HEALTH Embrace Their Inner Dark

HEALTH are no strangers to grim material. The Los Angeles-based industrial trio of vocalist/guitarist Jake Duzsik, bassist/producer John Famiglietti and drummer BJ Miller have a history of unflinchingly dark music, from the punishing electro-noise barrages of 2009’s GET COLOR to the bass-thumping basement club leanings on 2015’s DEATH MAGIC. But what happens when a band already fixated on the morbid faces a period of human history far bleaker than anything that came before it?

“The confluence of the pandemic, our first child, family illness, civil and social and political and military unrest, the world unraveling—it was just a fucking lot,” Duzsik says, calling in via Zoom from the home where he and his partner are co-parenting. The years since the last HEALTH LP—2019’s VOL. 4: SLAVES OF FEAR, named after Black Sabbath’s own fourth record—have been anything but uneventful for Duzsik. But even before the tumultuous events of 2020 and the two collaborative albums spawned during lockdown ever came into being, Duzsik became a father. The shift was major, and that subsequently seeped into his creative process: “Fatherhood and trying to keep a family together in the face of all that was what I was really processing.”

Before we even begin talking about HEALTH’s latest album—the brutal, emotive, propulsive RAT WARS—Duzsik and I find ourselves discussing, in-depth, how his outlook on life intertwined with the thoughts that circled his mind as a new parent. “I have a penchant for negativity,” he tells me, before launching into a pre-pandemic story. “We were at an in-depth obstetrician sonar thing, where we were looking at every part of the baby. My partner, later, was like, ‘Isn’t that cool?’ And I was like, ‘He’s not even born yet but, best case scenario, he’s gonna have to grow up and get old enough to watch his mom die.’” With a pause, he adds, “And that was before everything went to shit.”

When it came time for HEALTH to finally return to the studio to write and record their follow-up to VOL. 4 (“We really didn’t want to make the next HEALTH record over Zoom in the same fucking city,” Duzsik says), the compounding weight of all these factors only darkened the already-despondent songwriting the band is known for. “We felt unquestionably that we had written our bleakest and most aggressive record,” Duzsik reflects now. “Even though VOL. 4 has a lot of homages to thrash and ‘70s metal, it was definitely a lighter record, though I know ‘lighter’—in terms of our band—is a relative term.” If the tonal palette this time around wasn’t clear enough, Duzsik also notes that one of the album titles he pitched to Famiglietti was OUTER DARK, the name of a brutal, early Cormac McCarthy novel. “It basically means ‘hell,’” Duzsik says. The title they chose is just as hellish.

RAT WARS—sharing a name from a cut off VOL. 4—is both a doubling down of the uncompromising yet arresting style that HEALTH has come to be known by and an expansion in scope for a group that’s always been unafraid of exploring every possible permutation of their sound. Here, the bursts of distorted guitars on “FUTURE OF HELL” or the harrowing industrial rush of drums on “CRACK METAL” can comfortably rest alongside the R&B influences of “ASHAMED” or the spare shoegaze leanings of closer “DON’T TRY.”

One unifying factor that brings these disparate sounds together, Duzsik tells me, is the idea of a common “backdrop visual aesthetic” associated with the record. “It’s always verged on this dystopian or post-apocalyptic [vibe].” He compares it to H.R. Giger’s work on Ridley Scott’s Alien: “It’s the future, but everything’s fucked up and dripping with slime and condensation. And you’re in space, but it’s just some giant evil corporation. Basically, what’s happening now.” Though a similar atmospheric tilt has colored much of HEALTH’s work, it became impossible for Duzsik to ignore how much heavier things felt this time around as he was making it. “As we stayed a band for much longer than we planned to, the world incrementally just seemed to turn into that unfortunately extremely dark artistic projection.”

There is one major way that RAT WARS diverges from past HEALTH records, though. “To oversimplify, it’s much more of an ‘I’ record than a ‘we’ record,” Duzsik explains. “There’s a lot on DEATH MAGIC and VOL. 4 that are vague platitudes, where I’m referring to us—people—as the royal ‘we,’ in a journalistic, surveying context.” He expresses that he’s always felt uncomfortable with writing in a personal sense, but calls RAT WARS “unquestionably” the most personal record for him.

