Conflict DLC - Health New Album

Introduction to Sonic Fury

The moment I started listening to HEALTH Conflict DLC, the sensation was like diving into an electrical storm: industrial noises bubbling like metal heated to a red glow and beats that feel like hammers driving echoes into the walls of the skull. Before talking about the album itself, it’s worth placing who these guys are. Originating in Los Angeles in the mid-2000s, the band has always walked the line between the experimental and the brutal, a trio that has mixed noise rock, distorted electronics, and industrial metal since its early steps, creating a sound that has always been both chaotic and hypnotic. They don’t soften their edges, but the aggression is never empty, beneath the distortion lies a deliberate and calculated design.

With Conflict DLC, released in December 2025, the band reaffirms this stance and delivers what many of us in the heavy and industrial universe were waiting for: a work that seems to directly reflect the weight and anxiety of our times.

A storm of sound, the experience of listening to Conflict DLC

Taking on the legacy left by Rat Wars (2023), Conflict DLC works almost like a dark mirror of this world saturated with information, fear, and constant tension, sound and lyrics collide to form a sonic portrait of modernity. The first thing that struck me was how direct and impactful the album is: there are no overly long detours or unnecessary moments, each track is built to pull you in with force. The energy is palpable, as if every guitar riff and electronic beat were trying to rip you out of your chair and throw you into the middle of the pit.

It is an album of intense contrasts: there are moments when crushing guitars and industrial drums meet like a thunderclap about to strike, and other instances where ethereal synthesizers open melodic cracks that leave you almost disoriented. In 'Antidote', for example, there is a sense of a more introspective breath before returning to the visceral cacophony that dominates much of the tracklist. This alternation allows the album to breathe without losing its brutal cohesion.

Metallic industrial with purpose

Here, heaviness is not mere heaviness, it is purpose. The way HEALTH manipulates elements of industrial, metal, and electronics seems intentionally designed to reflect an atmosphere of constant crisis. Instead of an album that simply spews noise, Conflict DLC builds a universe where every beat helps tell a story of hopelessness, inner struggle, and, paradoxically, human connection amid chaos.

The album opens with 'Ordinary Loss', which already throws you into the whirlwind with crushing riffs and a chorus that sticks in your head, almost like a visceral invitation to experience everything that follows. This sets the tone of industrial metal that runs through the entire work, a sense of sonic assault that rarely leaves the listener.

Even when the pace slows or when the music seems to breathe, there is a constant feeling of imminence, as if the tracks were air vents within a larger, heavier body. In 'Don’t Kill Yourself', this urgency materializes as raw vulnerability, almost as if the band were battling its own demons in front of the audience and in a way, this is part of the album’s disturbing beauty.

Conclusion: why Conflict DLC matters

What makes Conflict DLC an album that deserves attention, even from those who do not live solely on extreme metal, is precisely this unusual combination of brute force and emotional reflection. It is as if HEALTH managed to capture the sound of an internal and external collapse at the same instant, translating it into music with a technique that is not just technology or noise: it is pure artistic expression. With tight production and arrangements that maintain focus and intensity from start to finish, Conflict DLC is, for me, one of the most cohesive and impactful works they have released recently, a sound that feels essential for understanding how heavy music can speak about the present without losing its inherent fury.

If I had to sum it all up in a single image, I would say that Conflict DLC is a shattered mirror of the modern world: heavy, multifaceted, and at the same time strangely beautiful in its controlled destruction.