“Very singular” and “very brutal” was Justin Broadrick’s intention with the new Godflesh record, A World Lit Only By Fire, due on October 6. A declaration that even pre pre-order is music to the ears of the Godflesh faithful who waited 13 years since last album Hymns, hopeful Broadrick and co-founder and bassist G.C. Green would reform after splitting in 2002.
Which they did, in 2010, first to play Hellfest and later Supersonic and Roadburn festivals where – in another thrilling development – they played their seminal first record Streetcleaner in its entirety. As a long-term fan who’s travelled wide at Broadrick’s side into many a collaboration and solo project, it is still those first two Godflesh records I return to most: that 1989 debut and 1992’s Pure. That Godflesh too was inclined to return to those roots felt both right and righteous.
It could have ended there, and fairly happily for those who saw the Streetcleaner shows, but punters were not the only ones energised by feeling the brute physical force of summoning those early songs to life onstage again. Broadrick and Green felt it too and it felt good. And for Broadrick, personally, nothing had replaced how effectively Godflesh could express and exorcise what he describes in one word to be the duo’s essence: frustration.
*Read the rest of this article over at The Quietus, here
