A world lit only by fire

"Godflesh make their return with A World Lit Only by Fire, the duo's first album in 13 years. Where some bands tend to emerge from a long absence with a sound that feels inspired by the current trends in music, Godflesh's seventh album feels like it was influenced by their first ... The worry when a band comes back from a long absence is that they'll have forgotten whatever it was that made them interesting in the first place, but A World Lit Only by Fire makes it crystal clear that Godflesh have a long, unfailing memory, and that their punishing work has only just begun".

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"A World Lit Only By Fire bears little resemblance to Hymns, the supposedly final Godflesh album from 2001, which eased Broadrick's transition into the post-shoegaze blurs of Jesu. Instead, this marks a return to the bleak, grinding cacophonies of early classics like Streetcleaner and Slavestate, wherein monochrome riffs and dehumanised drums collide, conjuring a disorientating fog of urban desperation and fury; the machinistic momentum of krautrock and Suicide re-imagined through a cracked prism of post-Thatcher social alienation".

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