Getting to Know... HEALTH

As wildfires come closer every year to devouring Los Angeles, it seems appropriate that the city’s underground music scene has been revitalized with bands that sound as if they are desperate to get away from something. These bands operate from a club called “The Smell” and like their indie rock sprawling and antisocial, with dark ribbons of noise muddying every inverted melody—and none more than HEALTH, the quartet that found an unexpected nationwide audience with their self-titled 2007 debut, a chaotic 28 minutes of pummeling rhythms, howling vocals and screeching feedback that took them around the world and landed them an opening slot of Nine Inch Nails’ final tour.

HEALTH's sophomore LP Get Color (out now) isn’t all sonic fire and brimstone—the band members have tightened up their rhythms and layered their harmonies. First single “Die Slow” is a surprising disco-noise hybrid that rattles and churns like a zamboni machine sweeping up and devouring everyone on the dancefloor. There’s even a contemplative ballad, “In Violet,” its stuttering electronics and sighing melodies ranking as their least combative song to date. And in an act of near unprecedented magnanimity, the band has placed 66 color-coded tickets in random copies of the new album, redeemable for an assortment of prizes ranging from posters autographed in their blood to a framed photo of a band member’s mother. The grand prize winner will be flown to Los Angeles to spend three days and two nights of “nonstop entertainment,” including a trip to the zoo and breakfast in bed. They’re just not sure anyone will want to make the trip. “It has been 100 degrees every day, and there are all these wildfires and smog and smoke everywhere,” says lead vocalist/guitarist Jake Duzsik. “It sucks.”

Paste recently talked with Duzsik about the contest, whether or not the band will practice before their Nine Inch Nails opening dates, and more.

Paste: Was making this record much different than making the first HEALTH record?
Jake Duzsik: Yes, definitely. The first one we did entirely ourselves and recorded and mixed ourselves. This one we recorded in a studio with an engineer and mixed it ourselves but did final mixes in a studio on outboard gear on a big mixing console. So that was really different. And we had a timetable, so we only had so many days. We rented a studio, so it had to be done, and the process of recording—it was a lot more regimented. And we recorded this album to analog tape, like an old school two-inch tape machine, so that was new, too, and really different because you can’t do a million takes on tape. It’s $250 for a reel of tape, and it’s more like you do a take, you do a take, you do a take, and if it sucks you erase it and get a couple that are good. You kind of just shoot for it until you get it, and then you got it. Rather than digitally, where it’s endless and free, so you keep doing it and keep doing it, like, “Oh yeah, we’ll figure it out later.”

Paste: Do you think working under those conditions created a certain amount of spontaneity in the performances?
Duzsik: Well, no. There was a different style to it as far it being like, “Well, you’re just going to have to do this until you get it right.” Mostly, it wasn’t too bad. Our drummer has a lot of crazy stuff that he has to do, so I think it’s pretty trying for him. And if I’m playing guitar, I might have some guitar parts to do, but, for me, vocals are the most stressful. But he’s got to play drums the entire song, so if he screws up in one section, that’s it. And some of them are calisthenically really demanding, so that can be really tiring if you’re not getting it and you get worn out.

Paste: From what I’ve read this was a stressful album to make.
Duzsik: Well, the reality is that everything we do is really stressful, because we’re really neurotic. The first album was really stressful, and I think the third album will be really stressful. I don’t think there are going to be any interviews with HEALTH where we’re like, “Yeah, this is our laidback album.” It’s not like we’re going to go to the Bahamas and start smoking a bunch of weed and make a dub album. It’s not going to happen.

Paste: What about the process made this one stressful? The time constraints? Or the expectations?
Duzsik: To be frank, I don’t enjoy making albums. It’s not fun. I like finishing music and having written music and working on it and playing shows. Finishing an album is great, but recording is deconstructed as far as making music goes, because you’re doing things one at a time, and you’re not even playing together necessarily. And you’re stressed out because you want it to be good, and you’re like, “Ah, that doesn’t sound quite right. That doesn’t sound like it does live.” I just find the process very stressful and intense and not fun. Some people really like recording. I don’t, though. Maybe it would be different if we were like The Beatles and stopped doing live shows and just recorded albums, and you can have George Martin come in and make everything sound incredible. That would be one thing. But we’re also mixing the albums ourselves, so any time we do anything, we know we’re beginning a massive process of work that’s going to be really stressful.

Paste: Did knowing that there was an audience waiting for this album make the process different?
Duzsik: Yeah, I think so. Obviously, we were aware of that.

