Posthuman is Justin Broadrick returning to heaviness by another route. Not a Godflesh album exactly, not Jesu’s vast grey radiance, not Techno Animal’s broken-system dub pressure, but a solo statement where all those histories seem to pass through one damaged processor and come out stripped, grimy, and beat-driven.
Released in 2012 on 3BY3, Posthuman was the first proper JK Flesh album, though the name had appeared earlier in Broadrick’s orbit through Techno Animal and related work. The project’s own later description frames JK Flesh as Broadrick’s heavy/mutant techno and electronica identity, informed by industrial, dub, power electronics, extreme electronic music, beats, and bass. That is the useful key. This is not electronic music as escape from metal. It is electronic music as metal’s afterimage: rhythm, weight, repetition, distortion, and pressure rebuilt without needing the old band-room grammar.
The album arrives at an interesting point in Broadrick’s arc. Godflesh had returned to live activity around 2010, while Jesu and Pale Sketcher had explored more melodic, mournful, and diffuse territory. Posthuman feels like a counterweight to that softness, or maybe a necessary correction of pressure. Drowned in Sound called it a “direct reaction against the purity of the Jesu sound,” describing it as grimy, dirty, and beat-driven, with more in common with the revived Godflesh than much of Broadrick’s recent work. That gets close, but the record is not merely Godflesh translated into electronics. It is Broadrick letting the beat become the oppressor.
The opening “Knuckledragger” sets the terms perfectly. The title suggests regression, brute motion, the body before enlightenment. The music turns that idea into a slow industrial trudge: detuned heaviness, synthetic percussion, damaged vocal presence, a groove that does not dance so much as haul itself across metal flooring. From there, the album begins to reveal its real trick. It is heavy, but the heaviness is not only guitar weight. It is sub-bass, loop logic, percussion programming, repetition, compression, and the sensation that every sound has been forced through an exhausted infrastructure.
That is where Posthuman earns its title. “Posthuman” here does not sound like sleek futurism, chrome bodies, or utopian transcendence. It sounds like the human after work, after industry, after digital mediation, after collapse into systems that continue operating without mercy. The record’s beats do not liberate the body. They discipline it. The bass does not open space. It colonizes the room.
Pitchfork heard the album as a cratered terrain of heavy basses, guitars, electronics, and nervous percussion, somewhere between Broadrick’s metal lineage and contemporary post-dubstep pressure. The middle of the album, especially “Devoured,” “Earthmover,” and the title track, is where that hybrid becomes most alive: half-step lurch, industrial bass movement, charred electronics, and a sense of club music dragged into a factory where the lights have been replaced by warning signals.
What makes Broadrick’s work endure is that he has never treated heaviness as one fixed substance. In Napalm Death, speed and extremity were one answer. In Godflesh, repetition and machine rhythm became another. In Jesu, weight dissolved into melancholy light. In Techno Animal, with Kevin Martin, dub, hip-hop, industrial, and electronics became a contaminated urban pressure field. JK Flesh gathers those routes and narrows them into a solo machine. The result is solitary music, but not small music. It sounds like one person operating an entire punishment grid.
Posthuman also lands beautifully in the archive after Incapacitants because it shows a different philosophy of extremity. Incapacitants are overflow, ecstatic saturation, noise as impossible weather. JK Flesh is control under stress. The overload is present, but organized around pulse. The listener is not thrown into a storm so much as locked into a sequence of impacts. One is the ocean breaking through the walls. The other is a hydraulic press remembering rhythm.
There is also something historically sharp about hearing this in the early-2010s moment. Dubstep and post-dubstep had already become visible enough to be absorbed, debated, commercialized, and mutated. Broadrick does not approach those rhythms as fashion. He drags them back toward industrial dread. The wobble, swing, and bass pressure become less nightclub excitement than urban anxiety. This is dance music after the dance floor has been militarized by exhaustion.
As a Private Release post, Posthuman feels like a hinge between older industrial heaviness and newer digital pressure. It does not belong to cassette archaeology or reissue devotion. It belongs to the era where underground listeners were already navigating files, blogs, genre collapse, and the strange afterlife of every earlier sound becoming instantly adjacent. Godflesh, dub, grime, metal, noise, techno, power electronics, and post-dubstep no longer have to stand in separate rooms. Broadrick lets them share one badly ventilated chamber.
The album’s value is not that it makes the human disappear. It proves the opposite. The human remains, but under compression: voice distorted, body sequenced, anger looped, grief mechanized, groove made hostile. Posthuman is not the future as upgrade. It is the future as damage report.
The machine is not replacing the body here. It is showing what the body has already become.
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