Explore the profound personal transformation of HEALTH's Jake Duzsik through loss, fatherhood, and the pandemic, as reflected in the band's emotionally charged and introspective new album, 'RAT WARS'. Check out our latest Upset cover story.

Words: Steven Loftin.

Since 2019's 'Vol. 4: Slaves Of Fear', HEALTH guitarist and vocalist Jake Duzsik has been through a lot.

The loss of his mother and the birth of his son - not to mention the pandemic - has resulted in a period of forced maturity, one that comes to a head in the group's latest effort, 'RAT WARS'. It's an album he hails as "the most intense and personal record, for me, that we've ever done."

The industrial noise-rockers are hardly known for their lighthearted offerings. Since 2007's self-titled debut, Jake, along with John Famiglietti (bass and electronics) and BJ Miller (drums), have concocted hard-edged tunes that rarely let you in, rebuffing advances with a swift kick to the jaw. These days, things are different, particularly on 'RAT WARS', their sixth - tougher and meaner, but also a wide-open book.

"I'm almost like a completely different person," Jake reckons. After his son's birth, the frontman found a new perspective forming. Born in the early months of 2020 ("He's like the Antichrist basically," laughs Jake), he and his family were thrust into the dizzying whirlwind that comes with a newborn. Yet that was to be the tip of the iceberg. "Around the time we got our sea legs, it was like no one can leave their house for a year kind of shit in March when the lockdown hit. So I think parenthood was one thing, but then like, oh, by the way, your career as a 500-cap to 1000-cap club band is the most threatened entertainment job there is, basically."

When he levies up how he is as a person now since Vol. 4, he whacks out a pretty definitive answer: "It's been a fucking tumultuous decade." Adulthood came careening into him head-on, leaving him dealing with harsh realities on either end of the vast scale of the human experience. "The stuff with being a dad is incredibly profound and meaningful," he acknowledges, "and losing a pair of parents incredibly profound and meaningful and as well, just not on the positive end of the spectrum. But all of it has been just intense. So it's been a transformative era of my life, which I think is probably pretty reflected in the music."

'RAT WARS' is an intense lightning storm that finds Jake reckoning with all of the above, and in true Health fashion, it's as abrasive as it is beguiling. Jake's musical output was his sole method of processing these difficult times. "For someone, it might be yoga or fucking meditation, or for me in the past, it might have been like taking a bunch of pills and drinking for fucking 16 hours straight, you know," he shrugs. "But being a parent and having all these responsibilities, I think my instinct was to process it creatively."

'RAT WARS' screams with the emotional angst and confusion you'd expect from such a difficult time. Like a nihilistic New Order, it plays out with building tension before often delivering a sweeping melody but with true Health action, chainsawing it up and lashing out, with Jake offering some scathing quips such as "And it is not my fault you were unloved when you were a child" ('Unloved').

Though indeed a period of intensity, Jake admits, "The more stable and functional I am emotionally, the less driven I am to make art and music," which led to the fruitful writing sessions for 'RAT WARS'. It's something Jake had come to acknowledge through the interview process for this album, too. "I've realised upon reflection that the lyric writing and a lot of the melody writing but specifically the lyrics on this album are much more stream of consciousness. And more 'I' oriented than 'We' oriented in terms of the editorialising of it."

Putting this down to the internalised effort the pandemic forced upon the world, Jake knows he's far from done with exactly what came out of him in these moments. "I'm still in the process of parsing out exactly what I meant. Some of it's very obvious to me what I meant, but there are a lot more instances of the first thing that I sang ended up being the actual lyric."

Being so "overloaded emotionally" as he puts it, this stream-of-consciousness writing was a new experience. Likening it to a "therapeutic writing exercise or something," often what came out was welcome but unsurprising. "I'd sit down, and I'd sing something, and then it would be like, 'Oh, that's just exactly how I'm feeling'. I didn't have an agenda of, like, I want to write a song that communicates this kind of thing. I didn't even have the latitude to do that. I had to cathartically process."

While he implores that "it's fairly opaque, and I think applicable, as a general emotion", he knows that what came out was a serious requirement. "Sometimes it's bewildering. You're like, what is my subconscious doing? And then other times, you don't have to be [Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst] Carl Jung, just be like, well, sometimes a cigar is a cigar. And, as [American stand-up comedian] George Carlin said, sometimes it's a big brown dick."

Being in Jake's position, it would be understandable to have reservations about pouring so much of his trials and tribulations into something meant to be consumed en mass. Still, as HEALTH have always been a band focused on channelling something from the depths within, it's all par for the course now - even when things are as intense and personal as they are for 'RAT WARS'.

"I think that there's been a period of acceptance on my part as the band since our audience has grown, which is extremely lucky for us. The pandemic was actually really good for our band; we gained a lot of listeners." Helped in part by their collaborative fifth double album 'DISCO4', which featured the likes of 100gecs, Soccer Mommy and Nine Inch Nails, HEALTH's growth has allowed them to bolster their ranks and make the cult band a sought-out enigma.

In line with this, over the years, they've stripped back the abrasive, hidden lyrics. "There was definitely a layer of like My Bloody Valentine [where] you can't hear the lyrical content in our earlier records," Jake admits. But with this new clarity comes a whole new realm of reaction. "There are a lot more people online or people at shows expressing things like, 'Hey, I was suicidal, and I listened to this record a lot last winter, and it helped me'. At first, I had difficulty processing that kind of communication because it's so direct, and feeling a little bit of imposter syndrome. I could get that for some giant band, like The Cure, or Nirvana, or Nine Inch Nails, where it's these generational cultural touchstones, but it doesn't matter if whoever's listening has their own experience."

Inciting such a response out of their fans is now a welcome part of the HEALTH experience for Jake, even though his priorities have changed. Nowadays, his time away from home touring is more akin to work than the hard-partying life he was living before, but it's still just as important. "I think that as that sort of thing became more communicated to me, I became more open and appreciative of it. For example, I am putting out a song like 'Ashamed' on this record, which is a very personal song. I think that the fan reaction to that song was very, very heartening and emotional."

It's part of the reason the pandemic hit Jake and co so hard. Continuing, he says, "For me, there's an element of trying to palliate your own loneliness by connecting to your audience. And I think that's one of the most amazing things about being able to perform music - there's a reciprocity that is very unique. One of the more rewarding parts of releasing a record, [and] specifically, a record that is vulnerable and emotionally damaged, is to understand that other people feel similarly. There's something about that does mitigate hopelessness or feeling alone."

Where Jake draws the line, however, is when he's told to explicitly explain meaning. He acknowledges that, particularly in heavy music, sometimes intention can be calculated ("There's nothing wrong with that"), but in the case of Health, and particularly 'RAT WARS', "it's more representative of an emotional process."

Mentioning when labels and the like ask for direct song meanings, he confirms that as the "part that I bristle against", even though he's well aware "people love things that are digestible". "People love a breakup album or recovering from the death of a loved one album. I mean, that's why I'm even loath to I'm trying to categorise my experience in the pandemic as my own personal experience, because even though it is this hugely historical event," he says. "I think people are fucking tired of reading about, oh, this is my struggling pandemic record," he snorts. "You want to actually feel the personality of the music, and hopefully it's there in that… I will say this, it is not superficial or an affectation - there's a darkness to the record, and obviously to our band, but it is very much representative of how I felt, and feel, largely over the last couple of years." ■