Post Self is the eighth studio album by English industrial metal band Godflesh. It was released on 17 November 2017 through frontman Justin Broadrick's own record label, Avalanche Recordings, and was the band's second album since reforming in 2010. The single "Post Self" was released for streaming on 31 October 2017, and a second track, "Be God", was released for streaming on 11 November 2017, six days in advance of the full release. Godflesh avoided interviews in the wake of Post Self, hoping to retain some of the album's purity and give listeners a chance to digest the music in a vacuum.
Musically, Post Self explores less of the metal side of Godflesh and instead focuses on the band's industrial and post-punk elements; thematically, it covers anxiety, fear, loss of self and similar topics. The album was critically acclaimed, appeared on several publications' year-end lists and peaked on Billboard's Top Heatseekers chart at 23. It was followed by various scattered tours across Europe and North America.
Background
After Godflesh released their return album, A World Lit Only by Fire, in 2014, frontman Justin Broadrick formed the band Zonal (a continuation of a previous project, Techno Animal) and created a number of solo albums; under the moniker JK Flesh, Broadrick released two albums, two EPs and a series of remixes. Jesu also released two collaborative studio albums with Sun Kil Moon. During this period of activity, Broadrick and Godflesh bassist B. C. Green were simultaneously working on Post Self. In a February 2017 interview with Vice, Broadrick said the then-upcoming album, recorded from 2016 to 2017, would be "more ambient, experimental, less riff-oriented. It should be a very interesting album, the next one." It was Broadrick's plan from the beginning to approach the new music as sampled and electronic tracks rather than as typical metal compositions.
Composition and style
Tonally, Post Self is centered more on atmosphere and noise rather than the discrete riffs of its predecessor, A World Lit Only by Fire; Joe DiVita, a writer for Loudwire, said that the music "hinges less on burly, cement-cracking grooves from the overdriven distortion of Green's bass and more on lurching low-end that provides the foundation for abrasive layers of swirling, droning notes." Multiple critics compared the album to previous Godflesh releases, most notably 1999's Us and Them for its experimentation and hip hop influence, and 1992's Pure for its sparse, desolate atmosphere. As Broadrick wrote in the album's original press release, Post Self was an exercise in mood, compiling previous experiments under the Godflesh title into a new, more coherent package. With the album's focus on generating a bleak tone, comparisons were drawn between it and one of Broadrick's other projects, Jesu. As Stephen Wyatt said in his review of the album for Under the Radar, Post Self balances the shoegaze qualities of Jesu with Godflesh's mechanical beats and thick guitar sounds.
In the album, Broadrick's guitar takes on many different tones and styles, but rarely does he use it to create a traditional metal riff. Instead, Green's bass provides the order and much of the musical direction; this technique was also used in the group's debut album, Streetcleaner (1989), when the band employed a second guitarist to create the warbling background noises while the bass was left to guide the songs. As such, Post Self eschews many trademarks of both the heavy metal genre at large and of Godflesh's most commonly-attributed subgenre, industrial metal. The label post-punk is often applied to Post Self, and Broadrick's vocals show similarity to Jaz Coleman, singer of the influential post-punk band Killing Joke.