“I always write about the same shit,’ he continues, “because it’s always about being preoccupied with this existential dread in the face of meaninglessness and death that everybody is dealing with. All we have is our experience in a short amount of time, and the best way to categorize whether or not you’re successful is if you’re happy being alive day-to-day. And I’ve struggled with that for most of my life, from adolescence on.” He takes a moment to collect his thoughts and stares up above his webcam. “And then the world going to total shit and introducing a child into that, who you care about more profoundly than you knew you could care about anything—there’s a lot to unpack there, philosophically.”

As we start discussing specific threads in the album in this context, it feels apt to dive into the recurring imagery of children on the album—most prominently, in the title of the track “CHILDREN OF SORROW,” and in the first words Duzsik sings on opener “DEMIGODS” (“And they pronounced / That a child was born long ago / Hear me now, you demigods / Either lift me up or let me burn”). Though the latter is the result of Duzsik embracing his stream-of-consciousness demo vocal process and editing himself less, it’s one of several moments on the record that bears the emotional load he’s been carrying. “My subconscious is just fucking jammed with these obsessive ruminations on my own son,” he says. “There’s a lot of stuff that’s just Jungian—it’s just coming out.”

He mentions a quote from Robert Smith of The Cure that’s stuck with him: “He was once asked why he didn’t have any children, and he said that he wasn’t given a choice about being born, and—if he had been—he would’ve preferred not to be. I think about that a lot. I didn’t consult my son about whether or not he wanted to be a passenger on this occasionally brutal [ride].” As Duzsik continues by bringing up ongoing climate crises and ecological disasters that make up a significant amount of his parenting anxieties, he adds, “I was lucky enough to live in a time that was different, and I’m like, ‘I’ll have a kid. Fuck it. I’m sure that he’ll be okay.’ I don’t know if he’s going to be okay. I don’t know that things are going to be okay.”

These lines in “DEMIGODS” aren’t a singular occurrence; late in the record, in the coda of penultimate track “DSM-V,” they reappear in an even more somber tone, carrying the weight of everything on the album that’s transpired since their first utterance. The context here is loaded with a double meaning, as Duzsik tells me that “DSM-V” is a track about addiction. “I’ve struggled with it—substance addiction, but also addiction in a greater sense, like OCD or recurring unwanted thoughts. Ways that we’re destructive that we can’t control.”

“The reason I wanted to put that lyric from the first song at the end of the record,” he continues, “was hearing about people who lose their kids to drug overdose or suicide or an accident. It’s hard for me not to hear those stories and have this immediate reaction of, ‘How would I even survive if something bad happened to my son when he got older?’” He pauses and thinks to himself for a moment. “I have no idea what’s going to happen to him. I don’t know what his life will be like. Where that journey will take that human is unknown. We get to these places in our adulthood where we’re so lost and unhappy and destroying ourselves or destroying our relationships, or actively destroying the world, as you see happening across the globe. It’s so strange and poetic that we all start as these kids. Whatever our arc is, whether it’s tragic or blessed, it can lead to this place that’s so alienating from this simplistic biological state.”

This recurring lyric holds another role, too: “This isn’t a concept record, but it’s about as fucking close as we come to making a concept record, without putting Roman numerals or having some stupid narrative no one can actually follow,” Duzsik says. He mentions some disagreements in production about whether this throughline would register for listeners, but he pushed for it because of the place it served in RAT WARS’ arc. “The idea of restating a melodic theme at the penultimate track really scratches my album-oriented-rock bone that no one cares about,” Duzsik adds. “We didn’t want to get caught up in this idea of having to tell a narrative, but I do love prog rock and so do my bandmates.”

Beyond that, Duzsik emphasizes that he’s not interested in over-explaining his lyrics. “I think that can denude them for the listener,” he says. “One of the great things about vague art is that people just apply it to their own lives and feelings. It’d be kinda lame if Rothko was like, ‘I’m gonna be there at the art opening, and I’m gonna explain all these paintings to you.’ I don’t think you need to do that.” Jokingly, he adds, “Sometimes you get pushed, like ‘This seems like this is about this. Do you wanna talk about it?’ No! I wrote a fucking song about it! If I wanted to talk about it, I’d start a podcast.”

