Justin Broadrick's post-Godflesh project: the crushing weight of industrial metal kept but slowed and melted into shoegaze melody and doom-heavy beauty · heaviness turned toward the melodic rather than the mechanical.
Jesu is the melodic successor, and the Bureau files it at Tier II as the project in which Justin Broadrick proved that the industrial-metal weight he had founded could carry melody and beauty as easily as dread. He formed it in 2003, the year after Godflesh broke up, naming it after the closing track of Godflesh's final album, and has kept it running with himself as the constant and a rotating cast around him.
The relationship to Godflesh is the whole story. Jesu keeps the enormous downtuned weight but removes the mechanical cruelty: the guitars open into shoegaze haze, the tempos slow to a doom crawl, and half-buried melodic vocals float over the top. It is heaviness turned toward beauty, narcotic and melancholy where Godflesh was punishing, and it became a touchstone for the heavier end of shoegaze and for post-metal.
Across five full-lengths and a long run of EPs and split albums, on Hydra Head and Broadrick's own Avalanche Recordings (including a collaboration with Sun Kil Moon), Jesu has been one of the more visible nodes in a vast catalogue that also holds Godflesh, Final, JK Flesh and Techno Animal. It is the song-shaped, melodic pole of Broadrick's restless output.
The Bureau files Jesu at Artists · Tier II as the melodic successor: the project that carried the industrial-metal crush into melody and proved the form could be beautiful as well as crushing, the gentler counterweight to Godflesh in Justin Broadrick's sprawling work.