Godflesh
Purge

It's my album of 2023.

I had to wait seven eternal years to listen to a new album from Justin Broadrick's monumental band.

Many times on the site I've praised the sonic monolith that characterizes every release from Godflesh; I've written over ten reviews of the English combo, certainly one of the groups I've literally appreciated and revered for over thirty years.

Announced in March as a sort of continuation of "Pure," their best work in my opinion, released back in 1992.

Purge says it all in the title: it's a true purification, an attempt by Justin to exorcise his fears, to fight with Music the autism that has long been diagnosed and stress symptoms amplified by the pandemic.

And once again he emerges victorious: standing, not without effort, on the podium of Industrial-Metal that he helped create at the end of the eighties.

I must start with the cover, that icy black and white image. Fingers brushing the cold skin of a snake, an evident nod to the dead hand emerging from the ground on the cover of "Pure."

And finally, the eight tracks arrive.

Nothing has changed since 1992.

Purge is a sinister, menacing, murky album. Gigantic barrages of lowered-tone guitars, suffocating. The usual abnormally huge bass, swollen, dictating cyclopean plots, accompanied by the habitual obsessive drum machine.

Nero is the title of the track that opens the collection. I won't add anything more, the title alone suffices to hint at the explosive steel mill furnace tons emitted from the tormented instruments, played with a disturbing primitive force.

Justin's voice alternates between passages of unparalleled rawness and ferocity, as in the very slow Mythology of Self: Sludge-Dub-Doom that certainly wouldn't have looked out of place in the earliest cacophonous creations of Godflesh.

There are also clean, ethereal vocal moments that border on a kind of purity reminiscent of Jesu, another group created by Justin that I will never stop loving and appreciating.

Top marks, as always!

Ad Maiora.