I hope you’re having a really bad day, because I have some good news and I really want to touch you right in the life: HEALTH just announced Death Magic, their first studio album since 2009’s Get Color, via a video for their song “New Coke.”
I’d like to take a moment now to clarify that by “announced,” I of course mean they “released a video that looks suspiciously like every night that you go out in East L.A.”
Yes, there are multiple slow-motion vomit waterfalls in bathrooms adorned with layers of shitty eighth-grader graffiti. Yes there is a naked fat man chasing after something invisible, perhaps the dream of fame that forever eludes his grasp. Yes, there is slow motion screaming and — OH MY GOD IS THAT ALICE GLASS? Thank you so much for asking, these are all great questions.
We’ve all had nights in L.A. like the one in “New Coke.” You do a line laced with livestock tranquilizer here, you ride in a car through an ominously strobing tunnel with some #models there. Just try to look yourself in the mirror and call yourself a true Angelino if you haven’t looked up from the stroboscopic mass of writhing bodies at da club to find John from Health staring not at, but through you from across the room.
Jesus … what fucking taco truck do you think they ate at? Must’ve been that Tacos Arizas place, I heard it’s like the birthplace of Hep A-Z. You’d think that a band called “Health” would avoid such bacterial breeding grounds, but listen, I can appreciate irony. I can appreciate it so hard.
Mainly, right now, I’m just concerned about everyone’s level of hydration after this. Everyone gets a PediaLyte!
Vital information: “Death Magic” will be released on August 7 via Loma Vista. The band worked with the Haxan Cloak, Mars Volta engineer Lars Stalfors, and longtime Kanye West engineer Andrew Dawson on the album, so it’ll probably be totally boring.
HEALTH’s last release was over 700 days ago, and it was the score for the video game Max Payne 3. This is really significant because when I was 12, my friend had a crush on Max Payne. I tried to tell her he was just a fictional character in a video game, but she was hypnotized by his brute force and willingness to kill. Anyway, here’s the track list:
Death Magic:
01 Victim
02 Stonefist
03 Men Today
04 Flesh World (UK)
05 Courtship II
06 Dark Enough
07 Life
08 Salvia
09 New Coke
10 L.A. Looks
11 Hurt Yourself
12 Drugs Exist
You can check Health out any night at a party, puking the night away or at even at Psych Fest in Austin if you’ve got a full tank of gas and enough new coke to fuel an epic journey.
