The L.A. industrial-rock band HEALTH’s new album RAT WARS is the most violent yet vulnerable LP of their career. It is somehow fitting that such a brutal collection of songs is at the same time their most comprehensive artistic statement.

Meticulously aggressive production detail collides with painfully personal confessions and a strange savage grace is paired with icy gallows humour… surprisingly it’s still fun as hell.

RAT WARS joins the lineage of ground-breaking heavy acts like Nine Inch Nails and Ministry, which re-drew the borders between metal, electronic and pop music. It also speaks directly to the band’s young, fervent online subculture.

It’s The Downward Spiral for people with at least two monitors and a vitamin D deficiency. Written during the most emotionally trying period of the band’s life, the album builds on their chaotic yet re-invigorating pandemic years.

In that time, HEALTH cut dozens of tracks with heroes and inheritors like Nine Inch Nails, Lamb of God, 100 Gecs, Poppy, and Pertubator on DISCO4. RAT WARS captures all the fury and ambition their LP’s have until now aspired to. It’s their boldest statement on the insanity and the insipidness of contemporary life.

TRACK LISTING

1. DEMIGODS
2. FUTURE OF HELL
3. HATEFUL Featuring SIERRA
4. (OF ALL ELSE)
5. CRACK METAL
6. UNLOVED
7. CHILDREN OF SORROW
8. SICKO
9. ASHAMED
10. (OF BEING BORN)
11. DSM-V
12. DON’T TRY

In 2007, HEALTH walked into a windowless, sweat-stained venue in downtown Los Angeles to record its debut album.

The band - then composed of singer/guitarist Jacob Duzsik, bassist John Famiglietti, drummer Benjamin Jared Miller and guitarist Jupiter Keyes - was locally renowned for its violent, fifteen-minute live sets. Its squalls of tribal drums, shredded guitar noise and eerily plaintive vocals sounded like nothing else in the city.

At the time, that rank Skid Row venue known as The Smell was becoming arguably the most influential DIY venue in the world. The scene around it would launch the band to international acclaim.

Crystal Castles remixed HEALTH’s single “Crimewave” on their own debut LP, becoming a breakout single for each act. (The group would continue that pattern on its lauded “HEALTH::DISCO” electronic remix series). Later that year, HEALTH opened for Nine Inch Nails on its “Lights in the Sky Tour,” refining its chaotic live set to command some of music’s biggest stages.

In 2009, they released their second LP “GET COLOR,” a significant step up in fidelity and ambition. The heaving single “DIE SLOW” became an underground hit and remains one of the band’s signature tracks. DIY bills soon turned into festival slots at Pitchfork Fest, Primavera Sound and other marquee events. Their second remix compilation included the single “USA BOYS,” recorded with Trent Reznor and Alan Moulder.

As they began a much-anticipated followup, however, an unexpected new project proved just as compelling. Rockstar Games, the creators of the “Grand Theft Auto” franchise (the most valuable media title in all of entertainment), approached them to score “Max Payne 3,” the latest installment of the noir action series.

The 2012 game re-imagined the very concept of a video game score, looping electronic drones and pulsing percussion into a bleak modern shooter. HEALTH’s video game work, including the “Max Payne” single “TEARS” and “Grand Theft Auto V’s” original cut “High Pressure Dave,” won over a generation of young musicians and gamers alike, and continues to influence both worlds.

In 2015, the band finally released “DEATH MAGIC,” its third LP, on the prestigious indie label Loma Vista Recordings. Years of work with producers Lars Stalfors (Lil Peep, St. Vincent), Andrew Dawson (Beyonce, Kanye West) and Haxan Cloak yielded the most precise and diverse album of their career, drawing on black metal, New Romance synth pop, beat music and industrial sounds alike.

HEALTH, now a three-piece after Keyes’ departure, played prime slots at Coachella, earned a lengthy profile in The New Yorker magazine, performed alongside acts as varied as The Neighbourhood and Deafheaven and covered New Order’s “Blue Monday” for the Charlize Theron action film “Atomic Blonde.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Psychonaut
2. Feel Nothing
3. God Botherer
4. Black Static
5. Loss Deluxe
6. NC-17
7. The Message
8. Rat Wars
9. Strange Days (1999)
10. Wrong Bag
11. Slaves Of Fear
12. Decimation 

Double CD comprising of Disco 4 pt1 and Disco 4 pt2. Three years after 'VOL.4 :: SLAVES OF FEAR', the L.A. trio's ferocious entry into the world of heavy music, HEALTH return with the second half of their 'DISCO4' series. A whole lot went to hell in the world in the meantime, forcing the band to re-invent how they wrote music together. For 'DISCO4 :: PART II' they cut it fast and mean, recruiting both legends and nascent contenders of heavy music and its many peripheral genres.

