HEALTH unleash CONFLICT DLC as a brutal, full-contact blast of industrial heaviness that channels doomscroll-era dread into something dark, sharp, and cathartic.
HEALTH have never sugarcoated the state of things, but CONFLICT DLC makes their point with brutal clarity. The Los Angeles trio return with 12 new tracks that stare straight into the doomscroll without blinking, turning anxiety, compulsion, rage, and existential fatigue into something fierce, physical, and strangely cathartic. If RAT WARS cracked open a new era of industrial metal chaos for the band, this record is the full plunge into the void.
The album kicks off with "Ordinary Loss," their heaviest opener yet. It hits like a collapse you can dance to, built on harrowing riffs and dense industrial textures that feel both suffocating and addictive. Jake Duzsik lays the mood bare in a single exhausted line: “The dead are blessed with no dreams.” It introduces an album that never flinches and never lets up.
CONFLICT DLC is a stack of full-octane bangers, each shaped with the maximalist intensity that has defined HEALTH across their wild genre mutations. They’ve jumped from harsh electronic noise to gale-force industrial pop to what they half-joked as “cum metal” on RAT WARS, but the core remains the same. This is music weighted by depressive gravity and sharpened for impact, built to hit hard for the coalition of subcultures that call HEALTH their own.
Lyrically, Duzsik stays rooted in the familiar terrain of depression, anxiety, and the digital claustrophobia of 2025, where the world feels broken and the phone in your hand keeps reminding you. His dry summary says it all. The future is shit and the device in your palm is making it worse. And yet, he still invites you to lean in close, to lose yourself a little more in these twelve tracks of anger, fear, sadness, and death.
The band brought STINT back behind the controls, pushing the cinematic heaviness of RAT WARS into something even tighter and more concentrated. Knocked Loose producer Drew Fulk, working as WZRD BLD, and Lars Stalfors handle the mix with an ear for contrast. Every metallic blast, every synth shrapnel hit, every surge of atmosphere lands with precision.
For all its bleak humor and end-times energy, CONFLICT DLC is built for enjoyment. It finds connection in the disconnect. Glitter in the dark. As the real world grows more absurd by the day, HEALTH sound less like prophets of doom and more like the only ones responding to reality with the appropriate level of volume.