Boldly going where precious few artists—Brainiac, Racebannon, HORSE the Band—have dared go before, screamo brain-scramblers For Your Health prove that ingesting berserk art-noise does a body good. The latest evidence that their theory holds water comes in the form of This Bitter Garden, which is out now via 3DOT Recordings. The follow-up to 2021’s In Spite Of, the first chapter in an ongoing trilogy, For Your Health’s second record finds the band growing in their musical vocabulary, confidence, and, simply put, identity since they formed in Columbus in 2018. The band made the record with producer E.M. Hudson (of Foxing) in a studio in rural Illinois that used to be a church.
Vocalist Hayden Rodriguez recently provided us with a few anecdotes from the making of the album: trials, tribulations, and even a borderline band breakup. Here’s what Rodriguez had to say in our remarkably transparent conversation.
How did you pull off an album that feels like it was made with reckless abandon—until you realize that there’s a connective thread between the songs, a method to the madness?
We tried to just make songs that we, as a band, wanted to hear. We also wanted to challenge ourselves. Our band members come from different music backgrounds and are different ages. We wanted to hit more targets than we did on our last album. We wanted to make sure we were having fun playing these songs, because something I can’t stand is when a band has, like, 10 records, but somewhere in between they hit a plateau and there’s no obvious increase in skill afterward. We had a little bit of help from Eric [E.M. Hudson]. Some of the ideas we came up with were a bit scatterbrained, so having an outside voice to guide us back and land the ship was really helpful. We haven’t really had that before.
The whole [album] was a challenge. From start to finish, we were fighting for our lives. At one point we thought the band was going to break up entirely. We started trying to make this record three years ago, when we had a different lineup. We often felt like we were getting pulled in a lot of different directions, and honestly we got to the point where we had nine or 10 demos and none of them even made it on to this record. We pretty much started over from scratch. I’m happy that that happened because we definitely became better musicians. I’m happy that we waited to make the record that we did. Eric was around from the start of the first draft of the album and gave us some very honest opinions about the tracks. I talked to Eric on the phone, because he’s also my friend, and I was, like, “Hey dude, I don’t even know if this record’s gonna happen. I don’t know if this band is gonna keep happening.” And he was like, “Don’t quit.” I was like, “Alright, cool.” That’s all I needed to hear.
It sounds like, ironically, the record that could’ve tolled the death knell for the band actually brought you closer together in the end, no?
Yeah. This band started as a four-piece, and we’re a six-piece now, after adding a second guitarist and a synth/keys player. We’ve actually been touring as a six-piece since around the time our first album came out, but we hadn’t had a chance to record as our full band since then. So most of the time this band has existed, it’s in the [configuration] that we sound on this record. With this lineup, it feels like we finally formed the [proper version] of the band. And this project ties us together. Not all bands [consist of] friends, but we hang out constantly, and I love that. No one even knew each other before playing together in the band. But we’re all really, really close now.
I read a little bit of what you guys have said about the meaning of “this bitter garden.” Is the idea that when a “garden” such as the whole United States becomes inarable due to conflict, it no longer produces healthy fruit?
This might be a little convoluted, but we actually had the name of the album before even our first record was out. I built a story around it, and that became one of the reasons why the first attempt at this record didn’t make it: I wanted to do a concept album and was so deep up my own ass about the story. We actually had a two-week writing session where we were locked in a basement and literally staying up all night writing demos and lyrics and stuff. It was like the ravings of an insane person.
Did Eric feel the same way?
Yeah. When I tried to explain the concept over the phone, he was like, “That doesn’t make any sense.” The story made its way over to this record, but in more of a backseat way. Basically, it was a fantasy/allegory story: A woman bears a child into poverty and basically wants to escape serfdom. She’s given a mission from a talking crow to kill 1,000 evil men, and after the pact is completed, she could have whatever she wanted, which was to go to a better place with her son. But when you start killing people, it corrupts your soul and ends up killing you. That’s why the garden turns bitter. So basically the son is now obligated to carry out her work.
There was actually a six-and-a-half-minute track that had so many words it was impossible [to complete]. It was basically the whole precursor to the story and explained everything. Again, it was one of those things where Eric was like, “No one’s gonna get this. Don’t do this.” And I was, like, “Fair enough.” I trust Eric with my life. I’m happy that happened, because it was such an [unwieldy] undertaking, and I’m not a skilled-enough writer to tie it all together. It would have been a pile of schlock. Some of the overarching themes and characters still appear in the final record and are in the album art, however.
My favorite aspect of the album is that there isn’t a second on it when you know what’s coming next. Did you try to keep listeners on their toes with the record?
We’re all really into movies. I enjoy the engrossment that you can get with a tense or intriguing story, so we definitely want people to be in our records and go on a ride, rather than have a bunch of disconnected tracks that are just the best songs we have. There were no extra tracks; everything that we wrote had a place on the record. A lot of the sequencing was decided before we’d even finish the songs, too. We brought in Nick Holland to direct a video for one of our songs. He’s really cool, big into horror movies, and is in a really good band of his own, Wounded Touch. Working with him for that video was really awesome. And I’ve always wanted to make movies. Getting to make a short horror film was one of the coolest things about getting label money, I’m not gonna lie.
