Ever since he was a kid coming up in a Birmingham council flat, Justin K. Broadrick has shielded himself with heavy music. As a teenager, he amassed records by bands like Discharge, the Stranglers, and Cockney Rejects, parlaying his punk credentials into camaraderie with the tough kids at school. By the time Broadrick formed his pioneering industrial metal project Godflesh in the late 1980s, he was in search of something far more subversive. “I wanted this repulsive sound,” Broadrick said in a recent (and rare) interview. “I wanted it to be an expression of pain… Filthy, dirty, mechanized but organic painful fucking music.”
For decades, Broadrick and Godflesh bassist G.C. Green have sublimated that pervasive sense of agony into brutal, down-tuned metal that is all the more terrifying due to its structural austerity. Broadrick is a metal ascetic; he values restraint and order. Godflesh songs often loop simple bass riffs, curt lyrical passages, and crushing drumbeats. Rather than feel repetitive, the music conjures the dread of an advancing onslaught. It’s as if an armored battalion marching is toward you, weapons drawn and aimed. Broadrick’s bowel-shuddering scream has always been inextricable from Godflesh’s sound—but now it also has proven to be the root of the project’s demise.
No score yet, be the first to add.
Several months ago, Broadrick posted a statement on Instagram discussing surgery he endured to treat a severe inguinal hernia caused by years of bellowing. “If I continue to perform and shout/scream as I do with Godflesh, then I am at high risk for more hernias, and blowing out my abdominal wall entirely,” he wrote. (The surgery was highly invasive, requiring a six-inch incision in the groin to repair the rupture.) Broadrick revealed that Godflesh’s touring days are over, and that the duo’s final studio LP would be recorded later this year. He also announced Decay, the band’s penultimate record. By then, the album was in the mixing stage, but the six-track release shows a clear shift in the way that Broadrick modulates his vocals. His sawtoothed roar is often tempered, rendered as a whisper or sung melody. At times, it recedes almost completely, becoming one with the “filthy, dirty, mechanized” music that has long protected the musician.
