jesu emerged from the aftermath of Godflesh’s original dissolution, taking its name from the closing track of the band’s 2001 album Hymns. Where Godflesh had pursued mechanised weight and confrontation, Justin K Broadrick used jesu to explore something altogether more exposed: crushing volume colliding with melody, vulnerability, electronics and dreamlike abstraction.
First appearing on record in 2004, jesu quickly established a sound that was both immense and deeply intimate — downtuned guitars and physical low-end dissolving into shoegaze, slowcore, ambient electronics and Broadrick’s fragile, understated vocals. The project became hugely influential in the space where extreme music and dream pop intersect, helping define a language subsequently described as doomgaze, post-metal and shoegaze metal.
The significance of that early work has only grown with time. Pitchfork later named the self-titled Jesu album among The 50 Best Shoegaze Albums of All Time, placing a record born from the collapse of one of industrial metal’s defining bands firmly within the wider alternative-music canon.
Over the following two decades, jesu has remained one of Broadrick’s most personal and open-ended projects. Alongside an extensive catalogue of albums, EPs and collaborations, the name has crossed repeatedly into worlds far removed from conventional heavy music. Broadrick collaborated with Sun Kil Moon across two full-length albums, while jesu has also been invited to reinterpret work by artists including Julien Baker and Interpol.
That reach has become particularly visible in 2026 through Broadrick’s work with Phoebe Bridgers. Bridgers approached him specifically through her love of jesu and asked him to bring that sensibility into her own music. Broadrick subsequently contributed guitar to “Bobby” and “Best Dressed” on Bridgers’ Lost Weekend, before their collaboration continued with “On Video”, the end-title song for the A24 feature film Primetime, on which he performs electric guitar and bass.
Speaking to The Guardian in 2026, Broadrick described suddenly finding himself catapulted from his fiercely independent world into Bridgers’ huge mainstream orbit. Yet the connection makes sense: the emotional weight, texture and melodic vulnerability that drew Bridgers to jesu are the same qualities that have made the project so enduring.
Now entering a renewed period of creative activity, jesu remains one of Broadrick’s most vital and forward-moving projects…a continually evolving collision of extreme heaviness, beauty and emotional exposure.
jesu is represented worldwide by Mythology Agency.