Recommended Album: HEALTH – ‘RAT WARS’

Anyone who has counted themselves a HEALTH stan since the beginning will understand just how much the Los Angeles noise band’s post-Jupiter Keyes era has tested your loyalty. Their 2007 eponymous debut was the year’s best, hands down, and defined the framework for what would come of noise rock throughout the 2010s. Drummer BJ Miller, vocalist and guitarist Jake Duzsik, and bassist and producer John Famiglietti have leaned heavily into electronic projections and undefined collaborative experiments with a wildly diverse range of artists since 2015’s third full-length, DEATH MAGIC, however, rendering their sound to be more in line with arena-sized goth wave than the Brooklyn basement rock that popularized them initially in yesteryears. Receipts on their tour dates alongside popular rockers the Neighborhood and Sleep Token and team-ups with Nine Inch Nails and the Neighborhood have suggested their ambitions steering toward something just as big as well. While the “old” HEALTH has been dead and gone for years now, the struggle to put it entirely behind them has not. Their fifth full-length, RAT WARS, destroys the past once and for all, hearing the trio finally arriving in bestial form by scaling up their production while embracing big tent rave energy. There’s a cinematic approach to their craft and track arrangements that professes a meticulous refinement to their sensory experience, with the album’s intro track “DEMIGODS” pushing ominous doom through a frigid space (reminiscent of AFI’s Sing the Sorrow classic “Miseria Cantare: The Beginning” in that regard) before igniting the floor with an electrical fire on “FUTURE OF HELL”. That burns through before reaching a cataclysmic vapor cool in the final stages of “DSM-V”, with HEALTH never sounded more metal than they ever have in between on “CHILDREN OF SORROW” and the Godflesh-sampling “SICKO”. In releasing the album during the final weeks of 2023, HEALTH has more or less signed up for exclusion on most year-end lists, and they’re probably fine with that. Most tastemaker publications who once championed the band have since written them off anyhow. For those day ones still listening, though, RAT WARS is an unexpected long-game fete in the form of a band who has never ceased to test their own boundaries (and in turn, their listeners’ patience) until getting the formula right. Industrial star power sounds great on them here. Let’s hope the rest of the world coming from the outside of critical discourse rewards them with it by solidifying their place on stages bigger than ever.

Highlights: “DEMIGODS”, “FUTURE OF HELL”, “SICKO”

HEALTH’s RAT WARS is available now on Loma Vista Recordings.

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