Metal
Relapse Records · 25 September 2026
“Consume Me” runs 11:38 and takes up more than a quarter of Decay. The percussion never quite catches: the drums clatter out of step under shrieking feedback, everything dies down to near silence and then, just when it sounds finished, a blast of noise comes back with dry blows that land like a hammer on an anvil. Over all of it Justin Broadrick repeats “CONSUME ME” until the words stop meaning anything.
The album opens with “Master and Slave”, 8:46 of sharpened tone, keys that whistle in one long drone and a whip-crack beat. Voices writhe underneath without a single syllable coming clear. Two of the six tracks pass eight minutes and the whole thing doesn’t reach forty-two: Decay is a short record made of long pieces.
It came out of the same sessions as Purge (2023), which is hard to credit with the two side by side: that one had groove and beats borrowed from hip-hop, and this one has none. Broadrick made it with Ben Green, the bassist he’s always had, and he had it finished long before the abdominal surgery that has stopped him this year. Some of the vocals he did cut while carrying a hernia, and you can hear it.
The middle of the record is where it breathes a little. “Feral Colony” (5:02) welds a glam stomp to the industrial grinder, with a riff that throws sparks and a thick bass underneath. “Fear of Man” (5:23) puts dry drums and that same filthy bass under a keyboard that claws, and when a wave of distorted guitar rolls in it’s the one moment on the album you could call kind.
The toolkit is thin. The drum machine that tries to fire and can’t is the central move of “Fodder” (5:55) and then it’s the central move of “Consume Me” too: on a six-track album, using the same trick on the last two and longest pieces is impossible to miss. There’s also an ambiguity in how it’s being presented, since the press release calls it the penultimate record and it’s been reported elsewhere as the last one. A record built end to end as a farewell deserves to be told whether it is one.
Six tracks, forty-one minutes and fifty-one seconds, Relapse Records, 25 September. It’s Godflesh’s tenth album counting Streetcleaner (1989), and Broadrick has said he no longer sees himself physically able to carry on with this band, though he does want to keep making music.
Rating: 7.8/10
Text by Roger Estivill