HEALTH
Conflict DLC
LOMA VISTA
HEALTH’s sixth proper full-length begins in a very HEALTH way: with a poignant, quiet proclamation that all of this is temporary. “Into dirt, into dust / It’s an ordinary loss,” are Conflict DLC’s opening words. Vocalist Jake Duzsik sings them a cappella—tender, isolated, lonely. “Everyone that you love / They’re here and then they’re gone / And I’m the same.” It’s only then, after a brief moment of silence, that the other members of the band (bassist/electronicist/meme lord John Famiglietti and drummer BJ Miller) come crashing into the song, bringing the full weight of the void, of oblivion, with them. From there, Conflict DLC—a brand new album, yes, but also a continuation of sorts of 2023’s Rat Wars—is a full-on rush of nihilistic energy, a dark dystopia that reflects not only the inescapable societal anguish of the 21st century, but also the personal cost of that (as well as the cost of other, more personal traumas).
Despite the darkness, songs like “Vibe Cop” and “Trash Decade” somehow still sparkle—broken glitterballs hanging in the abandoned discos of the fall of humanity, still occasionally reflecting the nuclear light outside. While the album starts out heavier than almost anything else HEALTH have made, it settles into a kind of calm as it progresses. As such, there are numerous moments of spectral beauty here: the damaged, glitchy sadness of “Antidote,” the melancholy hopelessness of “Darkage,” the cinematic morbidity of “You Died,” not to mention the unsettling shadows of “Thought Leader.” The band have also turned their long-running mantra of “Don’t Kill Yourself”—a phrase they’ve printed on merch in mirror writing as reminders that, despite everything (even their songs), life is worth living—into a song of emotionally despairing depth. “I don’t want to kill myself,” sings Duzsik in a haunted, disassociated tone, “but I don’t want to live this way.”
If that serves as the perfect encapsulation of a world decimated by capitalistic greed at the expense of humanity, then finale “Wasted Years” is the calm after the storm, the flood, the apocalypse, the plague, albeit shaped from the perspective of the heart (“We built a life togеther / How is it already gone?” Duzsik queries). But as the song and album both then come to a close with its pulsating, atmospheric outro, the sound of birds seeping through the iron wreckage of the past and future, it’s clear there’s no answer. That’s just what happens. Only HEALTH could make the void—and an album that starts and ends within it—sound so enticing.
