HEALTH successfully carved out their own unique take on industrial rock halfway between the organic and the synthesized. The music is downcast but energetic, danceable but emotional.
-Brandon Essig
Release date: August 7, 2015 | Loma Vista | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Website
Before they got endlessly memed on for their frontman’s perceived lack of enthusiasm in a video for Amoeba‘s What’s In My Bag? video series, HEALTH were busy carving out a niche for themselves, employing abrasive styles like noise, industrial, and EBM in conjunction with synth pop to create a menacingly alluring sound. Their 2015 album DEATH MAGIC saw them bridging the gap between their early noise spectacle and a more pop-appealing aesthetic.
Brandon Essig
I was a latecomer to HEALTH’s music. I first saw them live in 2019 during their tour behind that year’s VOL. 4 :: SLAVES OF FEAR, sharing the bill with Show Me the Body and Daughters. It was quite the introduction to this three-piece: heavy electronic drops commingled with detached, airy vocals and harsh, feedback-infused dance grooves. Intrigued by this blend of sonics, I went home after the show and dug into their back catalogue, only to be caught off guard by what I heard in the group’s first two albums: the experimental, noisy elements were more pronounced, with less emphasis on New Order-esque goth club pounding and less traditional song structures. Their sophomore album, 2009’s GET COLOR, is particularly impressive in this regard, mixing the abrasive with the accessible to create a minor masterpiece.
In the lengthy six years between GET COLOR and its follow-up, 2015’s DEATH MAGIC, HEALTH remained busy, releasing a remix album of GET COLOR featuring the likes of industrial luminaries such as Crystal Castles and Tobacco, composing music and songs for video games like Max Payne 3 and Grand Theft Auto V, and featuring DEATH MAGIC’s lead single “NEW COKE” on the Need for Speed soundtrack the same year the album released. Such varied mediums and collaborations were bound to have an impact on whatever album proper the band pulled together next, and on DEATH MAGIC, that change is evident.
The group has, for the most part, cleaned up its sound with more straightforward verse-chorus-verse compositions, while guitarist-vocalist Jake Duzsik pens some singalong melodies, like on mid-album pop anthem “LIFE”. Although his vocals have never been the most standout, his breathy, almost androgynous delivery fits the light tone of the instrumental to a tee. A song title like “LIFE” could be seen as either frustratingly vague or pretentiously lofty depending on the listener, but thankfully Duszik’s lyrics – ‘life is pain, but I’m afraid to die’ – are simple and relatable. Other songs like “L.A. LOOKS” keep the atmosphere upbeat, while deeper cuts like “DARK ENOUGH” and the superlative closer “DRUGS EXIST” have a moodier, synth-driven vibe that showcases HEALTH‘s commitment to taking industrial in a more widely appealing direction than ever before. The rapid-fire military march of “SALVIA” rubs elbows with ambient passages and is over and done with in under two minutes; what might seem like an instrumental non-sequitur instead encapsulates the band’s playful dichotomy of these extremes.
All of this is not to say that HEALTH completely abandoned their heavier side on DEATH MAGIC, as the shots of noise on songs like “COURTSHIP II” and “MEN TODAY” keep things unpredictable. While it could be said that the band delves into nihilism pretty frequently in their lyrical content, songs like “FLESH WORLD (UK)” do find a way to marry such a sentiment to a catchy, cycling beat: ‘Follow your lust/there’s no one here to judge us/Do all the drugs/We die, so what?’ is about as close to a mission statement HEALTH has outside of their already-known ones (the confrontational ‘YOU WILL LOVE EACH OTHER’ and the tongue-in-cheek ‘SAD MUSIC FOR HORNY PEOPLE’ are emblazoned across plenty of their merch and unhinged social media accounts).
Compared to the following VOL. 4 :: SLAVES OF FEAR, which delved further into the murkier, on-rails industrial metal aesthetic and away from their looser roots, DEATH MAGIC strikes a perfect balance between wildly out-of-control walls of noise and a refined, pop-centric angle. One can hear the album’s pop-industrial influence on later projects like Poppy’s Choke EP; she would go on to collaborate with HEALTH in 2022 on their DISCO4 double album, which, judging by some of the other featured artists that took part in co-writing and recording original material (Nine Inch Nails, Lamb of God, and 100 gecs, to name a few), their influence has been more far-ranging than the band probably ever expected it would be.
While the influences listed by the band for DEATH MAGIC are obvious to anyone who listens to this style of industrial or EBM – Burial was mentioned several times in the lead-up to the album’s release – HEALTH successfully carved out their own unique take on industrial rock halfway between the organic and the synthesized. The music is downcast but energetic, danceable but emotional. Its songs about life, death, dependency on drugs and defying societal expectations would sound juvenile and solipsistic on their own, but instead feel uncommonly mature and universal coupled with the more polished electronic rhythms. HEALTH stated they wanted DEATH MAGIC to be ‘a modern rock record’, and they succeeded admirably.
David Rodriguez
‘Know we’re never gonna feel the same as it was today’
Feliz Jueves, motherfuckers.
