Band:	Health
Album:	Rat Wars
Style:	Industrial rock, Noise rock
Release date:	December 2023

01. Demigods
02. Future Of Hell
03. Hateful [feat. Sierra]
04. (Of All Else)
05. Crack Metal
06. Unloved
07. Children Of Sorrow
08. Sicko [feat. Godflesh]
09. Ashamed
10. (Of Being Born)
11. DSM-V
12. Don't Try

Having just had newfound appreciation for Health due to their collaborative series of albums, it's time to hear how well they fare back on their own terms.

I've gotten into Health through their 2019 album Vol. 4 :: Slaves Of Fear, so I got to see their progression backwards by going back to revisit their older albums already knowing they would morph into the electro-industrial outfit they are now, so hearing the punkier experimental noise rock of their early albums that sound more like Lightning Bolt than anything they do today was pretty interesting. Even though 2015's Death Magic is where they started settling into their current sound even if Vol. 4 is where that felt like it was delving into sounds actually close to being metal, hence why we nominated it in our Awards in the Industrial category. But at that point I was still somewhat ambivalent towards the band and their schedule of releasing an album and following it up with a remix "Disco" album. And then the two Disco4 albums came along.

An actual remix album called DISCO4+ was remixed, but it was the two DISCO4 parts that were what really took Health to the next level for me by being albums of really versatile and ingenious collaborations. Obviously with albums like that there is some disjoint and some collaborations that clearly worked much better than others, but it was very interesting to hear the same band collaborating with the likes of Full Of Hell, Nine Inch Nails, The Neighborhood, Ghostemane, or Perturbator on the same record(s). So until now whenever I felt the need to revisit a Health track, you can bet it was from one of these two. So when I got to see Health at Roadburn afterwards and it was a solo show, it did feel a bit like something was missing and it was hard for the band to maintain their appeal on their own.

This is why Rat Wars had some pretty big standards to adhere to in order to feel satisfying to me, so I was very pleasantly surprised to find myself really vibing with it all things considered. It seems like the versatility of the collaborations also gave the band more experience with how their sound can be crafted and adapted, giving them enough range to not require collaborators to keep things interesting. There are still collaborations in the form of the synthwave Sierra appearing on the very ravey and clubby "Hateful" and "Sicko" heavily sampling industrial metal titans Godflesh's "Rats". In theory I should enjoy the latter more than the former, but having expected something more collaborative than sampling and the way some of the sampling feels a bit clonky does take away some but not all of the enjoyment of that track, whereas "Hateful" just gets groovier with every listen.

Some of the material here is the heaviest that Health ever did, a lot of it seemingly especially made to appeal to metalheads, with songs like "Crack Metal" and "Children Of Sorrow" having some guitars and/or drumming that wouldn't be far off from what you'd hear in a metal song. There are songs that dial back on that to create something more dreamlike and atmospheric, but the overall density of the production still leaves some residual heaviness even in the album's softer moments. What acts as a stronger contrast with the heaviness is ironically the one element that originally made me not grow fonder of Health's solo music (including in a live setting) and that's the vocals. They're still something that I feel is a point of contention and something that needs some growing into. I have a feeling it's not just me getting accommodated to them through listening to them alongside someone else's on the collab albums, but that they're actually much better integrated in the overall sound, and the overall sound itself makes up for the contrast as well.

Overall this is a pretty neat step forward for Health, it's the first album of theirs that isn't a collaboration that I feel very compelled to return to in full. They managed to lean into their heaviness and metallic side and mitigated some of what made me not really gel with their music.

And I swear I'll finally start playing that Cyberpunk game, I just need to find the time.