HEALTH’s September Australian Tour Promises Their Most Powerful Shows Yet

Blazing a trail back to Australian shores next month, L.A. industrial trio HEALTH will headline show around the country this September, joined by special guests PERTURBATOR and KING YOSEF. A band equally capable of delighting and devastating with their versatile take on bewitching and aggressive industrial flavours set against brooding soundscapes, HEALTH are the ultimate amalgamation of dexterity and modern ennui. The perfect band to lure you onto the dancefloor while an apocalypse plays out, HEALTH’s cult-like ascension has spanned two decades, six critically-acclaimed full-length albums, collaborations with the likes of Nine Inch Nails, Poppy and Lamb of God, tours with Nine Inch Nails and Sleep Token, ongoing exclusive remixes, an online presence that bridges satire with genuine connection, high profile video game collabs, and an insatiable desire to weld infectious pop sensibilities into abrasive and primitive sonic landscapes.

Releasing their self-titled album in 2007, HEALTH most recently expanded on their 2023 full-length RAT WARS with their 2025 record CONFLICT DLC. Signalling a neon-soaked gateway into the band’s most thrilling era to date, CONFLICT DLC dexterously added to HEALTH’s pre-existing array of fan favourites, from TEARS through to Major Crimes and THE DRAIN. Most recently performing an almost entirely sold out headline Australian run back in 2024, returning in 2025 as part of Knotfest Australia, HEALTH have absolutely become a beloved fixture on Australian stages. Jake Duzsik talks to Rob Lyon about the tour.

September’s shaping up to be a massive month with the return of HEALTH. You must be really looking forward to getting back to Australia and touring all the new releases you’ve brought out in the last twelve months?
We get to play a lot of new material. Frankly, we do love coming down to Australia. It’s one of our favorite places to tour, generally speaking. And we’ve been fortunate enough to do it pretty atypically every year since 2021 or 2022. We’ve been consecutively coming; I think this is the fourth year in a row, so it’s sort of become almost a routine, but we’re really looking forward to it.

It must be humbling as well that the venues are getting bigger each tour and more people are catching on about how great HEALTH are?
We’ve been very surprised and appreciative of how well the Australian audience has seemed to respond to the newer music. We’ve been coming to Australia for a long time and it’s one of the few places where we always have had good shows. They’ve been incrementally getting busier, but we’ve never had stinker shows down there. I don’t know why, and I haven’t really figured that out. I don’t know if it’s really my job to, but we’re fortunate that the fan base seems to be reacting well to the music we’re making.

For new Aussie fans planning to come to these shows, what do you reckon would be a good starting point for an album to listen to, to get in the headset of going to the show?
The two recent releases are Rat Wars and CONFLICT: DLC, and they almost form a bit of a, not a double album, but they’re spiritual twins and exist in the same aesthetic universe and quite frankly, the tour that we just did in the United States, I would say that other than the top songs in our streaming catalogue, which is true for any band, the new fans, the fans that have been at the shows, seem to primarily know these last two records. Which is, to use the word you used, humbling because we’ve written a lot of different albums, but it’s also very invigorating to be able to connect to people with new material. Sometimes people just stay in dialogue with the music they like from the past, and if that’s the case then you kind of lose those fans little by little. So yeah, I would say Rat Wars, CONFLICT: DLC, and then preceding that we had the last two collaborative albums I think are a fun place to start: Disco4 Part I and Disco4 Part II.

It must be a really tough balance now with having so much material to draw on to get that tour set list that keeps it fresh and exciting for the band but engages the fans as well?
You’d think so maybe, and I worried about that at first. I’m kind of just pulling up this last headline set. I have a playlist as I was in rehearsal today because we haven’t played since our US tour concluded and it is definitely, spoiler alert, hugely top‑loaded with the material from the last two records. So there’s a couple of mainstay tracks that we know people tend to want us to play, but we kind of just acquiesced to building the set around the current material. I know that can be a double‑edged sword for bands that have a large catalogue, especially if they have beloved music. We don’t have some greatest hits to draw from, so for us it’s kind of freeing to have put out these two records in the last couple years and have that be the material that people want to hear. Because I feel like often times it’s the reverse, where you put out a new album and that’s the impetus to tour, but largely your fans want to hear the work that they’re more familiar with.

