HEALTH

As the world becomes increasingly preposterous, HEALTH’s music sounds less like a hostile future dystopia and more like a sane response to reality. Their fifth album, RAT WARS (2023), billed “The Downward Spiral for people with at least two monitors and a vitamin D deficiency,” encapsulated the misery and absurdity of contemporary life by throwing every genre the band has ever worked with into a power blender. Critically acclaimed and leading to some of their biggest live shows to date, RAT WARS’ hybrid sound has now become the bedrock of their follow-up project, CONFLICT DLC.

“Wrestling with existential meaninglessness in the face of unreckonable, unavoidable death,” is how HEALTH vocalist/guitarist Jacob Duzsik describes the band’s subject matter, which has been unwavering since their self-titled debut. “That’s kind of it. We are all trying to find some semblance of authenticity, and maybe a non-miserable existence, while dealing with those things.”

Since their formation, HEALTH’s sound has evolved from harsh electronic noise (GET COLOR) to gale-force industrial pop (DEATH MAGIC) to their own half-joking categorisation “cum metal” (RAT WARS), all rooted with the same depressive weight. Equal parts crushing and sublime, delicate and destructive, the L.A. trio of Duzsik, John Famiglietti (bass, electronics), and BJ Miller (drums) exist in a hinterland of their own aesthetic. They’ve shared bills with bands from Deftones to Interpol to Pierce The Veil, and collaborated with everyone from Nine Inch Nails to Bad Omens to Poppy on collaborative tracks. Their dystopian nihilism has a cinematic quality that has also landed them on several video game soundtracks, such as Max Payne 3, Cyberpunk 2077, and Grand Theft Auto V.

More recently, HEALTH has spent the last year and a half touring RAT WARS on the metal festival circuit alongside in-your-face mega-bands like Slipknot and Sleep Token. That experience prompted them to up the tempo going forward. “When you’re sandwiched between these insane bands you start to think, ok, we need a little more firepower,” says Famiglietti. CONFLICT DLC, brings exactly that.

A stack of 12 full-octane industrial metal bangers, CONFLICT DLC refracts the band’s formative influences like Ministry, Rammstein, and Black Sabbath through their own maximalist lens. “Still doing our thing, but adding new weapon types,” Famiglietti jokes. It’s produced by RAT WARS’ STINT (Ajay Bhattacharyya), taking the cinematic heaviness established on that album and pushing it in a more concentrated direction. The band also tapped Knocked Loose producer WZRD BLD (Drew Fulk) to mix the album alongside Lars Stalfors, and the two somehow perfectly balance it’s high contrast textures. Stalfors steers the pulse of synth slow-jams and extra-terrestrial instrumentals (“ANTIDOTE,” “YOU DIED,” “TORTURE II”), while Fulk lends HEALTH’s aggressive side an even more monstrous dimension.

While the new LP acts as a companion piece that inhabits the same sprawling aesthetic universe as RAT WARS, it is more direct and harder-hitting. Heavy riffs and blistered snares rain down like boulders on singles “ORDINARY LOSS” and “VIBE COP,” while the dance-friendly beat of “SHRED ENVY” and yearning thrust of “THOUGHT LEADER” demonstrate a newfound embrace of bouncing between modes in the same track. Pop jams transition into heavy breakdowns transition, into suspended ambience – a sonic mirror for the chaos of modern life.

So, while CONFLICT DLC may carry the ironic name of a video game add-on, the title ultimately ties in more with a wider cultural mood. Specifically, the juxtaposition of digital culture and sociological turmoil. “You’ve got this very online phenomenon of downloadable content and patches for games, and then also the entire fucking world is at war,” says Duzsik. “We didn’t know everything was going to continually devolve when we were writing RAT WARS and it’s follow up…But it has.”

Lyrically, Duzsik stays in familiar territory, only this time it reflects something beyond his own interior landscape. His usual themes of depression, anxiety, and obsessive compulsion are now eerily in sync with the doomscroll of 2025. We have arrived at a point in time where staring into your phone in the dark while feeling absolutely terrified isn’t an activity reserved for introverts and the philosophically perturbed, it’s the prevailing mode of living. “I’ve just been struggling with my usual shit, but the personal content of the lyrics ended up well timed,” says Duzsik, “because the state of the world has made the general public have the same issues as me. Come on in everyone, the waters fine.”

“There’s this mainstream view right now that, oh, everything’s fucked, isn’t it?” Famiglietti adds. “Whether it’s on social media or not, people are very concerned.”

Though it acts as an affront to the chaos of the wider world, like a bunker in a tornado, CONFLICT DLC isn’t an attempt to spark a large scale conversation. In many ways this album speaks directly to HEALTH’s own fanbase, which they describe as a “coalition of subcultures” spanning memelords, heavy music diehards, the delightfully perverted and generally pop culture obsessed.

“Our fans are this fascinating coalition,” notes Famiglietti, describing a community of people who are just as likely to show up at a HEALTH show in bondage gear and a furry mask as they are confide that the band’s music has helped them weather a mental health crisis. In that respect, what HEALTH brings to the table is more than just music. Their fanbase has become central to how HEALTH write and think about their work. The band has an active Discord, and fans have been able to call Famiglietti personally for over 10 years. The video for DEATH MAGIC single “NEW COKE” included, alongside an extraordinary quantity of slow-motion vomit, a phone number attached to a message that states “if you need to talk.” If anyone called it, Famiglietti would answer. That has been the case ever since.

There are growing signposts to that sense of community within the music itself. Giving a song the title of “DSMV” (a reference to The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) on RAT WARS, for example, was Duzsik’s way of making people “feel seen” on the record.

“On CONFLICT DLC, there is an attempt to achieve the seemingly disparate goals of being fun, cathartic and aggressive, while also earnestly addressing the emotional and psychological challenges that people deal with,” he explains. “There’s a lot more openness in talking about [mental health] now, but it’s not always easy to find it addressed in a way that makes people feel they are actually connected to someone who understands what they are going through.”

That intimacy with fans has shaped the sound as well, with HEALTH increasingly treating their records not as detached statements but an ongoing conversation between the band’s instincts and the energy they get back while performing live. CONFLICT DLC is a direct product of that feedback loop, reflecting where the band, their fans, and the world they share are right now: more extreme in every direction.

“It’s a strange potpourri. It’s more fun, faster, heavier and more sad all at the same time, which has its own strange relationship to how life is now anyway… except the more fun part” Duzsik laughs. “Life’s definitely not more fun.”

For all its existential strain, though, CONFLICT DLC is ultimately designed for enjoyment. “We want you to come to the show, dance, and get those feelings out. We’re definitely trying to reach our people and get them out of the basement a little bit. These kids have to touch some fucking grass.”

A slate of sad bangers for the end times, CONFLICT DLC finds connection in the disconnect and comfort in the dark.