Twenty years ago, Health was a lacerating noise band in a downtown L.A. nightclub, the Smell, famous for ear-splitting acts. While that scene made a lasting impact on DIY music culture, most of its flagship bands wound down long ago.
Somehow, Health only got bigger with time. Its members deftly updated their sound with electronics, metal riffing and industrial rock, most recently on the album “Conflict DLC.” They became a fixture in gamer culture for score work and influenced acts like Sleep Token and Bad Omens. Nearly two decades after its debut, Health sold out the 4,000-capacity Hollywood Palladium for its Friday show, the biggest hometown headline gig of its career.
The Times spoke to the band about how L.A.’s DIY scene shaped them, how Nine Inch Nails taught them to make brutal music a livelihood, and how young trans fans read their experiences into Health’s album “Death Magic.”
This Palladium set is your biggest hometown show in your two decades as a band. Did you imagine this as a possibility then, let alone now?
Jacob Duzsik, vocals and guitar: No to both things, entirely. We were part of a very insular, transgressive underground art scene. So there wasn’t any concept of anything like that. Our goals at that time were to be able to tour and play places like the Smell, warehouses where you would watch from the back and say, “Hey, I think it’s gonna fill out.”
B.J. Miller, drums: We were just as ambitious in some ways, though. Only a year after that, we’re opening for Nine Inch Nails.
JD: We have always been ambitious appropriate to our context. The music that we were inspired by at that time and looking to as luminaries never had a broad appeal. We wanted to make an album that sounds good and play the best possible shows we can. And then the trajectory changed. The Pitchfork lens gets pointed at the Smell, and suddenly we get to do festivals like Primavera and travel all over the world.
You’ve evolved one step ahead of so many scenes — noise, indie, electronic music, metal, industrial. How did you credibly make these shifts?
John Famiglietti, bass and electronics: Easy, because we never had any runaway success. Animal Collective were our aspirational band. Since we weren’t pigeonholed by any scene, we’ve been able to shuck and jive and move to different eras and not go down with the ship. If we’d had a hit song, I’d have had a drug overdose and everyone would have flamed out by now.
You’ve gotten here without a TikTok hit, which is how a lot of millennial bands are getting rediscovered by younger audiences. Like Acid Bath or the Neighbourhood.
JD: This is such a common story now, where a band broke up or they’re dormant for 10 years. Now it’s, “Hey, you got to reform. You’re going to play Coachella, because you have a song that has 800 million streams,” an insane algorithmic vortex that you cannot control. Any band from any moment could have some sort of virality-driven resurgence, and we are not having that.
But I would always hope for us to have some crazy watershed moment in addition to this natural grinding momentum we’ve built.
You’d want your Grateful Dead “Touch of Grey” moment.
JD: I reference that all the time. The Dead was already such a crazy scene, but there are all these soft rock stations playing that song. So you go to see the Dead, and there’s people selling acid in the parking lot. That would be the dream for Health, like, “I brought my kid down here because their song is on a video game, and there’s a guy in a leather dog mask.”
How did gamer culture help broaden that audience? There’s a whole segment of the fanbase that found you through “Cyberpunk 2077” and your “Max Payne 3” score.
JD: At the time, in the Pitchfork world, there were questions of whether or not we were selling out. But in retrospect, that was a linchpin moment that allowed us to stick around. Getting introduced to that universe of people who are very online made it easier to keep talking to fans during COVID-19. When we started doing collaboration records, a lot of those people knew us not from the first era of our band, but from playing Max Payne. There are all these things that are a domino effect that you cannot predict.
You’ve also been one of the most intense live bands in L.A. for decades. That must have helped.
JF: That’s how you make the deepest connection to the band. The cool phenomenon we’re seeing at these shows is that some of these kids have never been to a show before. We came up going to the Smell, where everything was about playing live. The records were cassettes that sounded like ass.
JD: It is very different from now, where someone has to figure out how to present their music live, and they don’t really know how to, and it’s this reverse pressure. When we started, the way that you would get more bookings and more exposure was to be a good live band. We’ve always presented this in a very physical, cathartic way that feels like a show. The biggest thing to fight against as you age is that your fans age too, so if you can’t replenish those new impressions, they’re going to be disappointed in you.
BM: We cut our teeth in these various DIY spaces, where everyone was trying to be the best in some way, but also accepting and encouraging. We practiced four times a week. We always wanted to play our best and make sure the thing was as tight as possible. For something as wacky as “Courtship,” we went over that so, so many times.
Which is the opposite of how young acts get seen today, where they have a hit song but have to catch up to get good live.
