HEALTH

On RAT WARS, HEALTH, are not only making the heaviest, most genre-obliterating music of their career, they’re documenting just how insane it feels to be alive right now. It’s The Downward Spiral for people with at least two monitors and a vitamin D deficiency. “RATWARS” is a definitive statement on the insanity and the insipidness of contemporary life.

“The Downward Spiral for people with at least two monitors and a vitamin D deficiency”

HEALTH–the LA-based industrial-rock band of Jake Duzsik (vocals/guitar), John Famiglietti (bass/producer), and BJ Miller (drums)–today announced their new album RAT WARS will be released December 7th, 2023 via Loma Vista Recordings. The album’s first two singles are also out now at all DSPs: the menacing “CHILDREN OF SORROW,” featuring Lamb of God’s Willie Adler on guitar (YouTube link HERE), and the half-time hellscape “SICKO,” which samples Godflesh’s “Like Rats” (YouTube link HERE). Preview the singles’ upcoming visuals by James Markidis and Mynxii White via a new YouTube trailer. RAT WARS is now available for pre-order on limited edition vinyl, cassette, and more HERE.

HEALTH today also announced a 2024 headlining U.S. tour beginning March 2nd in Ventura, CA and including shows at NYC’s Brooklyn Steel on March 15th and LA’s Belasco Theater on April 4th. Pixel Grip and King Yosef support on all dates; a full itinerary is listed below and tickets go on-sale Friday, October 6th, at 10am local time. The trio will host a full album listening party of RAT WARS at LA’s Das Bunker tomorrow (Friday, October 6th), where they’ll party with fans afterwards (21+, free with RSVP).

The follow-up to 2019’s VOL. 4 :: SLAVES OF FEAR, HEALTH’s fifth album is the most violent yet vulnerable of their career. It is somehow fitting that such a brutal collection of songs is at the same time their most comprehensive artistic statement. 

Meticulously aggressive production detail collides with painfully personal confessions and a strange savage grace is paired with icy gallows humor… surprisingly it’s still fun as hell. 

Produced by Stint (Oliver Tree, Demi Lovato) and mixed by Lars Stalfors (SALEM, The Neighbourhood) the 12-track LP joins the lineage of groundbreaking heavy acts like Nine Inch Nails and Ministry, which re-drew the borders between metal, electronic and pop music. It also speaks directly to the band’s young, fervent online subculture.

It’s The Downward Spiral for people with at least two monitors and a vitamin D deficiency. 

Written during the most emotionally trying period of the band’s life, the album builds on their chaotic yet re-invigorating pandemic years. RAT WARS captures all the fury and ambition their LP’s have until now aspired to. It’s their boldest statement on the insanity and the insipidness of contemporary life.

VOL.4 :: SLAVES OF FEAR won over heavy music fans with its thrash riffs dissolving into ambient melancholy and hip hop beats, while the lockdown era, two-part DISCO4 fully explored collaborative songwriting with peers from across metal, rap, electronic, and indie rock.  

This long and willfully unconventional career arc has coalesced in RAT WARS. They are, at last, a band that is comfortable with their own uncomfortableness.