Godspeed You! Black Emperor Tell Their Story for the First Time Ever
For 30 years, Godspeed You! Black Emperor have been rock’s most guarded band, shrouded in mystery and operating as a democratic collective. Founder Efrim Manuel Menuck is finally ready to explain.
Efrim Manuel Menuck has eight finger tattoos.
He laughs at the ones on his left hand—uneven little lightning bolts, the ink faded so thoroughly they look almost silver now. Menuck, 56, has been a professional musician for three decades, founding Godspeed You! Black Emperor as his binge-drinking exercise in home recording in 1993 and starting the radical chamber ensemble A Silver Mount Zion Memorial Orchestra six years later. Still, he doesn’t consider himself an especially good musician or dazzling guitarist. “I like the idea of having lightning fingers,” Menuck says, smiling on a sunny day in his little Montreal backyard and waving his hands.
He laughs, too, when I tell him about what I’ve read online regarding the notes on his right hand: F, G#, F, B♭. Are they truly notes to self, to remember how to tune his guitar? “No!” he says, his voice breaking with delight. “What am I, Steve-O from Jackass? It’s ‘A Love Supreme.’” He starts singing the standard, tapping each finger to correspond to the melody.
When Godspeed first emerged beyond Canada in the late 1990s, they arrived in a cloak of intentional mystery. Their debut, F♯ A♯ ∞, had several blurry covers, included a penny flattened by a train, and, aside from the disembodied voice that opened the record with a monologue about flailing governments amid assorted samples, featured no vocals. They gave very few interviews, even less personal answers. They avoided publicity stills, too; when NME put Godspeed on the cover of a July 1999 issue, pronouncing them as “the last great band of the century,” it was the only time that venerable hype-machine has foregone a band photo up front. “We don’t trust what other people choose to do with our words, ideas, and feelings,” Godspeed collectively wrote in response to NME’s questions. “Our few encounters with rock journalists have left us feeling regretful.”
For 30 years, then, myth has filled a vacuum of fact: The members of Godspeed were radicals who squatted in warehouse spaces amid the post-industrial ruins of Montreal. They were the hub of a sprawling arts collective and a Dadaist orchestra that barely cared about sound. They were possibly terrorists, debatably assholes, absolutely anarchists. Maybe they lived in a polycule, too? And, of course, at least one of them had finger tattoos to help them remember guitar tunings.
“They rolled up in an old short bus that was painted blue, very mysterious and serious about what they were doing,” remembers Low’s Alan Sparhawk, who took Godspeed on one of their earliest American tours. “That was a time when, promoting a band, everybody had a one-sheet: What’s the short story? They’re Montreal anarchists, political. That would stick.”
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Late last June, I happened to be in my North Carolina hometown when Godspeed was making up a nearby show they’d canceled seven months earlier. Their bus had broken down on the way to the venue, so the line snaked for half a mile down a rural road as folks waited on doors to open. As I walked along the queue, I was stunned by how many people there were in their teens or early 20s, how they hadn’t even been alive during Godspeed’s mythmaking heyday.
I remembered what it was like to encounter Godspeed for the first time—a college freshman in September 2001, stifled then by a rush of American jingoism and calls to arms that hang around like fetid air even now. They extended the wordless affirmation that it was OK to disagree, to reject the prospect of endless war. It changed my life. The guitarist Tashi Dorji tells me that seeing Godspeed soon after he moved from Bhutan to North Carolina helped him feel like he’d found a “world of radical, traveling anarchists and music makers.” Watching kids be swallowed by Godspeed’s din last year, in the early months of the second Trump administration, I sensed it still had that power.
What’s more, that night I heard Godspeed had been forced to cancel its November 2024 show because Menuck had allegedly suffered a stroke on tour, a few months after turning 54. I started to think about what a shame it would be for something to happen to Menuck in general but especially when he was still so shrouded in relative secrecy, when the scattershot interviews he allowed still felt so elliptical. Menuck and I had spoken briefly in 2022, when he released the 1993 solo recordings he’d made under the Godspeed name before it was even a band, as a fundraiser for medical care in Gaza. “In actual conversation with people, I am open,” he told me that February. “Actually, I feel like I’m kind of an open book.”
A few weeks after that 2025 show, then, I sent him an email to test that statement: If he was such an open book, could I come to Canada and interview him at length, something no one had ever done? Not because Godspeed has a new record out, which they don’t, but simply because I thought his story was one that needed to be written. (Menuck is finishing a few different solo and side-project albums right now, but his only current hope for Godspeed is to cut a live record in Puerto Rico soon.) After months of back and forth, he agreed. So much of the writing about Godspeed has leaned into the power of their enigma, he said; he finally wanted to tell his story. “But I need a long runway to feel like I’m getting anything across that makes any sense,” he warned.
In late April, I arrived in Montreal to spend two days with Menuck. He drove me around town, showing me the band’s former loft space, Hotel2Tango, and the studio of the same name in the building he and a few others now co-own with Godspeed’s record label since the beginning, Constellation. But mostly we sat at a faded wooden table in his backyard in Park Extension, the immigrant-heavy Montreal neighborhood he has called home for 16 years, since being priced out of most everywhere else. He is hoping to buy the row house soon, the first place he’s ever owned. “The gentrification that’s happened all over the city? It’s never hit here because of fucking racism,” he says, chuckling and rolling another cigarette. “People will come here to eat Indian food, and then they go back. They can’t deal with the fact the neighborhood smells like Indian food all the time.”
Menuck was right about being an open book. A father of two then a couple of months away from celebrating his seventh wedding anniversary, he described a miserable childhood in which he was raised by an unprepared single father and stuck in notorious Zionist schools in Toronto. He told me about leaving home as a teenager, how he’d lived on the precarious margins of society and barely made it out alive. We talked about panic disorders and acid trips, the limits of protest and the last gasps of capitalism, the Grateful Dead and the Boston Red Sox (whom he apologized for liking). What’s more, Menuck detailed the inner workings of one of rock’s last great enigmatic acts: their simple reasons for quitting streaming services, their logic for reforming in 2010, their struggles as they moved outside of their comfort zone, as when they opened for Nine Inch Nails in arenas. (I should say now that I sent everyone else in Godspeed a letter, asking them to talk about Menuck; no one responded.)
By the time Menuck and I had spent 10 hours talking, I understood why Godspeed still mattered so much, why the kids on that hot summer night in North Carolina got as much out of the absorbing melodic din as I did a quarter-century earlier: An eight-person collective of Montreal misfits that still debates every major decision and, aside from a booking agent and an accountant, remains largely outside of the music industry’s structures and strictures, they are the kind of band that should no longer exist, that the demands of the market should have eliminated long ago. Before they even play a note, Godspeed’s mere existence in 2026 is itself an act of resistance. Menuck’s is, too.
“The work has been like filling buckets on a sinking ship, dumping it back into the ocean. There’s no land in sight, but that doesn’t mean things are hopeless,” he tells me, pushing his hands through his peppery gray beard. “Godspeed has to keep going until we die—not in a vainglorious way, but because it would just suck if we gave up. We’re supposed to be here in our corner, doing our weird thing. Doing the spectacle has its own inherent value.”
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