Godflesh Purge LP (Silver with Gold Splatter Vinyl)

Rolling Stone 100 Best Albums of 2023 - Rated 97/100!

With the highly anticipated 2023 album Purge, Godflesh revisits and updates the concepts of Pure (1992), as well as bringing a whole host of new dirges and laments. Amongst the many layers of dirt, Purge mangles '90s hip-hop grooves and puts them through the Godflesh filter to create something futuristic in style - and utterly unique, just as Pure was upon its release in 1992.

Both minimal and maximal, Godflesh deliver alien grooves that swing whilst also retaining the psychedelic, bad-trip edge with layer upon layer of filth and heaviness that Godflesh have always been known for. This is, and always has been, feel-bad music.

The title alone - Purge - references directly how songwriter and creator Justin K. Broadrick utilizes Godflesh's music as a temporary relief from his diagnosed autism and PTSD. It's the next stage in a journey he has been on since he began creating music, feeling alone and like an outsider in any scene or group, from childhood through to adulthood.

The music of Godflesh gives Broadrick the means to express a lifetime of feeling misunderstood and overwhelmed by hyper-sensitivity. The band is the vehicle to provide some sense of catharsis and transcendence: a way of communicating overload, as well as the constant disenchantment at the human condition, and man's abuse of power and the systems that chain us.

Purge references the cycle of horror that man always has and always will inflict on all of society; those in positions of power revel in the infliction of pain and horror upon individuals in the name of their religion, their power, their money, their flags...

Purge is eight songs, delivered in a concise fashion for fellow outsiders.

The duo of Godflesh - Justin K Broadrick and Ben Green - augmented by Machines, are seen as a pivotal entity in the world of 'heavy' music, impacting entire subcultures within the scene since the band's inception in 1988.

Godflesh have been credited as being one of the first bands to cross old British industrial music with down-tuned, primitive and minimal metal, accidentally pioneering the 'industrial metal' sound, yet their music reaches far beyond the confines of the genre. The band is widely regarded as a cultural icon, and its impact can be felt across generations of heavy music, both mainstream and underground.

'Nero' opens the album with menacing loops, brick walls of downtuned guitars, and Broadrick's anguished shouting. 'Army of Non' similarly channels the hip-hop-influenced Pure sound, but with heavier, more swinging grooves. Moving beyond the early '90s, the rocket-fueled 'Land Lord' is closer to the guitar-driven big beat which populated action movie soundtracks and electronica compilations near the turn of the millennium. 'Permission' is psychedelic drum'n'bass, with skittering breaks and a hypnotic bassline spiraling along with Broadrick's largely clean vocals. 'The Father' is like a more muscular, riff-heavy version of Broadrick's shoegaze-leaning work as Jesu, with dubby, spaced-out moaning about having 'one way out.' Broadrick adopts an almost comically scary growl for the bludgeoning 'Mythology of Self,' and reverts to his softer, more dazed voice for 'You Are the Judge, the Jury, and the Executioner,' the mesmerizing dirge that ends the album.