Back in 2012, one of the best third-person shooters ever came out, Max Payne 3. Doing the soundtrack was LA’s HEALTH, a band I was not familiar with until then, but was about to get acutely so. The music they conjured for Max Payne 3 matched the game’s dark, pulpy aesthetic nicely, following the titular washed-up slow-mo akimbo cop haunted by the death of his family and crippling addiction as he gets pulled into an international crime ring, beaten, bruised, and battered yet again… but not as badly as his adversaries. There’s many highlights all over the soundtrack, soaked in ambiance and the adrenaline required to make your way through a game like this, but it culminates in the song “TEARS” made for the game’s final mission taking place at a Brazilian airport – one broken man against an army. Due in part to HEALTH‘s soundtrack, I will never, ever forget that game’s ending.
The Max Payne 3 soundtrack marked a seismic shift in HEALTH‘s tone and mood, going from sunny, busy noise rock to depressive and hazy industrial electronic music with a gothic flair at times. It sounded like “TEARS”. The throughlines from the past to the present were there, but 2015’s DEATH MAGIC was a reinvention of sorts, and one that was massively influential in so many ways.
‘We’re here, there’s nothing else. We’re not here to find ourselves’
DEATH MAGIC is modern nihilism and hedonism baked under neon lights. If that sounds a little contradictory or cringy to you, fine, but rest assured there’s layers to it. HEALTH tap into the lizard-brained, primordial functions of us all – sex, violence, listlessness, drugs, the comfort of apathy, and sitting in the millennial post-9/11 malaise that has washed over everyone whether they admit it or not, the kind that’s gifted my generation with a flippant attitude toward death and suicide because it’s a big part of how we grew up. Your own relationship with mental health will surely influence how you interpret HEALTH‘s music too, suffice it to say it’s more bleak than it is uplifting, but in that alone is a warmth, a comfort, and a place to go when you feel up against the cold, concrete wall.
The album practically beckons for you to move. Despite its dreary mood, I don’t see how you can hear the smack of the drums on “STONEFIST” or the abrasive bonesaw intensity of its synths and not tap your foot to the beat. “FLESH WORLD (UK)” is arguably the catchiest song on the album and at a higher BPM than average, danceable at its core with hard-hitting drums and dense melodies. Best believe, this is the kind of shit the vampires in Blade would be dancing to if that movie was made a couple decades later and they were given downers to match Jake Duszik’s faded croon. “L.A. LOOKS” also belongs in the club with its screaming synths and general approachability if you’re cool with loudness and feeling like you’re melting. And if you’re a diehard about the band’s classic sound, you got “MEN TODAY” which is the closest thing you’ll get to something off GET COLOR. No matter the song, it’s a reason to let go.
‘We die, so what? We’re here, let go’
DEATH MAGIC is also woefully uncaring toward the world around it, manmade and natural. What I mean by that is how the music thrusts the inevitability and inescapable principles of life and death upon us, not to scare or provide a sort of moral statement, but to level the playing field. We all will die before we know, so says “NEW COKE”, but what of the time we have here? HEALTH‘s solution is simply to be, to not regret, to love, and to feel. It encourages us to act on urges and be honest with our more unsavory ones, displaying a vulnerability and candor that would repulse most straitlaced people, but frankly, this isn’t for them. These are all things they have carried eloquently and superbly into their music since, making DEATH MAGIC patient zero so to speak, a real contending with sick realities unfurled year after year. After all, the depression of 2025 is nowhere near what it was back in 2015, so too will the music contort and bend to form to match our new hells.
HEALTH are ultimately not overly concerned with that inevitability and in that, there is a freedom – it’s the most important thing they share with us through their music… well, almost.
‘Do what you want, don’t hurt the ones you love’
It’s no surprise that given the band’s aesthetic and attitude that they’ve garnered a hell of a following, centered – where else – online in a Discord server that I occasionally peek my head into and lurk. It’s welcoming and fun, reflective of how their music has attracted people of many walks of life. I see them uplift each other, joke around, stand up to injustices hand-in-hand, and, metaphorically at least, break bread. The mods also put on awesome movie watch parties here and there, and host giveaways to stoke even the weakest ember of morale among us into something bigger and more sustaining to press on through the world.
Guitarist Johnny Famiglietti (often referred to as JOHNNY HEALTH) seems like an affable dude, doing frequent livestreams and some convention appearances in the past that strip away some of the rockstar veneer to show that he’s human like the rest of us. Some of their merch even references things like Elden Ring or Chainsaw Man, or how about a classic like Terminator 2: Judgment Day? Or what about a dad hat that says ‘DON’T KILL YOURSELF’ flipped horizontally so the message displays clearly when looking in a mirror? Bottom line, there is community to be found among HEALTH and it functionally all began with what DEATH MAGIC delivered.
‘Let the guns go off. Let the bombs explode. Let the lights go dark. Life is good’
While I’m sure the Rockstar checks for Max Payne 3 and later Grand Theft Auto Online were nice, DEATH MAGIC was surely their most bountiful album, launching HEALTH into a new era lit by red neon lights and teased by fog rising from rain-soaked city streets. It’s no wonder with all this in mind that they were chosen by CD Projekt RED to contribute music to Cyberpunk 2077 (under the name Window Weather). This is the album that opened doors for many, coaxing us out of our shells and calling us over with an upturned, curling finger into a world where we can simply be. No matter what happens, HEALTH make it clear there’s always something that makes the aching slog and dredge of life worth holding onto, for something better, to not miss out, even if it’s just for another HEALTH album.
YOU WILL LOVE EACH OTHER