Paste: Does that make you uncomfortable, like the idea of having someone looking over your shoulder?
Duzsik: No. It’s really exciting. Of course, it’s stressful if someone says it’s not good or that they are disappointed or, “You changed your sound.” That can be kind of stressful. But I think it’s vastly preferable to recording an album, like we did our first one, and not even knowing if anyone is ever going to listen to it.

Paste: Going into the studio, did you have a clear idea of what you wanted this album to sound like?
Duzsik: Yeah, I would say so. Obviously, nothing ever works out the way you plan it, and different things change. I think for the third record, we know now more how we want it to sound like, having done two records. There were certain things that we loved on the first record. We loved how the drums sounded but we didn’t like how the guitars sounded. But I really like how the guitars sound on this record, so there were certain things that we wanted to fix. We’re learning more and more about recording, and I think we’re going to record the third record ourselves again. I’m sure that will be stressful, too.

Paste: Did you know how these songs would fit together before recording?
Duzsik: Yeah. We already knew the track listing and how we wanted the album to go. We did that even before we finished writing the songs. We knew what the order was and how the album should flow. That part was pretty easy.

Paste: What was the writing process like for “Die Slow,” seeing that it mashes together a lot of different ideas?
Duzsik: I think for that song we had experimented with so many different concepts for songs that we were like, “Well, let’s try to write a single, but we’ll make it weird, and it will be like one of our songs.” And that was a project or experiment, trying to accomplish that. I don’t know if it totally worked, but I like that song. It definitely seems to be the song that people respond to the most of ours.

Paste: Did you expect that kind of reaction?
Duzsik: That was the idea, so I guess it kind of worked out. When we play festivals or shows, it’s the song that people are waiting to hear or get the most excited about. It’s definitely the most immediately gratifying song that we have, and structurally it repeats itself, like verse-chorus-verse-breakdown-solo-outro. When you get down to it, a lot of times that’s what people want. Even if they say they don’t want that, they do, because it’s easy to respond to, and it’s really fun to play.

Paste: How about incorporating more electronic textures? Was that a goal going into the studio?
Duzsik: Well, we’d already written the songs, so those were part of them. We didn’t add anything, like, “Let’s make this more electro,” or anything like that. Those were the songs we had written. Even still, all those tracks, there’s nothing on them that is computer based. I mean, we used guitar pedals that have a computer chip in them, but we aren’t using a laptop or anything like that when we play live or when we record. That’s not really how we do things. I think incorporating more electronic textures is something that’s becoming more a part of our band because the possibilities are so endless. One of the things that we’re focused on and dedicated to is not repeating ourselves and wanting to sound new. Not that electronic music is by any means new, but the possibilities that you have when using electronic based sounds are so wide open that I’m sure it’s going to become more and more a part of our band.

Paste: How about a song like “In Violet”? As you were working on that song, did it seem as if you were doing something that you hadn’t done to that point?
Duzsik: Yeah. That was one of those songs that we wrote without ever playing live. We had to figure out how to play it live because there are no drums in it, and it’s the longest song we’ve ever done. I guess it felt like we were doing an epic ballad. The closest thing to it was “Perfect Skin” from our first album, because that was slower, but that’s more a noise song, where “In Violet” I think of as a Pink Floyd. But, yeah, it felt good to be writing something that felt was different for us and somewhat new.

Paste: How about “We Are Water,” another song that seems to be a touchstone for people? What was the songwriting process for that one?
Duzsik: It was sort of how we tend to start songs. We’ll have a concept for a song and we’ll have a structure written beforehand with the ideas, like, “This song should have a dance beat,” and then we’ll start working on it. That song was written very originally, and we did it in a couple days. That’s my favorite song on the album, personally, and probably one of my favorite songs that we’ve done, just because it does what I’d ideally want our songs to do. It’s very short relative to the amount of parts that it goes through, and I like that it has an intro that is very different from the rest of the song, and there’s a transition that’s chaos, and then it goes into a very rock verse part. And there’s repeatable lines but all these different sections, and the outro is totally different. There are six different parts to the song. That’s what I like about it, and that’s what I think makes it fun to listen to and fun to play.

