Godflesh Announce New Album Decay: Hear “Living/Ending”

11:12 AM EDT on August 12, 2026

Way back in 1988, the former Napalm Death member Justin K. Broadrick got together with fellow young Birmingham musician B.C. Green to form Godflesh, a duo who combined slow, heavy music with psychedelic textures and electronic techniques like drum machines and sampling. Their 1989 debut Streetcleaner was hugely influential in the realms of extreme metal, industrial, and noise-rock, as well as all the places where those things overlap. Over the years, Broadrick and Green kept Godflesh intermittently active, building a vast and inspiring discography. Now, Godflesh's days are numbered, but they have a couple of albums left to go before calling it quits entirely. One of them is called Decay, and it'll come out next month.

A few months ago, Justin K. Broadrick announced plans to end Godflesh for an extremely understandable reason: He can't scream like that anymore without endangering his personal health. The 57-year-old Broadrick had to get surgery to repair an inguinal hernia, and the vocal style that he uses with Godflesh will put him at risk for further hernias. (He'll continue to make music with Jesu and JK Flesh, two projects that don't put the same kind of physical strain on him.) When he made that announcement, though, Broadrick still planned to release two more Godflesh album. Decay will serve as the duo's penultimate record, and it was mostly finished before he had his surgery. Still, that title feels significant.

Godflesh's most recent album was 2023's Purge, and Decay comes out of many of the same sessions that produced that LP. After self-releasing much of their recent material, Godflesh will release Decay through Relapse Records. Here's what Broadrick says about the new album and about the impending end of Godflesh in a press release:

Decay was born from the same sessions as Purge. 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. 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.
It expresses my pain, and I’ve put my body and soul into this expression for the majority of my existence. I feel quite lucky, because Godflesh is now physically impossible for me, rendering it useless. I now wish to move out of its constraints, move on creatively with heavy/ugly music to new ground.

Along with the announcement, Godflesh have shared one of the six tracks from Decay. "Living/Ending" is a lurching, guttural groove that fits right in with the band's overall body of working. Listening to it in its current context, you can really feel the physical force that Broadrick puts into his vocals; it's not hard to understand that he can't keep doing that forever. Check it out below.