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The Right Way to Vomit Milk and Play Stadiums: An Interview with HEALTH

The LA band sits down with us as they gear up for the release of their third album, 'Death Magic.'

Jupiter Keyes knows a thing or two about projectile vomiting on command. “A gallon of milk,” says the HEALTH multi-instrumentalist of the debauched music video for the Los Angeles band’s new single “New Coke," directed by bandmate and bassist John Famiglietti. “I eat a bunch of weird shit and down a gallon of milk as quick as I can. It’s excruciatingly painful, you just wait and at some point your body says “FUCK YOU”, and everything comes out.” Adds Famiglietti, “There’s a science to it. If you notice it’s quite a stream.”

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“It’s one of my few talents, I saw a bunch of people being like ‘Oh it’s fake.’” adds Keyes with a laugh. “All these fucking actors crying on cue,” says drummer Benjamin Miller. “We’ve got puking on cue.”

This anecdote, which comes towards the tail end of an almost hour-long conversation with three of the four members in Toronto (lead singer and guitarist Jake Duzsik was at a hospital getting an old injury examined), perfectly encapsulates the noise rock group’s modus operandi. Since their self-titled debut in 2007, they’ve made discordant, uncompromising records, without CGI special effects or taking shortcuts.

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Don’t let the incredibly graphic videos, tales of drugs and bodily fluids (Famiglietti on what he’s doing to preserve water during LA’s ongoing drought: “I piss outside exclusively”), or the band’s Rated R Twitter account (sample tweet: “Music trends come and go…but the kids are still as crazy about vaginal intercourse”) fool you though—the group treats the music that they make very seriously. How else do you explain their third album, Death Magic (out August 7), taking six years to complete?

“If you’re a fan of a band and you wait three or four years for a record and get something sub-par, it’s like ‘What the fuck man?’” says Famiglietti of the expectations. “We’ve always been perfectionists in a very bizarre, janky way.”

Working with a cast of studio specialists including London-based producer and musician The Haxan Cloak (“We come from a similar background, he’s the new benchmark for drone noise or whatever you want to call it,” says Keyes), Mars Volta engineer Lars Stalfors, and longtime Kanye West engineer Andrew Dawson, Death Magic manages to be simultaneously the heaviest and most melodic HEALTH album to date. On “Stonefist”, Miller’s drums sound like they were recorded in a large cavern or on the back of one of the war rigs from Mad Max, the rest of the band harnessing the going-100-miles-per-hour energy of their live shows to its full potential.

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“Not to sound overly confident but I always thought we’d play stadiums,” says the drummer. He’s referring to the shows the group played opening for Nine Inch Nails in 2012, which saw them playing to crowds in the thousands. “It was polarizing,” says Keyes. “There were a lot of people yelling obscenities at us, and there were a lot of people who were hyped on us.”

To gain an idea of how they’ve grown as a band, and why they’ve always felt destined for larger stages, just watch the video of them performing “New Coke” at this year’s Primavera Sound music festival in Barcelona, Spain. Under oscillating strobe lights everything about their stage presence feels amplified; Famiglietti thrashing his hair while windmilling, Duzsik’s laser-like focus, buzzsaw synths punctuating Keyes’ industrial-sized riffs, and Miller’s machine gun drumming. While they’ve previous described their vocals to have a softness “like a Zombies melody or a Gregorian chant,” you don’t need a genius-level online knowledge base to decipher the lyrics, as witnessed by the throngs of people moshing into the early morning hours.

“That would be completely true,” says Famiglietti when asked if the group’s latest is their most pop-sounding album to date. Adds Keyes, “We’re not blind, we know how music works. You respect production and song-craft, these are fucking skills.” “You do get the trend of the young talent being cherry-picked for bigger artists,” says Famiglietti. “We know a lot of successful electronic producers and they go to songwriting camps, they get tapped by pop people, pop artists get this hot new sound for a year and then they move on.”

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If you think these cautionary tales are based on the band’s experiences composing for Rockstar Games’ third-person shooter video game Max Payne 3, though (they also contributed a song to Grand Theft Auto V), guess again. In order to end up with the 26 instrumental tracks that appear on the soundtrack, they worked on a ton of original music, picking up new studio tricks along the way. “We had to learn a lot of shortcuts to doing things and we had to learn how to write in a slightly different way,” says Keyes.

“There’s so many ideas on the record that we’d like to take further, but we just had to fucking solve the problem and get to this place,” says Famiglietti. “We’ve got over this crazy hurdle, and our next record will definitely not take six years.”

In the meantime, as with their previous two LPs, they’re planning to release a complementary remix album. As the bassist lists off dream list of potential candidates including UK producers Blawan and Daniel Avery, France’s Gesaffelstein, and members of LA label Fade To Mind, you get a further sense of the group’s post-genre intentions. Perhaps their biggest song of their career, Crystal Castles’ chiptune remix of “Crimewave”, came about from their willingness to collaborate with artists of different stripes. Keyes has been working with Alice Glass on new solo material since the Toronto duo’s dissolution, Famiglietti describes himself as “very active in hard warehouse parties”, and Miller drums in various local punk bands (including one named Fart Mouth).

To this end, it’s no surprise they’ve also befriended Eric Wareheim (who directed the band’s “We Are Water” music video and Eric Andre (HEALTH recently appeared on Adult Swim’s The Eric Andre Show). The two LA-based comedians have become known for not being afraid of aggressively confronting their audiences or relying on cheap gimmicks for a laugh.

“Our shows have always been about keeping people on their heels and making them a bit uncomfortable,” says Famiglietti. “I think that’s the only template we follow.”

Max Mertens is a writer living in Toronto. He’s on Twitter.