Justin Broadrick's defining band: guitar, bass and a cheap drum machine welded into a crushing, mechanical weight · among the first to fuse industrial method with extreme metal, and the founding statement of industrial metal.
Godflesh are the industrial-metal pioneers, and the Bureau files them at Tier I as the band that fused industrial method with extreme metal and founded a genre. Formed in Birmingham in 1988 by Justin Broadrick and Ben Green, out of their earlier band Fall of Because, they built their sound on a deliberate refusal: in place of a drummer, a cheap drum machine, bought with a loan from Green's mother, programmed into a crushing, mechanical, inhuman rhythm.
Broadrick had reason to want the opposite of speed. Born in Birmingham in 1969, he had written and recorded the guitar for side one of Napalm Death's Scum as a teenager, and he came out of that exhausted by blast-velocity. Godflesh slowed everything to a grinding trudge, guitar and bass welded to machine-rhythm, the grey claustrophobia of industrial Birmingham made audible. It was among the first bodies of work to put industrial mechanisation at the centre of metal.
Streetcleaner (1989, Earache) is the essential text. A vision of humanity locked into an endless struggle against overpowering forces, Orwell's 1984 rendered as sound, it defined industrial metal and was later named an influence by Metallica, Faith No More and Korn. Godflesh broke up in 2002 and reactivated in the 2010s, but Streetcleaner remains the founding statement of the form.
Godflesh is the centre of one of the underground's largest catalogues. Final, Broadrick's oldest project, has run as ambient and drone work since 1982. With Kevin Martin (The Bug) he made the industrial hip-hop of Techno Animal, plus Ice and Curse of the Golden Vampire; his solo industrial-techno alias JK Flesh grew out of the solo side of that work. Greymachine, Pale Sketcher, Council Estate Electronics and Zonal extend the web further, and he has produced for Pantera, Isis, Mogwai and Pelican besides.
The Bureau files Godflesh at Artists · Tier I as the industrial-metal pioneers: the band whose drum-machine crush welded industrial to extreme metal and founded a genre, and the anchor of Justin Broadrick's sprawling, restless catalogue. The line that began on the A-side of Scum runs through here and out into Jesu and a dozen further projects.