Musically, what’s proven to be most significant to the process and sound of RAT WARS was the two DISCO4 collaborative records that HEALTH made with musicians across all genres in 2020 and 2022, when they were able to remotely secure guests who had unexpected downtime during COVID lockdowns. With guest spots from metal and industrial mainstays like Nine Inch Nails and Lamb of God, vicious acts like Full of Hell and The Body pushing the upper limits of heavy music, and more recent upstarts like rapper Backxwash and hyper-pop duo 100 gecs, the DISCO4 records let HEALTH flex the full range of their capabilities as musicians in a way they hadn’t before, and helped break them out of old habits. “When you’re coming into a project with someone else, whether or not you get to be in the same room with them, the best thing is it jars you out of any repetitive pitfalls you might get stuck in with your own work,” Duzsik says. “It’s an immediate remedy for that.”

Going into the RAT WARS sessions right after these collab records, HEALTH carried the same principles and ended up with songwriting sessions with “less agenda” than ever. Duzsik further contextualizes, saying, “Your agenda in writing a collaborative song is finding the way you can reciprocally write a song together. You leave a lot of baggage aside.” The results, he says, were the most organic songwriting and recording HEALTH has ever seen. “We just weren’t really worried about what we were doing.”

“In that way, the collaboration records had a massive effect. That, and then the world going to absolute shit and me being at the lowest emotional state I’ve probably ever been were very prime for writing a record,” Duzsik quickly adds. “It sounds like those things should be mutually exclusive, but I would say this is maybe the most fun I’ve ever had writing a record, while at the same time being the most personally unhappy I’ve ever been. It’s a weird dichotomy.”

From here, Duzsik and I follow the conversational thread of the DISCO4 records’ genre-agnostic approach to discuss the larger ways music—by nature—perpetually evolves and build off past iterations, constantly reshaping itself into new permutations that would have been impossible to imagine even a few years prior. Duzsik references T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” an essay about art as an ouroboros: “What [Eliot] says is that it’s not just that you look at a piece of work and say, ‘That exists because of this thing that came before it, and that’s quintessential to its being.’ That works the opposite way as well. Every new piece of work changes and re-contextualizes the actual nature of what has come before it. I think of it as this very symbiotic, reciprocal, constantly evolving dialogue.”

He continues by comparing this idea to the unstuckness of time that hounds Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five: “It’s all just this mishmash of things. I think that’s how kids look at culture now. When I was a kid, it was really hard to be into hardcore punk and goth music at the same time, even though they had all these throughlines. They were mutually exclusive scenes. Now, everything is just vibes and feels and eras.” Duzsik does, however, express wariness of the ways contemporary home production technology can generate virtually perfect imitations of past sounds and scenes. “There’s nothing wrong with that,” he says, “but part of what’s so appealing to me is that you have these influences that you emulate, and then you fuck up and stumble through it and end up making something new.”

In applying that back to what he feels driven with in HEALTH, Duzsik adds, “What’s always most inspiring to me in any artform is to look at something that feels very expressive of the moment in which it’s made. It’s not like we’re making these sea-change shifts in artistic consciousness like [William S. Burroughs’] Naked Lunch or [Gabriel García Márquez’s] One Hundred Years of Solitude, but that’s just personally what’s always been appealing to me. Staying involved with what’s happening in a modern sense is a lifeline for us to stimulate our creativity, especially since we’ve been doing this for a long time.”

In seeking to better understand the full emotional breadth and complexity of HEALTH as a band, it feels fitting to steer conversation away from solely heavy and heady matters, and ask Duzsik about the group’s reputation for invoking gallow’s humor and morbid memes online. In the days surrounding RAT WARS’ release alone, the band’s Twitter is rife with posts that take a more lighthearted means of promoting an otherwise dark album.

Duzsik says that the band’s social media these days is mainly run by Famiglietti, but has his own insights into what the fan response to both the music and the memes says. “What feels like what might be mutually exclusive—the lyrical content and the shitposting—we’ve learned that the same person who maybe has suicidal thoughts really likes nerdy anime memes. They’re the same person.” When he was still actively running the Twitter page with Famiglietti, he says he learned that “if you just wrote [dark thoughts] out and posted it on Twitter, you get fucking crucified… but if you wanna be funny in a potentially edgy way, you can do it with a meme.”