Pre-order the album to be in with a chance of winning a limited edition test pressing.

Freud’s process of therapy was famously labelled the ‘Talking Cure’ - through the act of conversation participants received cathartic relief. Positive Mental Health Music (PMHM), the debut album from South East London band Tiña, stems from this idea. Lead singer/songwriter Josh Loftin explains that he used the songs to “work through a mental breakdown”, and that for him “writing is like solving a mystery”.

The 11 track LP provides an honest and intimate portrait into this process of self-examination, covering themes of anxiety, depression, love, sex, isolation, fear and failure. Yet, PMHM is anything but a difficult listen: the tracks are catchy, lively - even danceable at times. Loftin’s cooing vocals, his lyrics poetic yet slightly self-mocking, sit atop a blend of psych-pop keys, drums and guitars, all guided by the shepherding hand of producer Dan Carey.

After singles ‘I Feel Fine’ and ‘Dip’, Positive Mental Health Music is the first ever LP to be released on Carey’s Speedy Wunderground label.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Tiña perfectly stands between solemn bedroom rock and intricate art-pop, at once beautiful and effecting but without ever being a struggle to listen to. Personal, frank but beautiful and wonderfully done.

TRACK LISTING

1Buddha
2 Rosalina
3 I Feel Fine
4 Rooster
5 Closest Shave
6 Growing In Age
7 New Boi
8 Golden Rope
9 It's No Use
10 Dip
11 People

On first glance, the line-up on Shame Engine / Blood Pleasure, the seventh studio album from Chicago’s Health&Beauty, might indicate a passing of the torch. The recording features a large cast of musicians from the outfit’s past and its present helping the band’s founder and sole constant Brian J Sulpizio achieve his idiosyncratic vision—a sound and ethos he’s been kicking around, retooling, and finessing for more than 15 years, a few years after moving to Chicago from his native Defiance, Ohio in 2000. From song to song the band’ssound encapsulates detail-rich pop songs, extended jamming inspired by Chicago’s free jazz legacy, and devastatingly potent country-folk tunes. Sulpizio has never been hung up on genre, but his imagination and musicianship has allowed him to bring far-flung ideas to beautiful fruition.

A good chunk of the beautifully scorching new album was cut right after a quartet version of the group—with guitarist Jake Acosta, drummer Seth Vanek, and bassist Bill Satek—had finished an intensive three-week tour at the end of 2017. The new album conveys a directness and scorching power that seems to stem from the band’s live performances, whether the harrowing, droning blues of the opener “Saturday Night” or the soulful Irish-tinged folk-rock of “Recourse.” In reality, Shame Engine / Blood Pleasureis simply the latest chapter in an evolving tome, but it’s absolutely the most gripping and satisfying instalment in that process yet.

Over time many musicians have collaborated with Sulpizio—some in short bursts, others, like keyboardist Ben Boye and drummer Frank Rosaly, over the long haul—and the new record includes some fresh faces. Sulpizio is that rare beast with a keen ear for detail—no doubt a byproduct of his frequent work as an engineer and producer for some of Chicago’s most beloved bands—as well as an abiding love for the spontaneity and heated interaction of live gigs. His epic improvisational abilities have been a constant in the bands led by Ryley Walker—where the guitarist cemented his bonds with both Boye and Rosaly— but he’s always focused on serving the band rather than grandstanding. Even within Health&Beauty he frequently cedes lead guitar duties to others: check out Acosta’s post-Eddie Hazel fantasias on “Saturday Night.”

Shame Engine / Blood Pleasure, like its predecessors, is undeniably the product of his fertile mind, but it wouldn’t sound the way it does without the input and ideas of his collaborators. “We all have too much to gain by working with as many people as makes musical sense to us, and I really enjoy having Health&Beauty records run a wide musical gamut,” explains Sulpizio of the peripatetic line-ups of the band over time. “I've loved working with everyone I've played with over the years. Some versions of Health&Beauty seemed to live out a natural lifespan; some may come back together again. I really can't express enough how grateful I am to get to make music with the people I've worked with. Their contributions amaze me, ranging up to songwriting. Making music, going to shows or sessions or rehearsals, is joy and catharsis for me.”

TRACK LISTING

Saturday Night
Yr Wives
Rat Shack
Clown
Lack
Bottom Leaves
Judy
Escaping Error
Recourse
Love Can Be Kind

Whereas the band’s debut album ‘Popular Music’ was broadly political, the new album takes a more personal approach with beguilingly honest and brave lyrics that are bold in both sound and feeling, whilst also retaining the core DNA of their previous material.

