Justin Broadrick has been ordered no more screaming and no more Godflesh live shows, with a hernia that was largely caused by years of those performances ending the band’s time on stage. What we are left with is two final studio albums, and Decay is the first of them. Not the last word, but a penultimate one.

We’ve featured Broadrick’s other releases A World Lit Only By Dub and PREHUMAN. FLESHSTEP recently, but Decay is a real Godflesh statement. Master and Slave opens with nine minutes of chugging, and the main riff is strangely in a major key but every noise is so oppressive, industrial and horrible that it offers no comfort. Sounding like Trent Reznor but stripped of all pop sensibility, melodic instinct, and anything that would ease the harshness the song appropriately decays upon itself at the end. Living/Ending sounds like it could come off Streetcleaner but with vastly bigger production, both weighty and up to date so that it feels familiar but also current. Feral Colony is where the deeper emotions really begin to reveal themselves, spacious, unhurried, and churning with an evil and malicious guitar line that crawls slowly. Fear Of Man sounds eerie, as the drum machine pounds into the ground, and Fodder has a descending guitar line of grinding noise with chord work that’s grand and accepting, a completely different timbre from everything before it. We are so, so far from any recognisable metal clichés here, so deep into expressive noise the genre category barely applies. It’s nasty, but with a uniquely patient malevolence that’s artful and hard to explain. Consume Me closes the album across several movements, with what sounds like an angelic vocal sample buried underneath all the brutality, collapsing into completely empty space halfway through before the most brutish drum machine chugs back into focus, sounding like metal beams. And then the songs fades to a rumble.