HEALTH on the digital dystopia and new album ‘Conflict DLC’: “More uptempo, more bangers, more fun”

HEALTH have announced their new album ‘Conflict DLC’ with the pummelling single ‘Ordinary Loss’. Check it out below along with our interview with frontman Jake Duzsik.

Teased by the pummelling ‘Ordinary Loss’ – the band’s heaviest album opener to date that sees them face up to how “the dead are blessed with no dreams” – ‘Conflict DLC’ takes the themes of acclaimed “cum metal” predecessor ‘Rat Wars’ to ever darker but perversely more accessible places.

Arriving in December via Loma Vista Recordings, ‘Conflict DLC’ is another exploration of depression, anxiety, compulsion, albeit in the digital dystopia hellscape of doomscrolling. These, as Duzsik explained, are timeless feelings of hopelessness, but now “slamming into this modern moment of so many things actually making us crazy. ”

“I’m treading the same nightmarish water all the time, which is trying to confront meaninglessness and unreckonable, unavoidable death in this bewildering cosmic landscape and changing reality,” Duzsik told NME.

An interesting turn also came when the band found a way to take their guitar sound to epic new heights, with a little help from a Knocked Loose collaborator.

“The mixer on all the more guitar-forward tracks was someone we hadn’t worked with before,” said the frontman. “It’s a producer/mixer called Drew Fulk – who also goes under the moniker WZRD BLD – who had just done that last Knocked Loose record [‘You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To’]. When we heard that record, we were just like, ‘Holy shit, we have to figure out who made this’.

“We wanted the more guitar-focused music to have that. How do you make classic industrial music but then make it feel like it’s made in a truly modern sense that utilises the full frequency spectrum of sub-bass and transience in the drums? That became the mandate for that, directionwise.”

Check out our full interview below, where the frontman opens up about the impact of life online, being inspired by the likes of Sleep Token and Slipknot, how this could be their Radiohead ‘Kid A’/’Amnesiac’ moment, and making their most “fun” and banger-filled album to date.

NME: Hello Jake. How would you describe your relationship with the online hellscape?

Jake Duzsik: “It’s pretty insidious when you catch yourself laying in bed doom-scrolling, and just how destructive it is. I’ve been trying to get my mind around what it was like to just not check your fucking phone when you wake up in the morning.

“At a certain stage, you can become aware of not wanting to follow the classic cliche of just bemoaning how it was better when you were young – but the interesting technological singularity makes it easy to observe all the algorithmic poisoning. You don’t have to just decry younger people for being online and how they can’t be in the moment, because you can watch it corrupt your parents and your fucking grandparents too.

“My own dad got a smartphone and he was just as tractor-beamed as a 14-year-old kid. It destroys all walks of attention, mental wellbeing and quality of life, and yet I’m totally dependant on it what my job is. I hope everyone keeps using it a little bit just for us, but not in a world-ending destructive kind of way.”

Is that difficult to balance with HEALTH being such an ‘online’ band?

“Extremely. You can’t separate the art of our band from the internet and social media at any stage of our career. We don’t get to do what we’re doing without it. It’s a double-edged sword.”

Navigating this inescapable digital doom tornado is at the heart of ‘CONFLICT DLC’, right? 

“Definitely. When people ask me, I don’t tend to directly explicate lyrics, not to be trite, but once it’s in the court of public opinion and someone’s listening, their take on it is more real to their life than what I would say it is. But as a caveat, my lyrics are pretty fucking direct – I don’t think that they’re shrouded in simile and metaphor or coupled with absurdist nonsensical lines then fall by an earnest line. The sentiment is fairly clear.

“It’s just such a confusing time because those themes and that searching are are old as any self-aware human story, but now we have these elements that are actually reprogramming our neurobiology.

“It’s specifically designed to make moderation extraordinarily difficult. It’s a hard thing to navigate that and eternity, death, genocide, and the fucking destruction of the planet. Then you wonder, ‘Is that why?’ Patton Oswalt said something along the lines of, ‘They distract us with these small things so they can fuck us on eternity’. That’s what it feels like – we’re all so absorbed and can’t stop. But I don’t even know who ‘they’ are, because the same thing is happening to them. Even the tech overlords who poisoned everything with the algorithmic wasteland are falling prey to their own bullshit.”

How do you feel that your approach to navigating all this changed since ‘Rat Wars’? 