Going on to speak about the album Mez says “A Picture of Good Health is not a collage of work but rather a snapshot of time; our time and the time of those around us. It’s political, but in a personal way. It’s a body of work that explores and examines the bands inner-selves through a precise period; a period that has brought pain, loneliness, blood, guts, single parenthood, depression and the need for survival and love. It is the sense and need for belonging that is the resounding endnote!”

TRACK LISTING

1 Good Health
2 Moral Fibre
3 Bum Hour
4 Hollow Thing
5 Excites Me
6 Never Love Again
7 Half Pint Fatherhood
8 Grown Up
9 Niceties
10 Thoughts
11 It's A Con
12 Don’t Give Up Yet
13 New Rose In Love

Having spent 2018 touring with Sleaford Mods, Hey Colossus and Brooklyn's SAVAK, Nottingham punk rock lifers Grey Hairs have announced their third album 'Health & Social Care' - a scorching reflection on balancing your creative impulses against the commitments of impending middle age. Their first output since 2016's 'Serious Business', released via Nottingham's esteemed Gringo Records, 'Health & Social Care' is an expansion of the band's sound that recalls elements of The Birthday Party, Laughing Hyenas, The Jesus Lizard or of a downer-fuelled B52s and what surf music sounds like coming from the most land-locked part of the country. In the video for new single 'Tory Nurse', directed by David Lilley, we're taken on a sloped and queasy trip through rural Derbyshire that sees the band tasked with delivering a body (later revealed to be a clown) to an undisclosed location. The fate of the clown is never revealed beyond disappearing into a hole in the ground, in a droll and absurd attempt to address the core ideas behind ‘Health & Social Care’ and the inevitable mystery of things to come. 2016’s 'Serious Business' saw a clear sharpening of the band’s focus.

The clue was in the title. What started as an offshoot to the members’ proper bands reached that wonderful point where it becomes an entity all of its own and steers the ship as though an invisible 5th member. And that member was steering things in directions none of the others had ever anticipated. 'Health & Social Care' expands on this. Its rage is tight and deliberate and its themes more explicitly stated. This is not a bunch of guys mimicking their youth (or other people’s youth) and balancing their weekend anti-establishment anger with their job as a software developer, or vintage furniture dealer, or credit check specialist. If 'Health & Social Care' has a theme (and again the clue is in the title) it’s “how can someone be a public sector punk in 2019?”. Commendable though most political music is, it’s perhaps easier to articulate your rage at the system when you don’t spend over 40 hours a week working in it. But what if you do? What if your punk rock ethics extend to your occupation? This is a record about balancing your creative impulses with your life as you get older and the time to do either squeezes in on you. It’s a record about aesthetic punks, Dunning-Kruger syndrome in the Health service, extreme 360 degree cognitive dissonance and – most crucially – a confusion and inability to tackle these external problems because you’re so f*cked by your own personal ones

TRACK LISTING

1. Hydropona
2. Piss Transgressor
3. Ghost In Your Own Life
4.  Capable Man
5.Tail To Teeth
6. Tory Nurse 
7. Breathing In Breathing Out
8. Kernels Of Eyes 
9. The Nag 
10. Glugs 

New punk compilation that features the era's definitive punk songs, including Blank Generation, Blitzkrieg Bop, and more!

TRACK LISTING

Side 1
1. Blitzkrieg Bop (Remastered Version) - Ramones
2. See No Evil (Remastered Version) - Television
3. Blank Generation (Remastered) - Richard Hell & The Voidoids
4. Blank Generation (1990 Remastered Version) - Richard Hell & The Voidoids
5. (Your Love Is Like) Nuclear Waste - Tuff Darts
6. Hey Joe - Patti Smith

Side  2
1. (Get A) Grip [On Yourself] - The Stranglers
2. [My Baby Does] Good Sculptures - The Rezillos
3. Suspect Device (2002 Remastered Version) - Stiff Little Fingers
4. Warsaw (2010 Remastered Version) - Joy Division
5. 2-4-6-8 Motorway - The Tom Robinson Band
6. Shake Some Action - Flamin' Groovies

Side 3
1. The Wait (Re-mastered For 'Pirate Radio') - Pretenders
2. You Can't Put Your Arms Round A Memory - Johnny Thunders
3. Homicide - 999
4. Love Like Anthrax - Gang Of Four
5. Lexicon Devil - The Germs

Side 4
1. Digging My Grave - The Flesh Eaters
2. Sex Beat - The Gun Club
3. I Love Livin' In The City - Fear
4. Skulls - Misfits
5. Takin' A Ride (Remastered Version) - The Replacements
6. Amanda Ruth - Rank And File

Second album from this trio featuring Dave Cooke and infamous Leeds rock siblings, Steve and Paul Morricone. And true to form, it's a collection of top notch, slightly off-kilter tales, ranging from frenetic, up-beat numbers to mellower more reflective songs.