He chalks up HEALTH’s embrace of this online presence to the fans that the band has garnered through their work in video games, starting with their Max Payne 3 soundtrack that provided them their first big break. Much of the group’s activity and posting has since leaned into this—as their press release’s note about referring to RAT WARS as “The Downward Spiral for people with at least two monitors and vitamin D deficiency” alludes—from the track they’ve since contributed to Cyberpunk 2077, to their performance inside Elden Ring and subsequent merch as the culmination of a running joke about playing at the in-game Radahn Festival.

As Duzsik has observed from the number of very online gamers into HEALTH, “People who are sad and estranged and alienated and alone are not just sitting in a dark room, writing poetry by candlelight. They’re also watching goofy-ass videos and just trying to fucking make it through life. That’s what we’re trying to connect to. We just decided to really engage those dualistic sides of ourselves—both within the band and within each individual. The music is deadly serious, the lyrics are deadly serious. We actually really care.” He mentions the resonance of one of the most enduring pieces of HEALTH’s branding: merch with reversed text that reads “DON’T KILL YOURSELF.” “It’s not a quip, it’s not funny,” Duzsik says. “It’s completely earnest.” It’s part of what makes HEALTH a band that so many have a deep personal connection with: their image is inviting to those who share the group’s own dispositions, drawing in more people who most need to hear the genuine emotional core of their music. “It’s very representative of the fact that we’re all awash with different toggling, competing, and often warring states of being,” Duzsik explains. “That’s the noise of our own thoughts.”

Duzsik is quick to toss out self-deprecating asides—at one point, he mentions how another interviewer recently expressed surprise at how fun Famiglietti was in spite of the band’s sad lyrics, only for Famiglietti to remark, “I don’t write the lyrics. And Jake’s not fun.” But he holds both ends of HEALTH’s public presence throughout the interview. Our most sobering conversation sees him visibly still reckoning with the effects of the past years, prone to long pauses as he considers the extent to which circumstances have shaken him, and—at one point—choking up talking about his son. But he’s not beyond laughing at himself or joking about how the landscape his band exists in has shifted over time. In one response, he starts by saying, “Not to be too hifalutin about it, but—” and becomes silent for a couple seconds, before blurting out, “This is going to sound very hifalutin, I’m sorry,” and bursts out in laughter.

But, ultimately, Duzsik puts himself in the same category of many of HEALTH’s listeners: “I have a good and healthy sense of humor. And I’m a deeply troubled individual.”

Though Duzsik spends much of our interview transparently laying out the many fears and anxieties that have been rattling around his head, the end of our conversation has him reflecting from a place of relative peace. With HEALTH, he’s grateful that the band has had the opportunity to “come to terms with their own identity,” and not feel pressured about any expectations about the band or their potential for further success. “Where we were writing this record was believing that the fans we have trust us enough to make what we wanted, and know that we’re a weird band,” he says. “I’m content that I’ve been able to do this professionally, and get to engage in this dialogue where I get to make art and have people listen to it.”

On a personal level, he makes it clear that RAT WARS is emblematic of where he currently is: “in a disharmonious state and being okay with that, and letting yourself try to process that.” For as much as the record doesn’t look away from the ugliest and bleakest parts of Duzsik’s emotional states, confronting that so openly is new territory for him, and he doesn’t want to downplay the significance of that. “There’s just been so much new territory for me in the last half-decade,” he confides. “I think we’re constantly evolving. I’m just fundamentally very different than I was a while ago—before I became a father, before I had to deal with sobriety, before my mom died, before a fucking pandemic.”

“I’m not trying to struggle to get back to this state where I was happy. I’m not trying to cast myself back into the past or project myself into the future. I’m not always able to do it in my personal life, but I think I can do it creatively, and with my band. That’s a small but significant battle to win.”

Natalie Marlin is a freelance music and film writer based in Minneapolis with writing in Stereogum, Bandcamp Daily, Pitchfork and Little White Lies. She was previously as a staff writer at Allston Pudding. She is always at the front of the pit. Follow her on Twitter at @NataliesNotInIt.