HEALTHFor 20 years now, Los Angeles outfit HEALTH have been a force to be reckoned with when it comes to dark, experimental and industrial rock music.
Equally acclaimed and prolific in terms of music and their live performances, it’s hard to stop the group when it comes to knocking it out of the park with each and every new release.
Earlier this year, the group made their latest trek down to Australia as part of the Knotfest festival – their third visit in as many years. Between all those Aussie trips though, they’ve managed to find time to write and release new music, with their sixth album – CONFLICT DLC – arriving last week.
In celebration of the album’s release HEALTH vocalist and guitarist Jake Duzsik gave us a comprehensive rundown on each of the tracks on the latest record.
HEALTH – CONFLICT DLC Track-By-Track
ORDINARY LOSS
I feel like every record has that one song where once you unlock it, it tells you a lot about the rest of the record. And to me for CONFLICT DLC, that is embodied in ORDINARY LOSS. I feel there’s a good balance between all the different elements that are going to appear on the record. Lyrically, the chorus is a bigger lift. I tend to write “down” choruses oftentimes that are understated and almost quiet, vocally.
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ORDINARY LOSS is one where we sort of forced ourselves to really plant the flag of having a very noticeable lifting chorus in terms of where it goes to, and key and melody. But then you also have this very punishing, driving heavy industrial riff, which is sort of a nod to Ministry and KMFDM. I think it really contains a lot of the other elements that you're going to hear in the rest of the record.
And additionally, I think it's the first time we've ever put a single as track one. We usually have an intro track that's either a long building, almost proggy kind of piece, or something that's totally insane and very short and truncated, and then the single would go as number two.
This is the first time we were ever made track one a lead single. And to us, ORDINARY LOSS is emblematic of the entire record more than any other song,
BURN THE CANDLES
This is probably one of the weirdest songs that we've ever written. I'm not precisely sure if anyone will like it. I’d written the chorus many years ago and felt like there was something there because it felt different from some of our other songs, particularly the percussive production and the tempo of the song were totally different.
I don't think that the track was particularly resonating with John [Famiglietti], and one of the ways that we came to an accord is we experimented with this extremely high tempo and kind of happy-hardcore beat. We were listening to a lot of Brutalismus 3000 and kind of thinking: “can we do something at this tempo?”.
We ended up doing something with this Scooter kind of vibe with a spoken word thing, and then it goes to this very big shoegaze-y rock chorus. I don't know if I've ever heard another song like that, probably because no one wants it or no one asked for it. But nonetheless, I am always proud anytime we do something where I genuinely think: I’m not sure that anybody else is doing that.
VIBE COP
This song is a fucking homage to Ministry, Just One Fix is my favorite industrial song of all time. I used to always listen to it before going out on stage in the green room. It traverses so many different elements of the sub-genres of heavy music that I grew up loving, particularly punk rock, post-punk, industrial and thrash.
The riff on this one is much more like a punk riff than anything else. It's played with a lot more technical command, but it's very easy to follow. It's not proggy or amelodic, and I think we just wanted to make something that did that but with all the tools in modern production.
You can make drums sound so punishing now, and sub-bass and low end and all the transients in modern mixing. It was sort of our way of tipping our cap to a fully industrial metal song.
TRASH DECADE
With TRASH DECADE, I think we wanted to permit ourselves to be more ADD, sort of in the vein that some of our earlier music was, we had a lot of disparate elements and stops and starts and changes that unfold in a very short amount of time; yet still managing to find melodicism and emotional lyrics.
It’s hard not to be influenced by something like Knocked Loose’s last record, it's ultimately so experimental. There’s no expectations of: this is a verse, this is a chorus, this is a bridge, this is whatever trope that you're used to hearing in a song. And we kind of wanted to look at a track like TRASH DECADE through that lens and not be beholden to: “have we repeated this enough times? Can we change styles this many times in a song, but still keep it on brand for us?”.
I guess it's the closest thing that we would have to a metalcore song, maybe? I don't know. But it's one of my favorites and we've started playing it live and it's really fun to play live.
TORTURE II
The first four tracks on CONFLICT DLC are pretty punishing. It's not like it's a Slayer record or anything like that, but we tend to have a lot of peaks and valleys. We realise that the vast majority of our listeners are not listening to albums in sequence. Younger people just don't do that. We even have super-fans that have honestly told us: “I've never listened to one of your albums in full”. They’ve just listened to the songs they like.
But we still really care about how albums are sequenced, and so when we got to TRASH DECADE, we felt like the listener was going to need to take a breath. If you stick another heavy-ass song there, then you might as well make the entire record all heavy songs, which is not what we wrote. We felt like this was the moment for the calmest piece on the album.
TORTURE II is this post punk and almost my homage to something like Durutti Column, the way Vini Reilly would sketch out a guitar figure. It’s kind of melancholic and bittersweet, and there's a lot of space. And it's the only instrumental on the entire album
ANTIDOTE
I hate when bands say “it's a pop jammer”, but ANTIDOTE is a fucking pop jammer. Our records are usually pretty diverse, and that's something I love about industrial music in general.
Take a band like Nine Inch Nails, when you look at the sequencing of The Downward Spiral, in those first five songs you're getting so many different kinds of things. You get March Of The Pigs, you start with Mr. Self Destruct, but then you get the second track Piggy, which is this super spacey ballad kind of song. I just like approaching a record feeling like you can put whatever you want on there.
And for some of the newer HEALTH fans that maybe have found us through the Lamb Of God collab or Nine Inch Nails or seeing us at Knotfest, they might be like: “what the fuck is this? Are they trying to sound like The Weeknd or something?!”. That's possible, but I still felt like it was within the bounds of what we would normally do, which is to write any kind of song that we want.
