As part of the underground noise rock/industrial scene Health have been (not so) quietly ploughing a unique furrow and reinterpreting music in new and exciting ways. Having left a tantalising trail of albums in their wake, including latest long player Rat Wars (reviewed here), it has been a dream of ours to sit down with the band and that dream finally came true when we sat down with vocalist/guitarist Jake Duzsik for an exclusive chat before the band’s set at this year’s Download Festival (reviewed here).
How has your day been so far?
We showed up an hour ago and it started pissing with rain, so that’s not shocking, but I haven’t had much of a chance to explore the festival or see any bands yet.
You must know some of Download’s history, so how does it feel to stand on such hallowed ground?
It’s such a historical locale in terms of heavy music and bands who have played here. It is very interesting for us because we are not old hands at the big rock festivals circuit. It’s our first time here at Download and this whole run is our first time playing European metal festivals. I’m hoping that the audience will be interested and engaged, and I’m very interested to see what they make of us. We did HellFest in France a couple of summers ago and that’s the only time we’ve ever done anything like this. I’m just happy to be here and have the opportunity to see so many great bands.
Speaking of history, Health originates in Los Angeles and so many great bands of different stripes have come from that area. Does that come with a weight of expectation? Do you feel you have a lot to live up to?
It doesn’t feel like there’s that much pressure because the scene we came out of was extremely underground and antithetical to the music industry, but everybody from Los Angeles is a transplant; we don’t have the same musical identity as a city like Manchester where you have a rich, historic, musical past but it all comes from people who are from that area. So, while there are so many great bands that have come out of L.A., it feels like there are few quintessential Los Angeles bands because everybody moved from different places to be there. I definitely consider us to be a band that is a by product of Los Angeles, but I guess I’ve never really had enough pride to contextualise myself amongst great Los Angeles bands. I just try to do my best.
My next question is what makes your sound so travel so well, do you think it is coming from a scene that is transient?
I don’t know if it is that so much, but any staying power we’ve had has come about because we are not a genre band. So, I think that when you are in a genre band, it can help your music communicate directly to fan bases, but if your in a band that doesn’t tick boxes and you are a little bit strange it can help you hang around longer. You get moments where there’s a “hot new sound” and satisfy this Emperor’s New Clothes criteria and we haven’t had that, so I think that has maybe helped us to stay around and stay creative. The moment we are having right now might have something to do with the fact that heavy music is having a resurgence and a wellspring of new youthful talent. Ten years ago the industry had pretty much written off heavy music; there’s going to be no new headliners or heavy festivals, which as it transpires is not the case; there’s a resurgence of nu-metal and 2000-era music that is making everything feel fresh and vibrant and part of that is being able to stick around.
The world is a pretty heavy place right now, so do you think it is a case of art imitating life with all this heavy music coming to prominence?
I’ve thought about this a lot and I do think that has something to do with it. We always viewed our music visually and aesthetically, and from our first record on we’ve made music for a dystopian future, feeling the way Alien or Terminator 2 works, there’s high technology but everything is fucked and we’ve stayed around so long that a lot of that stuff has actually happened so I think that’s made our music resonate more because things are a bit nightmarish.
Your latest album Rat Wars brought to my mind Godflesh’s Streetcleaner. I wonder what was your inspiration when writing this album?
We didn’t try to force what we were writing and think if we needed a certain paced song, we just wrote a record and let ourselves be a bit more referential and I think that came with feeling more comfortable in our own skin a little bit. One of the mandates we give ourselves with this band is to always make things sound “new”. We might want to get the sound of a heavy guitar riff, but we don’t want to get a heavy guitar so we want to find some new strange way to do that and I think with enough time and maturity, I think that on Rat Wars we…speaking of Streetcleaner, there’s a Godflesh sample and we were listening to and inspired by that record and we thought why don’t we take a sample, we talked to Justin [Broadrick] about it, and use it in a way that hip hop would use a sample. I don’t play guitar like a thrash god, I can’t shred, but we wanted a song like that so we asked the guitarist [Willie Adler] from Lamb Of God to contribute to a track, whereas I think prior to us doing so many collaborative songs I don’t think we would have had the confidence in doing that and I think that’s partly why making that record we felt free enough to reference classic ‘90s industrial records on this album but keep our own identity.
So where do you think your sound will go next, how can you move on from this?
That’s a great question and I’m not trying to put too much pressure on myself to unlock that but I think I’d like to continue writing and exploring the aesthetic and production world that was in Rat Wars universe. One thing that I would really like to do, things that you can see with Sleep Token for example, we’re an eclectic band and we’ll have pop songs next to very heavy industrial-type songs and I think there’s a tendency to create a dichotomy where this is one type of song and that’s another, what you can see with younger bands coming through is the way they’ve experienced music through the internet and digested culture is that it can all exist within the same song. You don’t have to set parameters; all things can happen within the span of three minutes and I’d like us to be more open-minded in terms of that.
Finally, you said HEALTH is impacted by the modern world. In a strange way do you hope the world will become more conflict ridden as a way to shape your sound?
No, because that would seem to be to be utterly sociopathic and a horrible way to think. I hope things get better.
