Decay

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.

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.

While not as accessible as their previous release, Purge, Decay has some of the most (dare I say) legible singing of Godflesh’s career. Atop the bashed-in toms and detuned guitar on “Feral Colony,” you can actually make out a few lyrics: “Never the righteous/Only the weak/Shall inherit the earth/Shall destroy without soul,” Broadrick belts in a reverbed sprechgesang. On the heftier “Fear of Man,” Broadrick is also flexing his comparatively melodic chops, but he digitally smears his vocals so much that they feel more like a series of sustained notes than a collection of words.

Broadrick’s voice has been as influential as his atonal guitar riffs and methodical production techniques, but on Decay, his choice to refrain from shouting is often more powerful and frightening. On opener “Master and Slave,” demonic, croaking passages spill from his lips, bubbling just on top of Green’s sludgy bassline and a high-pitched synth that slices through the track like an icy squall. “Fodder” keeps Broadrick at an even softer, less processed whisper, and the vulnerability is supremely disturbing—a reminder that a human being has been behind this calculated madness all along.

“Living/Ending,” Decay’s best song, celebrates Broadrick’s mighty growl as well as the softness he is now resigned to (he will continue to sing in his less physically demanding bands, such as Jesu and JK Flesh). Broadrick alternates between full-throated snarls and labored breaths; the latter accentuate the sheer effort it must take to shout so forcefully. Broadrick’s chugging guitar and walloping bass drum envelop him in either state, eroding the boundary between craftsman and the craft itself.