HEALTH

Born in the heady grime of downtown L.A.’s noise scene, singer-guitarist Jake Duzsik, bassist-producer John Famiglietti and drummer BJ Miller set out to be divisive as they sliced bare fragments of songs out of backfiring guitar pedals. But by 2009’s GET COLOR, everyone knew this band was something different. They played major global festivals like Coachella and Primavera Sound, and after a brief detour to score the groundbreaking Rockstar games title Max Payne 3, they returned in 2015 with the long-awaited DEATH MAGIC. That LP fully harnessed digital production tools, grafted into their shrieking noise and avant-garde soundscapes. The album became an entry point for a new generation of fans, finding an audience as easily in goth clubs as in bedroom production studios. 2019’s 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.