“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.”

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 declared 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.”

“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,” Broadrick explained. ‘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.”

“Decay” track listing:

01. Master And Slave
02. Living/Ending
03. Feral Colony
04. Fear Of Man
05. Fodder
06. Consume Me