artificial intelligence, let us hang on the few chords that keep us alive.
The snare and kick on “Feral Colony” sound like parodies of themselves, abrasive, caustic percussion that propels the song through some of Broadrick’s most interesting guitar sounds on the album. The low distorted, dirge of Green’s bass acts as a counterpoint to the shoe-gazey guitars that float over the sonic destruction. Broadrick has always been a champion of noise, adding layers and layers of guitar and drums until the sound seems to turn in on itself, like the disposed viscera of a butchered deer.
“Fear of Man” is the viscera come alive, the sound of life burrowing itself into the bowels of the slain, a maggot-infested, roach-ridden organic mess of death oozing its way back into Earth. Indeed, all of Decay revels in the demise of humankind, as if our AI overlords would eventually be better stewards of this planet than the very souls to whom it was bequeathed. The Jesu-like guitars swell over the high-end tinniness of industrial cacophony. It’s unmistakably Broadrick, a beautiful melody buried within the agony, underneath layers of skin, sinew, and muscle.
Ultimately, however, it’s final song “Consume Me” that encapsulates what has always made Broadrick, and Godflesh in particular, such a captivating artist. The over-driven production and sonic patience allow a bit of breathing room, as shallow as those breaths may be, in a song that allows itself to unfold over its eleven-minute running time. It’s a desperate drone of industrial sludge, the gears of the wood-chipper muddled with the copper-red filth of blood, running for what seems like infinity.
In some ways, Godflesh is like a perpetual motion machine, defying the laws of physics and forever running in the background. Justin Broadrick has spent decades channeling the endless wells of negative energy forever being spat out by the human beings that infest this planet. Decay is another entry into the catalogue of life’s ugly, sordid demise.