Having CONFLICT DLC, the R‑Type series and now Addendum, is it hard to make that decision to stop and go out on tour, especially when you’ve got such a purple patch and momentum creatively?
Yes. This is a topic that I have discussed at length in interviews, but also inter‑band discussions as well. It depends on the artist and I think the creative impulse is different for everyone, but I find it to be not dissimilar to any sort of routine. Sometimes the tour/ writing/ recording cycle for a band can impose this weird stop‑start relationship with creativity, and I really dislike that. I do not like being off‑cycle creatively. I really think that it doesn’t matter, not to make it mundane, but an analogy to if you’re trying to exercise or eat right or do whatever thing it is. Neurologically the way we work is if it’s something that you’re doing regularly, it makes it easier to keep doing it. So I really like to just always be writing new music.

If I felt like I had nothing to say or there was just nothing coming out, I wouldn’t necessarily force it. But I think that sometimes, and maybe this is just emblematic of me being a procrastinator naturally, artists can kind of use that as a convenient crutch to say, “Oh, well I have writer’s block,” or it could be also like you don’t really feel like working on music, you’ve been on tour, it’s tiring. So yeah, I try not to get too blown out and when we get home, get right back into it.

I find the R‑Type series fascinating. Was that the most satisfied you’ve felt creatively working through this particular group of songs?
Well, the R‑Type collection is our version of a remix collection now. In the past, whenever we released an original LP, it would have its own corresponding collection of remixes, which is great for us because we get to reach out to other musicians, projects that we respect and are excited by, and then kind of have an indirect creative dialogue with them by them choosing a song to remix. We try not to give too many notes or anything like that and the way we’re using a remix is not really related to a major‑label giant artist where you’re just trying to prolong the commercial moment and generate more content. That’s something we’ve been doing for a very long time.

Now we’ve shifted to LP and then doing a collab album, writing a collection of all‑new material with other artists, which is pretty time‑consuming. It’s about as time‑consuming, if not more, than writing an original LP and then as far as Addendum goes, we had leftover songs that we were proud of, but we still look at the records as an aesthetic document that has validity on its own. So if a certain song doesn’t feel like it necessarily fits in the track listing, that might not be reflective of whether or not we dislike the song. It could be as simple as, “Oh, that doesn’t quite feel like it belongs in these twelve songs,” but we wanted it to see the light of day and the other thing I would say is we tend to shift our production sound and aesthetic universe of every album pretty significantly.

And Rat Wars and CONFLICT DLC, you specifically wanted them to exist in the same aesthetic universe, the same musical palette. The drum sounds are the same, there are synthesizers used throughout, so the body of work feels cohesive. Now you have to, before starting a new LP, discover what the next shift is going to be.

Does closing the book on that era, like you’ve done with Addendum, make it easier to move on and evolve the sound?
It honestly is, for our band, the most complicated aspect of what we do creatively. It’s been the same almost with every record, especially in the modern era where we’re really, not to use a cliché term, using the studio as an instrument. We have to unlock with one song, usually, what the sound of that album is. And once we do that, then writing songs isn’t easy, but I find it to be pretty engaging and fun.

But sometimes you’re just like, okay, fuck, are we repeating ourselves? I don’t want to use the same synthesizers, I don’t want to use the same vocal processing chain. So you’re trying different things and maybe you’re hung up on the familiarity of what you did before, or it just doesn’t feel right. That can be very frustrating internally in the band and with our producer. We can be sort of scratching in the dark until something presents itself. And then once it does, we’re off to the races and we know what the record is supposed to sound like. Then we just have to write songs that feel like they have that mood to them.

That must be the really satisfying part, how these songs connect and resonate with fans. You must be blown away by the impact they have, especially when you talk to fans at shows?
Absolutely and that’s very humbling and something you have to be grateful for. For the longest time we came out of a very esoteric underground noise scene where that really wasn’t very common. The music was very oblique and kind of hard to access. As the band has evolved, and especially with certain lyrical aspects, my innate, what you guys would call tallest poppy, perspective is to downplay them. Like, okay, there’s no way, we’re not really a very important band, we’re not a big band, we’re not a meaningful band. It’s my instinct to obscure that; it makes me a little uncomfortable. I’ve just gotten comfortable in the last couple years acknowledging that it is important to people, and that’s very meaningful, and it’s something we should not take for granted.

Going back to the tour, the supports you’ve got locked in, I think you’ve nailed it again. Even like the last tour, the supports are fantastic. It’s really shaping up to be an awesome tour?
I hope so. We had a great tour of the last record in the United States, so that was a really exciting experience. We’re looking forward to seeing how it resonates with the Australian audience.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch HEALTH on tour with Perturbator and King Yosef on the following dates, tickets from Destroy All Lines…