Rise Above is a title that could almost sound inspirational until JK Flesh gets hold of it. In Justin Broadrick’s hands, rising above does not mean transcendence, peace, or escape. It sounds more like pressure building upward from below: concrete, bass, smoke, repetition, a body trying to climb out of machinery while the machinery keeps learning its shape.
Released in 2016 on Speedy J’s Electric Deluxe label, Rise Above was JK Flesh’s second full-length album and one of the clearest statements of the project’s purpose. Broadrick’s own JK Flesh description frames the alias as heavy/mutant techno and electronica informed by industrial, dub, power electronics, beats, and bass. That definition matters here because Rise Above largely removes the old guitar armor and leaves the rhythmic skeleton exposed. The heaviness remains, but it is no longer dependent on riffs. It comes from sub-bass, distortion, repetition, compression, and a brutally physical 4/4 pulse.
That shift made the album divisive in the right way. Anyone approaching JK Flesh only as a Godflesh satellite could miss what Broadrick was doing. The old Godflesh logic is still present: machine rhythm, urban dread, body-meets-system punishment, the slow collapse of human warmth under industrial pressure. But on Rise Above, those ideas are rebuilt through techno. The beat is not decoration. The beat is the institution.
Resident Advisor described the record as wild, forceful, and meticulous, emphasizing its huge beats, static, and the tension between animal intensity and mechanical determination. That is the album’s whole engine: the human and the programmed locked together, neither winning, both damaged by the contact.
Compared with Posthuman, this album feels more narrowed and more confident. Posthuman still had the thrill of collision: industrial metal residue meeting post-dubstep weight, Godflesh memory leaking into new machinery. Rise Above sounds like Broadrick has stopped explaining the hybrid and simply started operating it. Tracks such as “Tunnel,” “Defector,” and “Swarm” move with sparse repetitive beats, heavy bass, and murky distortion, a sound Igloo compared to Andy Stott’s slowed, crushed, industrialized club language. But Broadrick’s version has a different emotional gravity. It is less narcotic, more punished. Less foggy room, more service corridor with the air system failing.
The album’s title also works against itself in a useful way. “Rise above” is usually motivational language, the slogan of self-help posters and corporate resilience speeches. JK Flesh makes it sound exhausted, almost sarcastic. To rise above this music would require leaving the body behind, but the body is exactly where the record keeps returning: pulse, impact, fatigue, muscle memory, breath under stress. This is posthuman not because the human has disappeared, but because the human is now processed through rhythm, infrastructure, and overload.
There is also a Birmingham shadow here, even when the guitars recede. Broadrick’s lifelong language of heaviness has always felt connected to industrial geography: factories, estates, concrete, machines, pressure systems, the spiritual weather of post-industrial Britain. Rise Above translates that geography into club terms. The dance floor becomes a worksite. The kick drum becomes a stamping press. The bass becomes architecture. The result is dance music with no fantasy of release. Movement exists, but it does not necessarily free anyone.
That is why the record feels important inside the Private Release sequence. After Incapacitants, where extremity often arrives as overflowing ecstatic noise, JK Flesh gives extremity a grid. Incapacitants make the room impossible to measure. JK Flesh measures it, reinforces it, then lowers the ceiling until the beat starts touching your skull. Both are forms of pressure, but the philosophies differ. One is storm. One is system.
The Electric Deluxe context is useful too. Releasing Rise Above through a techno label rather than a metal or industrial imprint forces the album into another conversation. It asks whether Broadrick’s heaviness can function not as rock heaviness adapted to electronics, but as techno heaviness on its own terms. The answer is yes, though it is an ugly yes. This is not sleek futurism. It is functional punishment. A club tool for rooms with bad memories.
Rise Above does not rise by becoming lighter. It rises like smoke from overheated wiring, like pressure through a shaft, like a buried machine finding the floor above it. The album’s achievement is that it makes minimal techno feel physically ruined without stripping it of motion. It is bleak, but not inert. Heavy, but not nostalgic. Mechanical, but still full of human damage.
Broadrick has spent a lifetime proving that heaviness is not a genre. It is a condition. Rise Above is one of the clearest demonstrations: the guitar can vanish, the band can vanish, the metal frame can vanish, and the weight remains.
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