Health started life in 2005, but it may as well have been centuries ago. At the time, the then-four-piece were a traditionally untraditional noise-rock band that made scabrous, abrasive songs that sounded, as vocalist and guitarist Jake Duzsik once described, “like the rock band playing in the shitty club in the movie that was made in the ’90s about the future”. Which is to say that Health have always been both behind and ahead of the times, evolving their sound and process significantly over the years. Not only did they release counterpart remix versions of their albums with the subtitle of Disco, they also began incorporating more electronics into the mix. That started in earnest when they scored the atmospheric soundtrack to the 2012 video game Max Payne 3, which then bled – profusely – into 2015’s third record, Death Magic and 2019’s fourth, Vol. 4: Slaves Of Fear.
“When we did the Max Payne score,” remembers Jake, “we had to generate so much goddamn music that it just forced us to expand our musical palette that, in the process, there’s just an inevitable discovery that points you in other directions for where you want to take your own songs.” That essentially brought the band to where they are today. With Disco 4 Part II, however, the world has – sadly, worryingly, depressingly – pretty much become that previously only-imagined retro-future.
“Since our inception, we’ve always thought of ourselves as like a future primitive soundscape,” Jake says, “like Alien or Terminator after Skynet. It’s like there’s crazy technology. It doesn’t sound anachronistic, but it’s a shitty future. Everything is covered in grime. Everything has gone wrong, but we have made incredible technological advances and maybe one of the things we’ve gotten lucky with, unfortunately, is that now it seems we are arriving at that moment anyway. So the band seems prescient or more fitting or something, I don’t know. Even when we first started, we always thought we were making music for a post-Skynet landscape. That’s what it should sound like. That’s what it feels like. It feels like technology, but technology that’s breaking down, and that just seems to be where the world is at right now.” From: https://www.kerrang.com/health-interview-disco-part-ii-jake-duzsik-john-famiglietti-bj-miller-cover-story
