“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.”
Broadrick is primarily referring to the nebulous process of writing and arranging songs into their various potential shapes, but he could just as easily be describing GODFLESH’s imminent conclusion. Just three years after the hypnotic crunch of Purge, 25 years after an uncertain hiatus that nearly scuttled the band, and 38 years since GODFLESH’s inception, Broadrick and bassist-at-arms Ben Green set out to mercilessly crush this cold world with their tenth and penultimate album, this year’s Decay.
“Decay was born from the same sessions as Purge,” Broadrick declares 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.”
Now, GODFLESH is ready to unleash an even bolder, bleaker series of sounds in Decay. These songs arrive shortly after Broadrick released a public statement about major abdominal surgery he underwent earlier this year. “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.”
While the middle of the record pulses with five-minute hate-grooves, Broadrick credits the slime-wracked opener “Master and Slave” and crawling closer “Consume Me” with Decay’s true conceptual thrust. “The bookends of Decay are the most important pieces to me. They say it all, so to speak; the album could have been just those two songs alone – the duration of them is half of the total album!”
As GODFLESH’s active tenure comes to a close, Broadrick expresses gratitude that it was ever his vessel to use as he willed. “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.”
“We in Brazil, we know what a dictatorship is. We know how harmful that is, how horrible that is, how bad that is,” says Moura, referencing the military dictatorship in Brazil that took place from 1964 to 1985. He draws parallels between that period and the leadership of Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro, who is in prison for an attempted coup d'état.
Adharma is Impoluto’s fourth album and the first conceived through remote collaboration, recorded separately by @mariobrandabar in Paraná, Brazil, and Theo Szczepanski in Sardinia, Italy, during 2022.
Departing from the free-form, single-take approach of the previous recordings, Adharma is built through deliberate construction. Noise, tension and silence are arranged with calculated precision.
Adharma is the Sanskrit antonym of dharma. It means “that which is not in accord with the dharma”. Connotations include betrayal, discord, disharmony, unnaturalness, wrongness, evil, immorality, unrighteousness, wickedness, and vice.
On this day, 8 August 1879, Emiliano Zapata, revolutionary and leading figure of the peasant army which helped overthrow Porfirio Diaz in the 1910 Mexican revolution, was born. Of Nahua and Spanish descent, Zapata organised alongside local Indigenous communities to fight against land seizures by wealthy hacienda owners, and occupy seized land. With the outbreak of revolution, he led a revolutionary militia, took part in many battles, and under the slogan “Tierra y Libertad” (“Land and Liberty”) kept fighting for the original goals of the revolution, most crucially land redistribution. After Zapata was assassinated, his followers kept up the struggle, and today, after an uprising in the 1990s, modern day Indigenous Zapatistas control a sizeable autonomous territory in Chiapas. More on Zapata and modern Zapatistas here in our online store: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/collections/all/emiliano-zapata