“That’s a great question. Obviously a lot of this shit is in all of our subconsciouses, so trying to pass through it and deal with it means that I’ll sometimes just sing something when I’m demoing and the first thing that I would sing would stay: it’s like sad-ass slam poetry. There’s something emergent about it. That’s been useful for me. It is therapeutic and does dispel something I need to express, and that tends to serve to communicate that more to the listener because we’re all going through the same moment. Tapping into that agitation and unease.”

You’d said that you’d been inspired by playing live with the likes of Sleep Token and Slipknot to make a more direct sounding record. Does that also come from a place of wanting to cut through all this noise? 

“We have never been a ‘metal festival’ band, so that is very recent for us. It was extremely illuminating because we did a lot of them in the US, Europe, UK and Australia. We’ve never really been a genre band. We’re always ‘bridesmaids, never the bride’. We don’t quite fit in and aren’t focal in the programming or the aesthetic, even in what some saw as our ‘Pitchfork indie era’. I think that has worked out well for us not to go out of fashion. There’s nothing to go out of fashion.

“There are some cycles in the creative process that are detrimental. You spend all this time writing a record, and when that record is done you could become burned out and really need a recharge and could lose perspective and focus. But you understand what you did best right when you stop. Then you go on these imposed album tour cycles and you become a pariah from creativity. It’s a rat race of touring that’s exhausting and stimulating. The idea of Led Zeppelin writing ‘Zeppelin II’ just by riffing during soundcheck just isn’t how records get made any more.

“Going on tour is the conversation; the conversation you’re having is with your audience – especially headline shows. With the metal festivals we were aware of this energy and these tempos reacting with the crowd. With our own shows, you’re having this emotional dialogue from the stage and there’s this exchange of energy and catharsis. Then you stop touring and you forget what that was. We wanted to stay really close and go back to write music immediately. It was appropriate to stay in the same aesthetic universe as ‘Rat Wars’ and the sonic palette.”

And where did you take that aesthetic?

“We ended up updating it. My plan originally was to release a record a year later and have it almost as a double album, but double albums are almost only exclusively considered a good idea by the people who release them. I’m hard-pressed to think of double albums – even by artists I love – where I think, ‘What a good idea!’ There are certain bands like The Clash, and I’m a massive Clash fan, where part of the magic is that they release everything: some of it is total shit and some of it is brilliant. They don’t care. We didn’t want to do that.

“We split it up in a way that you don’t have to leave the universe of that record or reinvent anything, but you still stay close to how the fans felt about the music you just realised and what they told you when you played it.

“One thing about ‘Rat Wars’ is that it’s pretty loose in terms of structure. We didn’t really try to write singles and it feels almost like a concept record without a silly through-line with a character. I felt like if we tried to just to do part two of that, that it would a fool’s errand with diminishing returns because the comparison would be too easy to make. Our solution was, ‘If ‘Rat Wars’ feels like a concept record in this expansive landscape, then ‘Conflict DLC’ is going to distinguish itself by being more uptempo, more bangers, more fun and shit I know will be fun to play live’.

“There had to be some growth that felt artistically relevant, without having to migrate out of that creative landscape that we created.”

It’s a good mantra, too: the world is on fire so let’s party

“Exactly. It’s a little bit more hedonistic. I’ve been trying to distill that into some sort of tagline. In certain ways it’s more bleak, more aggressive and more desperate, but it’s also more fun.”

“There are a lot more guitars and the BPMs are generally faster. There’s still a fair amount of slow to mid-tempo shit. One thing I want to make clear is it’s not an album of B-sides. We wanted to do something that sounded like it was in the same universe, but not capitulate through lesser versions. It’s in the same universe but it does sound distinctive.

“I’m going to make a comparison and I want it noted that I am not making a parallel to the cultural or sonic importance of Radiohead’s ‘Kid A’ and ‘Amnesiac’, but this is how I thought about it at the time. That’s a fucking really great example of two records that are evocative of the same creative moment for that band. They’re written in the same way and same place under one umbrella, but it’s not a double album and it’s not just b-sides.”

HEALTH release ‘Conflict DLC’ on December 11, pre-order or pre-save it here. Check out the tracklist below:

1 ‘ORDINARY LOSS’
2 ‘BURN THE CANDLES’  
3 ‘VIBE COP’  
4 ‘TRASH DECADE’  
5 ‘TORTURE II’  
6 ‘ANTIDOTE’  
7 ‘DARKAGE’  
8 ‘SHREDENVY’  
9 ‘YOU DIED’  
10 ‘THOUGHT LEADER’  
11 ‘DON’T KILL YOURSELF’  
12 ‘WASTED YEARS’ 

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