DARKAGE
DARKAGE is interesting because it's one of the first songs that we wrote. It was written in the RAT WARS era, and it was actually one of those songs, like I was describing with ORDINARY LOSS, where we felt like we had uncovered what the sound palette was, and how we wanted that record to sound: very dark, very oppressive, elements of brash guitars and industrial metal mixing with melancholy, fear and sadness.
Ultimately when we sequenced RAT WARS, we couldn't make this song fit. We just didn't feel like it fit in the track listing. That was sort of a cornerstone that we had. I'll be honest, there was still a debate: “oh, does it fit on this record?”.
And then we kind of did a revamp of it and slowed it way down, and then it felt like a good deep cut. I would say that there's not a lot of deep cuts on this record. A lot of the songs feel like “song” songs, and I would put DARKAGE as one of the big ones for me that I really like. It was never a debate of: “are we going to make a music video for this or are we going to make it a single?”. It's definitely a lay in the cut album track.
And calling back to what I was saying about BURN THE CANDLES, it has one of my favorite things on the album which is a chugging, doomy metal guitar with a vocoder in the intro. Once again, I don't think anybody asked for that, I don't think anybody wants vocoders with metal guitars. But I find it very interesting.
SHRED ENVY
SHRED ENVY is our Rob Zombie track where we really just wanted to have fun with it. It's not as good as a Rob Zombie track, there's no gigantic chorus that you could remember, but more in the way it moves and the tempo of it. When we released RAT WARS, DSM-V was the most blatantly genre-referencing song that we had ever done in terms of: “hey, this is an industrial song!”.
We were pretty reluctant about it and worried that people would clown on it or shit on it. But it turned out that people loved that song, and especially live for our fans or at festivals, it’s definitely a favorite song.
So when it came to this record, we felt like we needed to revisit that kind of idea. We have this tendency for self-sabotage, if we write a song that works, most bands write a bunch more songs like that on the record so that their fanbase can be like: “oh, I love that song. Let me hear more of the songs that sound like that!”.
We always edit ourselves and say: “well, if we do that, we're going to be repeating something that already happened”. And then every time, it’s just fucking Sisyphus, people will say: “I wish there were more ones like that one!”.
In the case of SHRED ENVY, we just gave ourselves the permission to say: “hey, we're going to kind of make a part two to DSM-V, but let's kind of go more in the Rob Zombie direction than Rammstein”.
YOU DIED
This is also the other “sticks out like a sore thumb” track, which I'm fine with because I think it's something that we do, and I think that modern heavy music is very comfortable traversing a lot of different genre touchstones.
But I would place this as: it's a witch house song that's a sad-ass ballad. I would say this and ANTIDOTE are the most traditionally melodic-oriented songs. YOU DIED is also one of my favorites. I think that it's emotionally direct and I'm proud of it.
THOUGHT LEADER
THOUGHT LEADER is another one of my favourite songs on the record, I think because it's really unlike any other song we've ever written. It's just two chords the entire song, they can be slightly augmented, but it's really an exercise in minimalism. And I was just really proud of how the mix came out, which is not me, I don't get to give myself credit for that, but it just sounds very lush and I like how simplistic the message of the lyrics are and how well they fit the music.
I think it's the most openly referential I've been, lyrically, to the current societal, cultural state that we find ourselves in, particularly our addiction to technology and how it's demeaning us all and robbing us of our dignity and our humanity and making us all fucking stupid. In the past, I had avoided making technological references because it felt kitschy and more of the provenance of pop music and hip hop to talk about your phone.
But now it seems almost ridiculous to not try to address those issues because it's the most common through line that all of us everywhere have as an experience, unfortunately. So I felt like it was pertinent.
DON’T KILL YOURSELF
This is probably the most openly vulnerable track on the record, lyrically. And we have been using that statement, “don’t kill yourself”, on merch items for many, many years, printing them on hats backwards so that when you stare into a mirror it reminds you: don't kill yourself. Same thing on shirts.
There's obviously a tongue-in-cheekness about that as a merch item, but it's also very earnest. We know, especially by now, that people in general, and also particularly a lot of our fans, are struggling with mental health issues. And so am I.
When I finished writing the lyrics, we were trying to figure out what to call this song, and we've been using that expression for so long, it felt like: this is finally the time to name a song DON’T KILL YOURSELF.
Personally, I would've made this song a single. Probably. It’s very raw and honest and direct. And I think people are either going to like it or they’re not going to like it, but there's not going to be an in-between
WASTED YEARS
WASTED YEARS is another one of the tracks that was written originally in the RAT WARS sessions, so it's sort of a carryover. We had originally planned on including a lot more of the material, there were B-sides from RAT WARS.
But then when we started fleshing the songs out, we realised we wanted to be more ambitious and not just hold onto something because we had it as a bird in the hand. WASTED YEARS is another one of my favorites, but it just didn't feel like it had a place in the track listing and the universe of the RAT WARS LP; but we always knew that it was part of that aesthetic landscape.
It’s not trying to do anything forced as a song, it just is the kind of song you write without any agenda. You're not deciding you need to write something uptempo or a ballad or a single, it's just a fucking song that came out very organically. I would once again highlight the lyrics as being particularly personally raw-nerved and open.
It always felt like an album closer, but on RAT WARS we had DON’T TRY and that felt like the perfect song for the end of that record, so we couldn't use WASTED YEARS. When we started this record, we already knew, we were like: “the last track is WASTED YEARS. That's the last song on the record”.
Even before anything else, that was one of the things we definitely knew, and we also knew that the second to last track would be DON’T KILL YOURSELF. It’s sort of like trying to archeologically uncover a skeleton, and those were the first things that we uncovered.
HEALTH’s CONFLICT DLC is out now.