Paste: Considering the complexity of the music, was it easy to get the entire band on the same page creatively?
Duzsik: Yeah, I think so. We spent a lot of time with each other. Obviously, there are discussions or head butting that goes on, but everyone seems to have an understanding of what we’re trying to do. The time span was pretty long between albums because we toured so much, but as far as the actual amount of hours writing, we wrote this album so much faster than the first one. We’d be writing when we had a week off tour. We’d write a song, and we’d be back on tour. Or, when we knew we had the studio time booked and we were not done with the album, we wrote four songs in a month. We basically went in and wrote every day for seven or six hours a day until we had an album. It was kind of scary because we didn’t get to field test the songs. We’re used to touring behind the songs, but we didn’t get to play “In Violet” or “Before Tigers” or “In Heat” or “Nice Girls.” So we basically wrote four songs that we were never able to play live before we recorded the album. We wrote a song a week for four weeks and then recorded them.

Paste: Was that an arbitrary time constraint that you put on yourselves?
Duzsik: No. We did not have an album done, and we had to record. Studio time was booked. In a weird way, it was really easy to write those songs, and if we had some kind of endless resource where we were a giant band and had lots of money or the time to do what we wanted, based on how we were writing at that time, we should have kept on writing. We were in that mode, and we could have just kept writing, but we had to go record and slow all that down.

Paste: Do you think the intensive touring changed you as a band?
Duzsik: Absolutely, yeah. You spend more time with people than you ever really should, but that also allows you to get really comfortable playing music together. Playing every night makes knowing those songs and knowing how to play off of each other easier. But there’s not that much to talk about on tour. Usually the subjects of tour are music, food, pooping and being hung over. That’s pretty much all there is to talk about, and then mindlessly referencing inside jokes that you have, or movie quotes. So you end up being around people that don’t know you and aren’t part of the group, and it seems like you have this weird hive mind, and it’s really off-putting. But you do get very attuned to each other’s musical proclivities by talking about what you want to do. There’s a lot of time to think when you’re sitting in a van all day thinking about what songs you want to write next. You have to find something to do with your time or you’ll go crazy.

Paste: In retrospect, does it seem like this happened quickly? Because I remember hearing that first record and liking it, and then it seemed like overnight you were touring around the world.
Duzsik: It’s weird. That’s like a double edged sword. Touring tends to slow down time. You’ll be on tour and you play a show every day in a different place, and you’ll be like, “Has it really only been two weeks since we left? God, that’s crazy.” It seems to take a really long time. But, then, you get a simultaneous sensation of the amount of time that has passed since the first record came out and people were hearing it to when we were opening up for Nine Inch Nails, it seems like an oceanic amount of time. But it wasn’t really that long. I would say that since the first record came out, more things have changed in our lives than in the previous ten years of my life. I went to high school, I went to college, blah blah blah. But it went from us playing shows and trying to be a band and putting out a record to being able to tour all the time. That’s a really exhausting and transformative process, and being able to travel so much and live off music and play festivals—yeah, there’s been a lot that has happened. It’s been good.

Paste: Was that overwhelming to be at the center of that?
Duzsik: No, because we didn’t get huge or anything. It’s not like we were some band like Vampire Weekend, and we released an album, and in the first week 60,000 people went out and bought it and we were on the cover of Spin. I think that would have been a little more like, “Whoa! This is crazy.” You’re able to assimilate pretty rapidly to where you find that that’s your reality. We were just joking about this, because everyone just got home from tour and everyone has girlfriends or friends that they want to see, and practicing is kind of burden. We’re not really set up the same, because we just got back. And our guitar player Jupiter [Keyes] was asking, “So, are we going to, like, practice before these Nine Inch Nail shows?” which are the last Nine Inch Nails shows ever. John [Famiglietti], our bass player, pointed out what an absurd question that is, that you’d ever think you’d be asking like, “So do we really need to practice before the last Nine Inch Nails show ever?” That gave us a moment of “huh, that’s funny,” because A, being able to say that is really strange. But B, of course you should fucking practice.

Paste: At this point, I imagine your expectations have changed a lot from what they were a couple years ago.
Duzsik: Yeah. One thing we’ve always said is that our expectations have been low or that we try to stay reasonable about them, but our ambitions are endless. So, yeah, I guess from two years ago, what I thought I might get out of this band or what I might accomplish [has changed]. That’s another cool thing, just thinking about what kind of music I think we might be able to make has changed a lot, because two years ago I didn’t really know who we were as a band. During the first record, I didn’t really know what the process was or if it would work. Since then, a lot of things have coalesced. I would say that what I want to accomplish has stayed the same, but the reality of what we think we can [accomplish] has changed.

