The word [Pure] has got so much - it is loaded because it's not even blatant. I like the extremity of it as well. Essentially we are coming from extremes but it's extremes that get a bit lost in the mangle because you just can't be that specific about it - it frightens people too much. We don't like to be sensationalist either. We're just not approaching any of these things in a standard way.
- Justin Broadrick / Godflesh interview, Pit #8, 1992
GODFLESH released their second album, Pure, through Earache on this day in 1992.
The new record combines the desolate heaviness of Streetcleaner with the technology of Slavestate. Before we'd always write songs from a guitar or bass riff, but now we often start with a sample as a groove and build from there.
- Justin Broadrick / Godflesh interview, Guitar Player, 1991
...fifty percent of our sales do go to people who are into metal and death metal and rock. So obviously it makes the sales big. Originally, when GODFLESH first recorded our first album, we never thought people would accept it on any level. Even though we knew that we were essentially just fucking with "rock" music we thought it was still too extreme for people. We seem to get accepted more and more, which is weird. I think the next album will be quite the contrary from the latest thing. It will be the most brutal thing we can possibly make. I always seem to subconsciously or unconsciously go to exactly the opposite end of what the media's general conception or consensus about what GODFLESH is at the current time. And everybody at the moment is saying Pure is the most accessible record that GODFLESH has ever done - which is bizarre to me - and that whole media thing has been so much in my face that I know the next record will be as brutal as possible and it definitely won't be nicer.
- Justin Broadrick / Godflesh interview, Pit #8, 1992
The CD edition included two bonus tracks.
My objections [to Pure] are the mixing. Not heavy enough. I was listening to a lot of hardcore hip-hop at the time and I wanted the beats to be as heavy as that. That's my lingering dissatisfaction with that album. But perhaps it was just something I noticed. When Loop disbanded Robert had said the only band he was interested in joining was Godflesh so it seemed totally right for him to become involved. And it worked brilliantly. But yeah, we've both got big egos so perhaps it could only last as long as it did, but Robert, as ever, wanted to keep moving.
- Justin Broadrick / Godflesh interview, Pit #8, 1992
For the title track, GODFLESH directly sampled the song below. The sample, slowed down and eventually incorporated into their own drum machine, is right around the five minute mark.