Beware the illusion of the open world. As any gamer who’s sunk 75-plus hours into Cyberpunk 2077 or Red Dead Redemption 2 can tell you, what feels like an environment of limitless potential and unlimited space to roam does, in fact, have borders. It’s scripted and designed in the hopes of keeping you content within its containment. And should you begin to bristle at the constraints, to realize that you’re not as free as you imagined, well, here comes a little DLC—downloadable content—to expand the map and the story just enough to keep you sated.
HEALTH position CONFLICT DLC, their sixth album of original material, as a continuation of the world forged on 2023’s career high RAT WARS. This is a group that cheekily estimates 85 percent of its audience has a Steam account; it’s a gamer’s band. And on the surface, CONFLICT DLC appears to be subordinate to its predecessor: Its cover mirrors that of RAT WARS, its tracklist is presented as sides C and D to that album’s A and B. CONFLICT DLC sustains the heavier, poppier sound of RAT WARS, too. But it also makes a discrete statement on the dehumanizing effects of living in a technologically mediated world—one that presents itself as a place of infinite possibility while doing its best to extract your data and capital as it confronts you with the ideas of the worst people alive. If you’ve ever doomscrolled yourself into a psychic clog, you might recognize the intermixed angst, impotence, and rage of HEALTH’s industrial nu-metal.
The poster’s lament is felt most keenly in “Thought Leader,” an electroshocked lullaby about staying up too late looking at your phone. “Everyone is dumb,” singer Jacob Duzsik coos over misfiring synapses in the chorus. “All in your head,” he immediately counters. Duzsik tosses and turns, oscillating between what feels like sincerity and his awareness that he’s being manipulated. Chugging guitars and stomping electronics seem to drag him through the song, never allowing him to put his feet down anywhere.
CONFLICT DLC is full of moments like this, where the brutal and depersonalized nature of the music treats its most recognizably human occupant like little more than a fuel source it must wrangle. Duzsik is shoved forward by the relentless push of the present in “Burn the Candles,” the album’s best song. “Memory is fake,” he sings, “People are here until they’re not here.” In CONFLICT DLC’s trap, there’s no room to yearn or mourn, only the prerogative to keep the machine going. A coordinated tangle of programmed noise and redundant guitars, claustrophobic and hyper-present, hem the singer in as if preventing him from drifting into the past or wondering about the future. Listening to it feels like being shaken very hard.
The tension between human need and the superior power of machine apathy has always been part of HEALTH’s music. The tension between Duzsik’s traditionally beautiful vocals and the whirring violence of the music he makes with bassist John Famiglietti and drummer BJ Miller has been central to their appeal since their 2007 self-titled debut. And while the brackish pleasure of beauty and noise isn’t unique to HEALTH, the overwhelming emphasis on the mechanical nature of the music makes CONFLICT DLC uniquely resonant when set against their previous work. Though it’s nominally a guitar record, there are not many riffs to speak of, just big blocky chords played with the uncanny precision of a team of factory robots. When the riffs do arrive, as in “Shred Envy,” they come with furious power, the combined sound of every instrument suddenly optimized.
Producer Stint reprises his role from RAT WARS, and the clarity of the soundstage he creates is crucial to the album’s success. Opener “Ordinary Loss” sails into being on a breathy Depeche Mode melody that’s immediately battered down by the disciplined chug of guitar and drums rendered so clearly you can practically see the indents of the rivets. “All there is, is bad news/I know we’ll be gone soon,” Duzsik sings in the chorus, and with his voice in sync with the mechanical thrum, it feels like he’s surrendered his agency and is being frogmarched away from his own grief.
Before he produced RAT WARS, the heaviest artist Stint had worked with was either Kesha or Demi Lovato. While his pop bonafides occasionally pull the album in unusual directions—if you’ve ever wondered what would happen to a stomp-clap band shackled in a dungeon, the breakdown of “Darkage” has you covered—his focus on songcraft and sonic clarity undeniably elevates HEALTH’s game. The band has spent the past few years playing major festivals and touring with mainstream-adjacent metalcore bands like Pierce the Veil; it’s odd company for a group that started as a harsh-noise project, but it’s inspired them to make louder and more intense music. And in becoming arguably the most beloved industrial-metal band of their generation, they’ve so far managed to swerve the swole posturing that dooms so much pop metal. CONFLICT DLC never gives you the sense that HEALTH want you to think they’re very tough and mean—more like they’re far too sad to be producing this kind of noise. It makes the music seem to have a will of its own, and HEALTH to be at the mercy of their own creation.