Paste: It seems that you’re in a good position, since your audience will give you liberty to do what you want to do.
Duzsik: Hopefully. I think our fans will definitely follow us. If the next record we wanted to make crazier than the fucking first record, I think our fans would still be into it. I think the critical community tends to expect something more from us. Especially now with “Die Slow” and “We Are Water,” I think people are expecting that we either continue to write material like that or write better material. When we released [“Die Slow”] as a single, a lot of people were saying, “So, is this what the new HEALTH record is like. I hope so.” And it was like, “Not really. It’s still a dark and fucked up noise record.” I think the fans we have now will follow us, but if we want more fans, we’ll have to progress. But we’re not going to make a record that sounds like the first record, because we already did that.

Paste: Is it surprising that the first record broke through in the way that it did since it is a difficult record in a lot of ways.
Duzsik: Yeah, I don’t understand how that even happened.

Paste: How about the golden ticket giveaway—how did that idea emerge?
Duzsik: Well, from Charlie and Chocolate Factory. It was something that we talked about for the first record, but we didn’t have any fans or the means to fly someone out. We just thought, “Wouldn’t it be funny if you could get a golden ticket?” And we were like, “What the hell would you do with it?” It seemed like a really passé idea for a band to be like, “There are a bunch of tickets, and you can get a free t-shirt.” We wanted to do something more personal. The original idea came about a long time ago, and it was just for the one prize. And then we thought, well, what if there were a lot of prizes, and the golden ticket was the number one prize. I think the idea came about, also, with the idea of wanting to somehow make buying a CD more of a conversation. It seems like purchasing music is an art form rather than downloading it and having it as an accessory on your iPod. You used to wait for a record to come out, and the only way to get it was to go to a record store on the day that it was released and buy it. And then you’d open it up and look at the album art, and you’d play the whole fucking thing. And the way people interact with music is very different now, and few people buy CDs, especially for a weird ass band like us. If you’re into a band like us, you’re on the Internet, and if you’re on the Internet, you download music. Or you have an iPod, and you got it from somebody. People get the album before the release date comes, so that changes it from being special. We just thought for the people that actually still wanted to buy the CDs, why not make it more interesting?

At first, we were thinking about packaging, but that seems to have been done a lot. Like No Age, when they released their last album, it had this beautiful booklet in there, and we didn’t want to do that, because it has been done really well. So we wanted to come up with another way to make the album personal, and, admittedly, it’s not for everybody. It’s a limited thing. But I guess the idea was, if you really like the band and you like the record, wouldn’t it be a weird story if you were playing the record and someone said “Who is this?” and, in addition to buying the record, there was a ticket inside and one of the band members sent you a book from their personal library with an inscription on it. I liked that idea. I liked having that connection with our fans. Hopefully, as far as the golden ticket goes, whoever gets it, I hope they actually want to come. Otherwise, we’re going to have to figure something out if they’re like, “I don’t want to go to some fucking weirdo’s house.” But we’ll jump off that bridge when we come to it.

Paste: And there are, what, 66 items on the list?
Duzsik: We have them all compiled. There are unique serial numbers to each ticket, so people will be able to redeem them, and we’ll start figuring it out. Hopefully people will buy them. We actually know which stores the CDs that have the tickets are in.

Paste: Was there anything too outrageous to put on the list?
Duzsik: Uh, I think we wanted to send blood samples to people, but we realized that you can’t do that. You can’t send bodily fluids in the mail. There might have been a couple other ones, or ones that were too abstract. Jupiter has a cat, and I was like, “Why don’t we shave your cat and send that person a bag of fucking cat hair and a photo of the cat?” Who the hell actually wants to get that? But the point is that we’ll actually do it, and we’ll actually send you a bag of cat hair.

Paste: Do you have any trepidation that the person who wins the grand prize might be totally insane?
Duzsik: Well, I actually added a disclaimer to that. It was supposed to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but it basically said, “Disclaimer: If you have been remanded to a mental health facility or penitentiary for a custodial sentence of up to or exceeding 30 days, please provide us with a full disclosure. This is for our safety and yours.”

Paste: Overall, what are the things that you’re looking forward to over the next few months?
Duzsik: Well, frankly, we want to write a new record. That’s the only frustrating thing. We feel like we’re ready to write a new record right now, but instead we have to tour. That’s part of being in a band. You’re done with a record, and it has been months and months since recorded those songs, and it’s new to other people, but it’s not new to you, and you’re ready to do something else. But you have to wait until it comes out and then you tour. Everything else backlogs. I think what we’re most excited about it writing a new record. That’s also very stressful. It’s not like I’m excited, like, “Oh, it will be super fun.” It’s just what I want to do. It’s what I’m focused on.

Listen to "Die Slow" from HEALTH's Get Color: