Justin Broadrick plays guitar on Lost Weekend, the new Phoebe Bridgers album that landed on August 14. Broadrick, best known as the frontman of industrial metal band Godflesh, turns up on two tracks: Bobby and the hidden closer Best Dressed. The record was co-produced by Jack Antonoff.
The collaboration was quickly labelled as unlikely and circulated as a Godflesh-meets-indie-folk curiosity. Broadrick’s own camp cut that short. A statement posted to his channels clarified that he played on the record as Jesu, his shoegaze project, not as Godflesh. Jesu’s slow, narcotic drift sits far closer to Bridgers’ world than Godflesh ever could.
Godflesh built its sound in the late 1980s out of guitar, bass and a drum machine, heavy in a way that owed more to factory noise than to metal. Jesu takes the same weight and lets it blur and float. On Bobby, that is the register Bridgers reached for.
The guest spot arrives as Godflesh wind down. Decay, the band’s tenth album and its second to last, comes out September 25 through Relapse Records, with lead single Living/Ending already streaming. Broadrick announced in March that Godflesh would stop playing live, after open surgery to repair a large hernia left his abdominal wall too weak for the band’s screamed vocals.
He was blunt about it. “I have a very weak abdominal wall, which at being 57 years old this year, is not going to improve,” he wrote, warning that continuing to scream live risked “blowing out my abdominal wall entirely.” He plans to keep working through Jesu and his electronic project JK Flesh.
Bridgers is moving the other way. Lost Weekend is her first album since Punisher in 2020, and her spring tour this year was her first live run since 2023. She has North American and European dates booked into the back half of the year, opening in Indianapolis on September 14.
Photos – Steve Gerrard
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