A hernia may mean his screaming days are over, but the Napalm Death alum’s influence on metal echoes on in unexpected places – and with ‘heavy, ugly’ experiments in the pipeline, his passion for ‘outsider music’ remains strong
On 4 October 2024, Justin Broadrick felt a pop. The singer and guitarist of pioneering industrial metal duo Godflesh had felt pain in his groin for several years. After a coughing fit following a show in Sofia, Bulgaria, he knew he had a hernia. “It was a small knob in my groin,” says Broadrick. “I got back home and told my partner, and she was like, ‘Let’s watch how it goes.’” He continued to perform live for another year, wearing up to two hernia belts at a time. By the time he got it surgically treated in February this year, it was 13cm long.
The next month, Broadrick shared a picture of himself in hospital and announced that Godflesh’s near-four-decade career will soon end. His condition had been caused by the physicality of shouting over their music since he was 18; he just turned 57. If he were to do so again, he would risk blowing out his abdominal wall entirely. There will be two more studio albums – starting with this autumn’s reliably crushing Decay, recorded pre-surgery – and possibly some archival releases and remixes. But beyond that? Nothing.
“I’m still in a lot of discomfort, even now,” says Broadrick, talking to me by phone in mid-August. “I’m not the toughest guy in the world, I’m very sensitive to pain, so it’s going to be nine to 12 months [after surgery] before potentially feeling no negative sensations whatsoever.”
Broadrick received support from all over the heavy metal world, including current or former members of Megadeth, Slipknot, Fear Factory, Neurosis, Sunn O))) and Killing Joke. It was just a small glimpse of the impact Godflesh have made. When Broadrick and bassist Ben “GC” Green formed the band in 1988, their cacophonous beats, programmed on a £500 drum machine, were unprecedented in the genre. Broadrick’s riffs were immediate, dense and unsettling. From top to bottom, they were the heaviest band ever.
Metallica were fans: guitarist Kirk Hammett got Andres Serrano to design their Load and Reload album covers after Broadrick showed him a Godflesh video directed by the provocative artist. Mike Patton praised them as “ridiculously heavy” and invited Broadrick to audition for Faith No More in 1993. He turned the offer down. “There’s no way I can join someone else’s band,” he reasons today. And many of nu metal’s frontrunners idolised Godflesh. Founding Slipknot drummer Joey Jordison once blared their music during an interview at his house; when Broadrick first heard Korn’s debut single Blind, he thought: “I quite like it, but it sounds like Godflesh meets Faith No More.”
Despite his widespread influence, Broadrick eschews the limelight. Born in Birmingham, he now lives with his partner, 15-year-old son and many, many pets in a north Wales village so remote that it doesn’t have as much as a pub. He avoids social situations, rarely granting interviews, but gives long, sometimes meandering answers. He says that these are symptoms of his autism, which went undiagnosed until 2022, when he was in his early 50s.
“I’m generalising, but the psychiatrist pretty much said to me that there are two types of autistic people,” he explains in his undiluted Brummie accent. “A lot of people who used to get diagnosed with Asperger’s generally have the cold, don’t speak, sit-in-a-corner type of autism. My autism is the other one, where, they said, people can get hyperemotional and hypersensitive and talk all the time, trying to get themselves understood.”
Broadrick’s hypersensitivity shaped Godflesh’s music. Their beats echo the clanging he heard from nearby factories while growing up on a council estate, and his anguished shouts and misanthropic lyrics are rooted in childhood trauma. His mum and stepdad were punk musicians who hosted wild parties with drugs and alcohol while he was home. “I was exposed to all manner of shit,” he says, “but at school, I was totally isolated. I couldn’t communicate with kids. I was virtually mute. Two very different, polarising existences there. As soon as I became obsessive about music at the age of eight, that’s all I could communicate about.”
He began making music under the pseudonym Final when he was 13. At 15, he walked out of his first exam and never went back to school. After meeting Nicholas Bullen of West Midlands grindcore agitators Napalm Death at a market, he joined the band and wrote “90%” of the music on side A of their debut album, Scum. It became a cult classic, inspiring a legion of copycats. The 1.3-second track You Suffer holds the Guinness world record for the shortest song ever recorded.
Come the release of Scum in 1987, however, Broadrick had already grown bored and left. “I love what we created, but I felt restricted. We said, ‘Let’s play as fast as we can.’ I remember saying to [drummer] Mick Harris, ‘Faster! Faster!’, and he was laughing, and we just got faster and faster. It was very momentary – very temporary, almost.”
In 1988, Broadrick and Green, who grew up on the same estate, started Godflesh. They were both signing on at the time, and talked Green’s mum into taking out a bank loan to cover that £500 drum machine. Their formula of playing distorted guitar over huge beats was inspired by Run-DMC’s single King of Rock, which Broadrick heard on The Old Grey Whistle Test. The angular riffs were pulled from Killing Joke, while the discordance and rhythmic vocal patterns evoked early Swans. That unique blend resonated widely, getting the pair off the dole “relatively quickly”. Their 1989 debut album, Streetcleaner, was released by popular death metal label Earache (then also home to Napalm). After initially only reaching No 19 on the UK indie chart, it became a sleeper hit and seminal release.
Godflesh proved especially popular in the US, where they scored their breakthrough by supporting Napalm in 1991. However, the tour triggered Broadrick’s hypersensitivity. From his first gig, he had used drink or substances to cope with the sensory overload of performing. Still, he had to play. Music is the only job he’s ever had, and, “among the distress and the feeling of wanting to fucking kill everyone, there is transcendence”, he says.
“I hated the overwhelm, everything about it. Two-and-a-half months, that fucking tour! I spent two-and-a-half months trying to get off,” he admits. “But here’s the thing: you could tell we were being exposed to a metal audience that had never experienced anything like us.”
Thanks to a deal by Earache, Sony-backed juggernaut Columbia Records agreed to distribute Godflesh’s 1994 album Selfless in the US. But then MTV banned the Serrano-directed Crush My Soul video – not only did it contain religious imagery and end with red liquid being poured on to Broadrick, but the artist had previously flared tempers with his 1987 photograph Piss Christ, which depicted a crucifix submerged in urine. Broadrick believes that the rise of nu metal not long after Selfless “buried” Godflesh: “Labels that wanted to sign Godflesh two years before were not interested any more. They just wanted anyone who sounded like Korn or Slipknot.”
