In a small photography studio on Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip, the members of Health look like commandos prepared for a coming post-apocalyptic future. The industrial trio are facing a camera with suitably grim expressions, standing in combat boots and layers of black, as a soundtrack of old hard rock hits washes over them.
They are a band of strange contrasts, making music of intense vulnerability and muscle, melody and noise. They are profoundly serious about their music and message, and a laugh-riot in person, on one hand repeatedly sharing the heartfelt declaration “YOU WILL LOVE EACH OTHER” while also jokingly claiming a new musical genre for themselves: Cum Metal.
Standing tallest is bassist-programmer John Famiglietti, thick hair past his shoulders, black cargo pants tucked into his boots. Nearby is drummer BJ Miller, long-haired and bearded in a heavy camo jacket. Between the flashes of red and white strobe lights, singer-guitarist Jake Duzsik frequently checks his phone. He is preoccupied with some urgent real-world business: parenthood.
It's difficult to imagine that your band would be meaningful to someone
John Famiglietti
Jake is the father of a five-year-old boy, and he’s endlessly checking in on his needs and demands. So the phone is in and out of the singer’s pocket throughout the photo session. “They're always on your mind – and in your business,” he says with a grin of kids generally. On the road, as Health travels the world to share their intense slabs of industrial noise and melody, he stays present through daily FaceTime calls from far, far away.
This should be a clue to the deep emotion and humanity found at the core or Health’s otherwise aggressive, relentless, post-industrial sound. In their songs, Jake explores not only his own interior life, but has made it a welcoming space both for fans simply in need of some exciting tunes and multitudes of listeners struggling through pain and self-worth. And after some initial reluctance at being given such a role in the lives of others, he now understands how deeply some of the band’s music has touched their audience.
“It's difficult to imagine that your band would be that meaningful to someone – or at least it's difficult for me to imagine that,” he says. “But after you hear it enough times, you have a responsibility to take it seriously.”
Early in 2025, Health released Mean, a collaboration with Chelsea Wolfe. It was a smoky, synthy love-hate song set to a sharp heartbreak beat, Wolfe and Duzsik harmonising the melody like it was a searing outtake from peak Depeche Mode.
Their new album, Conflict DLC, is very different, with tough, industrial-strength sound, euphoric melodies and words of profound feeling. “Into dirt / Into dust / It’s an ordinary loss / Everyone… / That you love / They’re here and then they’re gone / And I’m the same,” sings Jake on opening song Ordinary Love, before everything kicks in to Health’s thunderous blend of the digital and the most tactile of sounds.
According to the band, Conflict DLC is a sequel to 2023’s RAT WARS. The two releases were originally envisioned as one double album. John Famiglietti compares the two albums to Metallica’s Load and Reload. He puts the new album’s faster, heavier sound in part down to their experiences of playing metal festivals in recent years.
“We're like, ‘We need some more firepower. We need more of this heavy metal festival music in our own style,’” says John. “We're not gonna sound like other bands. We couldn't even if we wanted to.”
At 18, John came out of the San Diego hardcore scene and relocated to Los Angeles with an ambitious plan for his obsessions in music and film modelled after director Jim Jarmusch. The indie filmmaker seemed to be living the ideal creative life, having played in a band, the no wavers Del-Byzanteens, before taking off on his movie career, a trajectory that appealed very much to him.
“What I didn't expect is to have any level of success,” he says.
Health found an audience surprisingly early, especially after the Canadian electronic duo Crystal Castles remixed the band’s 2007 song Crimewave. That brought Health international attention, and they were invited to play festivals around the world. Then came their first invitation to tour with Nine Inch Nails, and suddenly his band was on a path toward inexplicable notoriety and opportunity, eclipsing the bassist’s filmmaking dreams.
He has no regrets about that, as one impossible break followed another. Seemingly out of nowhere, Health were hired to create the pulsating, menacing music for the video game Max Payne 3, which meant putting the band's work in front of a new audience: obsessive gamers. They wrote more than seven hours of music, and the game was, as expected, a major hit, shipping 3 million copies in its first week. The digital landscape suited them.
What I didn't expect is to have any level of success
John Famiglietti
If any member of Health looks ready for a tech-noir future, it’s the bassist. He turned up in 2023 at L.A.’s Anime Expo and Dragon Con in a bright orange, form-fitting Asuka Langley Soryu body suit (from the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion), looking like an action hero plucked from Tron or The Matrix. At well over 6 feet, he made an impression that went viral.
“I've just always had this interest,” he says. “When I was a kid, you went to a con and everyone there was just revolting and stinky. In L.A., it’s models and influencers. There's all these sexy people there.” He adds with a laugh, “When I was watching anime, it was like shameful, nerd behavior.”
It was John who coined the term “cum metal,” a new genre that he says also includes Sleep Token and Bad Omens, and the words have appeared on Health T-shirts. The band posted a parody Newsweek cover with their brooding faces and the headline: “Cum Metal – Not Metal. Not Industrial. A New Music Genre Emerges.”
His favorite song on the new album is Don’t Kill Yourself, which went through dozens of iterations, working with different collaborators, before the band landed on the right balance of drama, romantic hooks, explosive beats, and Jake’s torrid guitar eruption.
“It's really heavy, but it's also really emotional and it's very wistful,” he says. “It's artistic.”
The overall trajectory of Health’s music career has come as an ongoing surprise, not least to Health themselves. They were embraced early by Trent Reznor, and have subsequently collaborated with artists from Lamb of God to Poppy, remixing Korn and many more.