JD: We were kids when we went on tour with Nine Inch Nails, when suddenly you’re going from this completely DIY underground space to where the language of presenting music is at the highest echelon, and seeing that as something to aspire to. If your band keeps growing, you have to keep growing.
We’ve seen bands that got a lot more immediate traction than we did, who jumped venue sizes five times, and they didn’t have the guidance or perspective to scale a show. There isn’t a way to fill that room with something congruent, and then people don’t want to come back. There are these sea change moments for young bands that don’t know how to respond or calibrate to them. But they’ve been so incremental for us that we’re able to adjust to it.
Is it easier to grow older in metal and industrial music? You’re all in your mid 40s now.
JD: What are you talking about? I’m 31.
Sure.
JF: Metal respects their elders in a way that’s kind of unheard of in other genres.
JD: They aren’t doing the calculus of “Is this band cool anymore? Should I be wearing band shirts at this age?” They don’t give a s—. And when you have a culture that is comprised of people like that, I think it’s just a lot easier to maintain that connection with fans.
Look at the amount of people that are like, “I was in a noise band, then I was a house DJ, then I started making modular synth techno, and then I started doing peptide podcasts.” Metal guys are just like, “I like Tool. I have always liked Tool, and I will not change.”
Did growing up in DIY culture prepare you for the modern music industry, where you have to be self-sufficient with every aspect of your career?
JF: I worry, because kids ask me for advice, and my advice would be crazy outdated.
JD: As bands scale, you are a mobile merch company. That is the way that money is generated on a tour, because the overhead of touring is just horribly expensive. As ticket prices for shows have skyrocketed, you need to give people a legitimate reason to go and spend that money.
All of us came up on show culture, where you could go to multiple shows a week. And now, that is financially reckless behavior. So we learned the merch lesson very early.
Your “Don’t Kill Yourself” hat is such an instantly recognizable subcultural gesture.
JF: Even in the beginning, we were the merch kings of the Smell. Punk and metal bands, despite being anti-everything, they’re amazingly branded. I see kids with Black Flag shirts to this day, it’s never gone out of style.
You’ve had the Health hotline number on merch, and John will actually answer it. Can you keep doing that as the band gets bigger?
JF: I only take calls in the livestream now, which has made my life easier. But people still text me daily and sometimes show up at my house. If we have to stop this stuff because we’re too big, that’s a wonderful problem to have that I don’t see happening anytime soon. If you bumped into Lemmy at the Rainbow, he’d still be like, “Let’s hang out.”
JD: I have built it into my lore that I’m never going to meet anybody. That’s more about social anxiety than anything. The hotline was a joke that turned into a real thing. I remember reading Joe Strummer’s biography and his whole thing was, after a Clash show, he would bring fans from the audience back to the dressing room and drink with them all night because they’re a punk band, that’s their ethos.
I think there’s nothing cooler than when you meet an artist who had a storied career and they seem completely down to earth and easy to talk to, and not condescending or patronizing.
You’ve had a long collaborative relationship with Nine Inch Nails. Now that you’re closer to being an arena band too, what have they taught you about how to play experimental music at that scale?
JF: I love your confidence in us. We’re on the precipice of total world war and global financial corruption. Anything can disappear in a second. But for me it’s just anxiety. “How much does that cost?” Every time you hit that pyro trigger, it’s “how much was that?”
JD: Green Day might not need the same level of production, because there are songs that people want to sing along to. Bruce Springsteen — you just need lights and the Boss. Unfortunately for us, I think that we are in that category of bands like Nine Inch Nails that, if it does continue to scale, we will continue to do those things. It’s not as though we have a bunch of huge singsong choruses where everybody can hold hands and get their phones out.
Nine Inch Nails is a fantastic example of this. Do you take the music seriously? Well, then take everything else seriously. You have to curate every way that you present everything. The vertical integration of the lighting, the merch, how those imagistic components correlate to the music.
That’s good advice for younger bands like Bad Omens. What do they say they admire in Health?
JD: Noah from Bad Omens told me that “Death Magic” was when he discovered the band. What I gleaned from it is that we look at the electronic elements of production almost from a pop perspective, that gets integrated into aggressive music. Whereas within cool-guy culture, things are a little bit more separated.
I look at bands like Sleep Token and Bad Omens or Turnstile or Knocked Loose, these phenomenon bands driving kids back to playing guitars. I think it’s this “rage against the dying of the light” thing, because people are existentially groping for some way out of just staring at their phones and having AI-generated, bot-curated culture jammed down their throats.
