There’s something exhilarating about the way HEALTH closes the Disco chapter and returns to a more direct, darker sound. Rat Wars arrives as a diagnosis: one of a world saturated with anxiety, digital noise, and collective paranoia, translated into bursts of distorted guitars and synths that bite. The band has never hidden its taste for the extreme, but here the songwriting tightens, the tracks get straight to the point, and this calculated brutality feels refreshing after the sprawling experiments of the Disco series.
A riff like a blade
From the opening tracks, bass and guitar interlock in a mechanical, almost martial groove. The vocals, often buried in effects, function as an additional texture rather than a vehicle for pure melody: a voice that dissolves into the electronic mass, that becomes as much a percussion instrument as a carrier of meaning. The choruses, when they emerge, hit with an almost pop-like efficiency, violently contrasting with the industrial roughness surrounding them. It’s this tension between accessibility and aggression that makes the listening experience so addictive.
Rhythm as a weapon
The production is clean and sharp, foregrounding drum machines compressed to the extreme, hitting with surgical precision. You can feel the legacy of industrial metal embraced head-on, but also echoes of dark club music, as if the band wanted to fuse the rage of their early noise rock days with a more contemporary beat science. Field recordings and noisy textures punctuate certain passages, reminding us that HEALTH remains above all a band of experimentalists, even when aiming for the cohesiveness of an album conceived as a whole.
Fatigue and lucidity
What strikes you as you listen repeatedly is the impression of an album tired of the world but never resigned. The slower tracks distill a dull, almost cinematic anxiety before the following pieces come back to strike with renewed energy. This alternation of tension and release gives the album a formidable dynamic, far from the linearity you might fear from such a dense format. You sense a band that perfectly masters its tools, that knows how to measure aggression without ever falling into the caricature of total saturation.
Rat Wars isn’t an album of comfort, nor a pop reprieve like parts of Disco4 could be. It’s a dark, nervous object, tailored for contemporary discomfort, and that’s precisely what makes it a success. HEALTH proves it can still surprise without denying what has made its singularity since its experimental beginnings: an ability to make the harshest noise coexist with formidable pop instincts. You emerge from the listening electrified, a little dazed, with an immediate urge to hit play again to better grasp the details hidden beneath the wall of sound.
