Kicking against the pricks with the Birmingham prodigy.
Justin Broadrick has always been an electronic artist at heart. He's not a guitarist or a vocalist, he says, even though he rose to notoriety with a microphone and guitar in hand with industrial metal titans Godflesh. From his first steps into power electronics as Final, Broadrick has gone on to explore dread-filled hip hop with Kevin Martin as Techno Animal and Zonal, brutal techno as JK Flesh, drum & bass as Tech Level 2, and much more besides. He's also on the cusp of releasing his third solo album as JK Flesh on Speedy J's Electric Deluxe and an EP for AnD's Inner Surface.
From an early age, music served as a source of creative refuge and therapeutic expression for Broadrick, who openly admits to struggling with depression—for him, making music is a vital remedy. He describes the runaway success of Godflesh as an "accident," and it seems that he fell into Napalm Death as an outcast teenager growing up in the "concrete hell" of inner-city Birmingham in the '80s. This could be conceived as self-deprecating talk, but there's genuine pain and anxiety behind the words.
Recorded between sets at Roadburn Festival in Tilburg, the Netherlands, Resident Advisor's Holly Dicker gets to know the electronic musician behind the metal facade.
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