Put this on and listen to what is missing. There is no fill. Nowhere in fifty two minutes does anything speed up because a human being got excited. That absence is the record, and in 1989 nobody had built a metal album on it before.
Godflesh released Streetcleaner through Earache on 13 November 1989, ten tracks, a little under fifty three minutes, with Combat putting it into American shops a year later. Justin Broadrick played guitar, sang, and programmed the machine. G.C. Green played bass. Paul Neville came in on second guitar for part of it. That is the entire personnel, and two thirds of the rhythm section is a box.
The box, by most accounts, was an Alesis HR-16. You can buy one now for the price of a decent dinner. It has sixteen bit samples, no swing worth the name, and a hi-hat that sounds like a stapler. Broadrick has said for years that he chose it partly because he did not consider himself a good enough drummer to play what he was hearing, and separately that he wanted something that sounded inhuman, beyond what a person could physically do. Those two statements have been used to argue opposite cases about this album ever since, and the honest position is that both are true. A limitation and an intention can be the same object.
Now the technical part, because it is the part that explains why this record still works and a hundred imitations do not. The guitars are not tuned to sound heavy. They are tuned to sit in a narrow band and stay there, and the bass is mixed loud enough to carry the low end on its own. That leaves an enormous hole in the middle of the frequency spectrum, and the drum machine, which is thin and dry and has no bottom to speak of, sits in it perfectly. Nothing masks anything else. It is the cleanest arrangement decision on any extreme metal record of the decade and it was made by two men with no money.
Every band who copied this went out and bought a better drum machine, which is exactly how they missed the point.
"Like Rats" opens and does the recruiting. Four and a half minutes, one figure, no development, and by the second minute you have either surrendered or turned it off. "Christbait Rising" is the longest thing here at seven minutes and the most obviously constructed, the one where the hip-hop skeleton is closest to the surface. "Devastator" running into "Mighty Trust Krusher" is the best sequencing on the album, a hard cut that reviewers have been pointing at for thirty five years. And the title track is where the tempo finally drops far enough that the machine stops sounding mechanical and starts sounding patient, which is worse.
What people get wrong about this record is calling it cold. It is not cold. Cold implies restraint, and there is nothing restrained here: the vocals are buried and howling, the bass is distorted past the point of pitch, the repetition is punishing rather than hypnotic. It is inhuman, which is a different thing, and the difference is why Fear Factory and half the industrial metal that followed sound like machines with feelings while this sounds like a machine that has stopped caring.
Three sources will tell you the same thing about its importance and they are all correct: this is the point where the rhythm section stopped being the thing under the guitars and became the thing the guitars are attached to. Metal spent the next fifteen years working that out. The record itself is not a pleasure and was never meant to be one. It is one of the two or three most influential things anybody made in extreme music in the eighties, and the influence is still audible every time a band programs a beat instead of hiring somebody to play it.