When the group started in 2005, Health were boho noise artistes performing amid the urban squalor surrounding The Smell nightclub in downtown Los Angeles. They were an underground unit aligned mostly with an uncompromising punk rock ethos, with no expectations of commercial acceptance on any level. The idea that they would one day be featured in a heavy metal magazine, or any magazine, was once unimaginable.
BJ Miller was pulled into the fold after he responded to an online Craigslist ad. A new band was searching for a drummer, and he was looking for something new, after dabbling with other projects: an emo band, a folk-rock band, and another playing behind a singer-songwriter. The audition was in an old industrial building along the L.A. River. Things got loud and chaotic very quickly.
The music was out of BJ’s comfort zone at the time, and more exciting because of that. Things seemed to click with the group, then a foursome (with guitarist-synth player Jupiter Keyes). But after the audition, he didn’t hear back for almost two months. When he did, things got serious.
“I felt a sense of urgency,” BJ says now. “They wanted to not just tour, but go somewhere, do something different.”
He grew up in Riverside, California, an hour outside of L.A., and studied architecture and theater at Cal Poly Pomona, then dropped out in 2003 to pursue music. A drummer and guitarist, and the son of a jazz-player father, Miller was a huge fan of Nirvana and Tool, and their earth-shaking drummers Dave Grohl and Danny Carey. Health finally provided a chance to create his own sonic assault.
I hope we still have the same fervor that we did going into it – feeling that we can push boundaries
BJ Miller
The earliest days of Health were built on low-budget DIY touring, traveling the U.S. to play basements and austere venues of bare brick and concrete. To the band themselves, they made noise rock, unrelenting slabs of guitar, electronics and beats. It wasn’t until they began playing festivals that others insisted that Health were an industrial band. They began to embrace the label.
Things began to get heavier after recording DSM-V in 2023, as a stomping beat was added to their repertoire. “You can't say there's not metal there. There's something soft and hard kind of going on,” says BJ.
There has been much evolution in their abilities and interests since those early days, but Miller says the noisy essence of what they were at the beginning is still at their core.
“I hope we still have the same fervor that we did going into it – feeling that we can push boundaries and we'll have an audience there to receive it somehow, one way or the other,” he says. “Back in those DIY days, it felt like this whole unconditional kind of feeling in the air.”
On RAT WARS and now CONFLICT DLC, BJ says, “the drums becoming more metalish was interesting.” He adds that he’s “excited to keep expanding on what really does feel like the most metal or industrial metal turn we've ever taken.”
Not far from this photo studio is the big corporate guitar store in Hollywood where Jake Duzsik and John Famiglietti first met as disgruntled employees. It turned out they shared tastes in abrasive music and wild avant-garde noise and soon conspired to start a band together.
The Smell became their venue of choice and a workshop to create. It’s where Health recorded their self-titled 2007 debut, during 4 a.m. sessions after waiting for the reggaeton bar next door to close for the night.
Jake Duzsik came to Southern California from Seattle, and landed at the Claremont Colleges, 30 miles east of Downtown L.A. He lived in Spain for a time, and learned Spanish from watching dubbed episodes of The Simpsons, which was on twice a day, but music called him back to the U.S.
He’d grown up listening to a wide variety of experimental and mainstream music, from free jazz and post-punk to the aggressive industrial sounds of Ministry, Skinny Puppy, and Nine Inch Nails. He yearned to be part of a movement like the ones he read about in the punk and alternative history books Please Kill Me and This Band Could Be Your Life. He wanted to find his own CBGB and Mud Club.
Jake moved to LA, and after that initial meeting of the minds with John at the guitar shop, he discovered the creative home he craved at The Smell nightclub and a downtown scene utterly isolated from the mainstream music world. The sounds they made there were intense and challenging, and that was its own reward. Not everyone bought into it. Although Trent Reznor heard their first album and brought them on tour, Health were not universally loved by fans waiting for the headliner.
“The Nine Inch Nails fan base was very different then than it is today,” he says, remembering one fan at a show flying two middle fingers their entire set. “We had to play for 45 minutes. That's really hard to keep your arms up that long. He was so dedicated to expressing his disgust.”
They just scream when you go out on stage as if it's Beatlemania
Jake Duzsik
Health began to build an audience of their own, including many of their musical peers, responding to their complex blend of textures and lyrics that were personal and existential. “We've been told by many, many people and bands that we are a ‘band’s band,’” Jake says. “By virtue of that, we have just clung to life and moved from one strange opportunity to the next.”
Being embraced deeper into the metal world has its challenges, he says. “We're still completely unlike the other bands. Every other band that plays before you, they're riling up the crowd, like ‘What’s up motherfuckers!’ And it's something that I'm not comfortable doing. I'm trying to navigate these changes.”
Their most recent touring experiences show the evolution of their audience continuing outward, as they’ve faced young, largely female fans while on the road with Pierce The Veil. It tends to be an audience open and hungry to have a special night.
“You're looking at a fan base that's mostly teenage girls,” says Jake. “A lot of them probably could count the number of shows they've been to on one hand. They're lining up six hours before the show. They just scream when you go out on stage as if it's Beatlemania. They're so effusive and not toxic or negative.”
Regardless of the setting or the genre of a festival, Duzsik is looking to connect, and keeps the emotional well-being of fans in mind. He recently directed a music video to the new album’s ethereal, electronic ballad You Died. On the screen he’s included the hand-written messages from fans expressing grief and regret over loved ones who have died, which Health requested on their online Discord group.
“We'd become pretty close with our fan base,” says Duzsik. “You want your music to reach people,” he says, “and do it in a way that is also still truthful.”
Health’s Conflict DLC is out now on Loma Vista. Order an exclusive Health Metal Hammer cover variant and Cum Metal soap bar via the official Metal Hammer store
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