You’ve never been a political band per se, but “Ordinary Loss” is such a blunt statement about how bleak everything feels right now.
JD: The joke is that I’ve been writing the same goddamn song the whole time, and it just turned out that everything just got worse. When we were making our first record, we had a mood board for the visual landscape that we were trying to make music for. It was this Skynet, “Terminator,” “Mad Max” future primitive sort of thing that now seems current and timely.
JF: “You guys make music so prescient for the times.” Well, I’d rather the band was doing worse and times were better.
JD: A German interviewer asked me, “So it seems as though this is all working quite well for your band. Do you want things to stay getting worse?”
The band is obsessed with death, lyrically and aesthetically. But you’ve had some real loss recently — you were close to Silent Servant and the Soft Moon, who sadly passed. How did that affect you?
JF: I was personal friends with them. All of us are one degree away from someone who has died in the same way, and it’s a big reason why we do stuff with End Overdose. Obviously, it’s rock and roll, this stuff has always been a thing. When it happened, it was very, very sad.
JD: Drugs are dangerous, but they did not used to be so dangerous. We all know this from living in Los Angeles in nightlife culture. We’ve all had friends who have been doing a lot of hard drugs for a long time. And then within a year, I knew five people who died from accidental fentanyl overdoses.
You have a song called “Drugs Exist” that alludes to that reality.
JF: I worry about the kids. It’s still a scourge. That’s why we really push people to test. Obviously, you’ll be smarter to not do it, but that is an impossible message. It’s like telling kids to stay abstinent, it’s never gonna happen.
JD: The song “You Died” on the current record is in part about Luis (from the Soft Moon). We had done a song together, John hung out with him a lot, he had just moved to Los Feliz and we were talking about doing a tour together. There’s a line in that song — “We walked around the same streets, we wanted the same things / Then we made plans and never spoke again.” It was just that simple. “Oh, we should hang out. We both live in the same neighborhood.”
This is the first time I’ve mentioned it in an interview, because it’s not like he was my best friend, but it was very visceral and very real.
JF: I think that’s always kind of a thing, just how un-cinematic real life death and tragedy are.
JD: That’s “Ordinary Loss.” I’m getting older and I’m a parent. I lost my mom not that many years ago, and it’s hard to digest how the most destructive and emotionally devastating things are also absolutely assured and commonplace. They’re not even unique. That’s just a hard life lesson to learn.
Cormac McCarthy said someone asked him, “A lot of your books are about death. Why is that?” And he replied, “I don’t know how the hell you’d write about anything else.”
I want to ask about something that’s a happy surprise for the band. You have a really substantial and devoted young trans fan base. For guys who did not have that experience, that must be interesting and powerful.
JD: It’s one of those things that we’re careful to navigate talking about, because we don’t want to take ownership of it. It’s this beautiful thing that has happened without us trying to capitalize on it. I could write a song where I’m speaking about my own personal experiences, but be cognizant of the fact that they interpret it from a different lens, and be respectful of that. It’s just been this amazing byproduct.
As far as we’re aware of it, from our fan base, there’s something about my voice where people think that I am a woman if they don’t know the band. There’s some androgyny to the way my voice sounds when paired with the music. But it’s also not really for me to guess. I would rather have that conversation with them, and have them explain to me what it is.
“Death Magic” made a splash, but it wasn’t a huge one, and it receded, and we changed our sound. But what we found was there was a younger generation of trans people who all somehow, by word of mouth, discovered that record, and they came to us later having grown up with it. They felt it was a trans-coded record, which, not to sound clichéd, but that’s one of the most beautiful things about art, isn’t it? It gets to be infused with whatever meaning anyone who listens to it wants to bring to it.
That must be one of the biggest compliments you can get as an artist, that songs have life outside of what you intended.
JD: Yeah, but then also, Ukraine’s ministry of defense started using some of the songs off our album “Rat Wars” to pair with videos of their drones blowing stuff up in Russia, and getting millions of views. We thought, hold up, our music is now associated with killing people? If some active shooter was listening to my band for 20 hours straight before whatever happened, I would feel pretty bad.
Is it strange to watch the police brutality of the “Slaves of Fear” video now, after all the ICE raids of recent years?
JD: It’s f— up. When we did that video, it felt too over the top, “Oh, Big Brother is gonna come for you.” We wanted elements of that in it, and now it’s just, “This is literally the United States now.”
I guess that’s one thing we’ve been “lucky” on. Let me just be as negative as possible, as fatalistic in the horrible direction everything’s gonna go, and that all worked out.
