“No, it’s not just your imagination,” claim HEALTH. “The future is shit and the phone you are reading this on is making it worse.” It’s a suitable epigram for the twelve industrially-tinged and rather downtrodden compositions held within ‘CONFLICT DLC’. The Californian band are an industrious trio, with a refreshingly bold approach to collaboration that their near two decades of consistent output attests to. Their propensity for combining heavy electronics with shades of industrial metal has brought work alongside Nine Inch Nails, Chelsea Wolfe, Bad Omens, and, somewhat surprisingly, Lauren Mayberry – vocalist with the Glaswegian synth pop group Chvrches.
Mayberry’s feature appeared on ‘RAT WARS’, an album HEATLH initially released in 2023 – only to release it again a year later, with its runtime subsequently elongated by a selection of songs re-recorded alongside guests that included Mayberry. The implication is that these are fluid entities that will shift over time. The same can be said for ‘CONFLICT DLC’ – which HEALTH have released alongside a mirroring set of remixes, with guests aplenty, available via the band’s SoundCloud.
It all makes this a curious era for HEALTH, a now well-established band who appear to be at the height of productivity. But prolificacy does not automatically mean that anything altogether new is brought to bear. As an album, ‘CONFLICT DLC’ relies on much of the metallic clanging that characterised HEALTH’s earlier releases. At its best, the results are pleasingly aggressive and aurally oppressive, with an ambitious flair for sound design. But HEALTH’s want for creativity is both their strength and their downfall.
The frequently diluted vocals heard throughout is an aesthetic misstep. They appear faded, often lacking in volume and subsequent impact, all while sounding like they’ve been recorded underwater. Opener ‘ORDINARY LOSS’ exemplifies this. Despite possessing a sonic hostility, the over-produced vocals are unflatteringly poppy. This, alongside the trite bass rhythms that underpin what is an oddly mawkish opener, makes HEALTH sound less like a metal band and more like a rejected Eurovision contender.
This is not to say that a more melodic approach is universally unsuccessful. ‘BURN THE CANDLES’ immediately follows; with the band adopting a tastefully refined approach to the combining of pop hooks and ringing distortion, while never veering towards lurid pomp. Also better is the tender, and only a touch insipid, ‘Antidote’ – one of the album’s surprisingly gentle all-out ballads.
The album’s heavier moments, while less surprising, are almost universally better. ‘CONFLICT DLC’ is an assortment that varies wildly in quality. However, only the churlish would deny HEALTH their penchant for a smartly constructed breakdown. ‘VIBE COP’ and ‘TRASH DECIDE’ – despite the former’s ghastly title – both build to incendiary conclusions. Meanwhile, ‘SHRED ENVY’ – with its equally ghastly title – even forgoes the building part; instead beginning with an incendiary introduction that morphs into an incendiary breakdown, only to transition into a somehow even more incendiary finale.
The comparative heft of moments like these are what makes HEALTH’s various forays into pop music all the more bizarre. The lacklustre and disappointingly inoffensive ‘THOUGHT LEADER’ struggles to inspire. Meanwhile, the strangely catchy ‘YOU DIED’ is dazzling. Its solemn chorus – “you’re dead, I’ll be like you, you’ll be like me, I’ll be dead too” – forms a concisely philosophical earworm, and proves that HEALTH, inconsistent as they are throughout the record, do have an ear for poptimism.
‘WASTED YEARS’ closes proceedings by once again relying on the album’s habitually distant vocals. Now, however, they sound so far away that several lyrics appear near inaudible. For an album steeped in lyrical nihilism, the vocals are strangely at-odds with much of the all-consuming instrumentation. Despite this, the scale of ‘WASTED YEARS’ does at least give the album an adequately apocalyptic send-off.
When HEALTH’s off-kilter and occasionally oddball creativity succeeds, there’s a tangible gravity to much of ‘CONFLICT DLC’, due not least to how pleasingly futuristic much of this album sounds. It’s intricate too, often impressively so, but sometimes to a fault. Nonetheless, the breadth of ‘CONFLICT DLC’ ensures that highlights are to be found amongst the blemishes that ambition often brings.
BEN WILLIAMS