ALBUM REVIEW: Rat Wars – Health
Industrial rock trio HEALTH are one of the most exciting bands emerging from their scene; not only releasing their own studio albums but a remix DISCO project that has morphed into a collaborative series with DISCO4:: Part 1 and Part 2 in the last few years. It’s almost as if they’ve created two separate continuities in their own discography, allowing them a breadth of creative freedom afforded few bands, and fifth main album Rat Wars is arguably the culmination of both streams of work so far. It’s a stunningly wrought album, exploring some of their most personal themes and some of the best music to bear their name.
There are two quite different sides to Rat Wars; the first are the almost melancholic, personal moments such as opener Demigods that glides into view with minimalist synths and a booming snare. The laconic pacing explores the edges of synthwave and industrial, where the two bleed into one another. That’s pushed even further into a rave-like atmosphere with Future Of Hell, with its pounding beat and pulsating alarm-like synth. Hateful sounds just like its name too, the driving rhythm and techno adjacent melody lines underscoring wails of “Lies, all lies / Hateful of all else”.
That HEALTH have already explored both ends of their sonic spectrum in just three songs doesn’t mean they’re out of ideas; far from it. Unloved is one of their finest works yet, its icy industrial and aggressive production accentuating its noise-laden misery, without losing any of its ability to fill goth club dancefloors. At the opposite end is the pit-inciting riff of Children Of Sorrow courtesy of LAMB OF GOD’s Willie Adler, but it’s cut up and fed through HEALTH’s meticulous, aggressive production to make something entirely their own.
These collaborative moments might’ve got their start with the DISCO albums but here they’re realised in a way that keeps the album sounding coherent, whereas the DISCO releases were deliberately scattershot by their very nature. Case in point, Sicko samples GODFLESH’s Like Rats in a mechanical, robotic battering ram of a song. What Rat Wars does best is realising HEALTH’s unique creative vision, a blurring of the lines between harsh noise, industrial and metal into something distinct and utterly compelling. Updating the nihilism of GODFLESH or NINE INCH NAILS for the online generation is a hard task, but HEALTH are adept at creating that, while existing in their own space.
Rat Wars is, then, a triumph of an album. Just over 40 minutes of mechanised, dehumanised drum beats and icy synthwave that collides with the intensely personal confessions of the likes of Ashamed and Unloved while retaining plenty of acidic bile and bite, it’s HEALTH creating their most adroitly realised soundscapes yet. It’s not a huge departure, sonically, from previous albums and a lot more barebones than the collaborative DISCOs, but by learning all the lessons from those albums, Rat Wars takes an iterative but no less bold step forward creatively and ensures there’s still nobody that sounds like HEALTH.
Rating: 9/10
Rat Wars is set for release on December 7th via Loma Vista Recordings.
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