Musically, A World Lit Only by Fire is a particularly heavy album driven by repetitive machine percussion, frontman Justin Broadrick's employment of an eight-string guitar and B. C. Green's distorted bass.

Broadrick's low, guttural vocals explore the brutality of humankind and the corruption power brings, an approach partially inspired by the book from which the album derives its title.

[8] On 2 June 2014, Godflesh released the Decline & Fall EP, featuring songs cut from the upcoming album for being colourful outliers that would have put it over Broadrick's desired ten-song length.

[2] Broadrick believed that the addition of a human drummer to the Godflesh dynamic was largely detrimental, calling it a dilution of his original goal that, despite yielding "quite amazing" results, took the project away from its initial point of man–machine fusion.

[4][14] The mechanical percussion used on A World Lit Only by Fire facilitated Broadrick's groove- and beat-focused writing style, and it allowed him to be more deliberate in the composition process;[14] this eased one of the primary difficulties in creating the album: the pressure to rush out a product and exploit the reunion's media attention.

Musically, A World Lit Only by Fire is an exceptionally heavy, bleak and mechanical album driven, as Godflesh's earliest and most influential releases were,[18] by machine percussion.

[19][20] Unlike those first EPs and albums, though, A World Lit Only by Fire features Broadrick using an eight-string guitar;[21] according to him, this choice was made so he could "tune even lower" than before and "achieve more complex dissonant chords and riffs".

[30] José Carlos Santos of Terrorizer called the balance of past and present perfect,[32] and PopMatters' Dean Brown praised the album for both respecting Godflesh's early material and focusing on the future.

[16] The album's first song and lead single, "New Dark Ages", is a slowly building piece with a guitar sound that Gregory Heaney of AllMusic described as an "impossibly detuned, nearly atonal chug".

[31] The song, focused on a simple, looping groove[34] that Tom Breihan of Stereogum called a "ferocious methodical pummel",[35] was compared to the opening track from Streetcleaner, "Like Rats", by Falzon.

The eighth track and second single of A World Lit Only by Fire, "Imperator", is a droning song[41] with Broadrick employing a clean, eerily tranquil style of singing rather than his characteristic growls.

called the track "high-grade industrial damage", and wrote, "thick and meaty, detuned guitar chug is paired with a percussive stomp of a million-robot-deep militia".

[45] The two final and longest songs of A World Lit Only by Fire,[39] "Towers of Emptiness" and Forgive Our Fathers", are both weighty tracks that conclude with Broadrick melancholically repeating the titles over a background of sinister sounds.

The band coheadlined shows with Loop[52] (whose frontman, Robert Hampson, toured with Godflesh in 1991 and 1992 and contributed on Pure)[53] and was later supported by opening acts Prurient[54] and Khost.

[59][25] For the shows in support of A World Lit Only by Fire, Green and Broadrick played over preprogrammed drum machine loops, and apocalyptic imagery was projected onto a backdrop.

[63]  A World Lit Only by Fire saw worldwide release on 7 October 2014, and all versions featured cover art taken from the 1933 experimental film Lot in Sodom by James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber.

[46] In 2019, Broadrick's label, Avalanche Recordings, released an album by Celer known as Plays Godflesh;[65] it is composed entirely of ambient samples from A World Lit Only by Fire.

[67] AllMusic's Gregory Heaney wrote that "A World Lit Only by Fire makes it crystal clear that Godflesh have a long, unfailing memory, and that their punishing work has only just begun.

gave the album a perfect score and said, "Complete with bleak, nihilistic themes, A World Lit Only by Fire is every bit the record fans have been waiting over a dozen years for.

"[36] Zachary Houle of PopMatters wrote, "A World Lit Only by Fire is revisionist industrial and the soundscapes of this brittle disc leaves you wondering what on earth just hit you."

"[69] Writing for Metal Injection, Jeremy Ulrey said, "A World Lit Only by Fire will eventually go down as an elite Godflesh album not for the era(s) it recreates, but for the strength of material.

Pitchfork praised the album for living up to Godflesh's early releases,[30] and Rolling Stone wrote, "Sculpted out of scrap metal and bloody sinew, it's a monument to what [Broadrick] sees as a new Dark Age where humanity still breeds like rats under a fiery, polluted sky".