Interview: HEALTH (US) Talk With Grecco Romank - NZ Tour

LA industrial rock / metal figureheads HEALTH are back in Aotearoa New Zealand this week for their first local performances since 2016. Supporting Jake Duzsik, John Famiglietti and B.J. Miller for their Double Whammy headline show this Wednesday will be dungeon power techno trio Grecco Romank, whose co-vocalist Billie Fee recently spoke with Duzsik about the delicate art of balancing seriousness with fun, his love for Auckland city, the meaning of "cum metal" and more. Their Pōneke gig on Thursday with cybergrind maniacs DEATHTRIPPA has already sold out, swoop on what few Tāmaki Makaurau tickets remain or you might be crying about it later — brought to you by Valhalla Touring...

HEALTH

Wednesday 5th March - Double Whammy, Auckland w/ Grecco Romank
Thursday 6th March - San Fran, Wellington w/ DEATHTRIPPA (sold out)

Auckland tickets on sale HERE via UTR

Billie Fee: So you've been to Auckland a few times and the last time was like 10 years ago. Is that right?

Jake Duzsik: Fuck, yeah, nine years ago. It was for Laneway 2016. I remember that being one of the best of the Laneways. The two that stood out to me were Auckland and Brisbane.

You will be in Australia soon and touring around.

We leave for Melbourne and you can see how the arc of our career has been atypical and malleable, as we're coming over for KnotFest. Pretty big distinction between Laneway and Knotfest.

What is Knotfest?

It's Slipknot. Literally, it's their festival.

Oh my god, okay, Knot as in Slipknot, right!

So it's like all heavy as fuck fans.

You're very genre spanning.

Yeah. We're genre flexible. We're pan-genre.

How would you describe where you're at, at the moment? Are you more Knot? Or are you more Laneway? Or are you something totally different?

That's the interesting thing for us, is that I think that we never really fit anywhere... But when we played Laneway, we were pretty out of place. I don't think it's so much that we've just been in a little bit of a no man's land. We've, over the last couple of years, we've found quite a bit of acceptance and enthusiasm from the sort of metal core. I would say we make modern industrial music.

I'd say in a lot of ways, like our band started as like a very much like arthouse, no wave noise rock band, which was like an incredibly niche, non-commercially scalable type of thing. We were just playing in warehouses downtown when we were really young and just didn't think about the future at all then. But we've always kind of had like an industrial bent to the music, so when we were on Laneway, the headliners were CHVRCHES and Grimes. You remember you were there. It's definitely a different kind of thing, we were not emblematic of what the aesthetic was mostly for that festival. So now, kind of comically we find ourselves in the same place, but on a different type of traveling fest.

But now we're on Knotfest and it's Slipknot and Hatebreed and really fucking heavy bands or metalcore bands. We're not like those bands either... You definitely don't usually have really heavy industrial music and then have someone effeminately, androgynously singing over the top of it. I don't scream. We played a bunch of metal festivals in Europe and the UK, like the hardest part for me to adapt to is, I don't hype the crowd up.

I just don't do that. It's not a judgment thing on the fans or the bands. But if you don't do that, they think that you're fucking bummed on the show. Because every single band — every bridge, every breakdown, before every song, certainly at the end, they're like, "What the fuck is up!?" I just don't do that.

The first time I saw you, I was 17. You came to Auckland in, it must have been 2010. I'd just finished high school and at that time there weren't a lot of all-ages shows. It's funny you say that, because that show, I remember very specifically that you guys didn't interact with the crowd. There was no banter or like you say, hyping the crowd up. You were all just staring absolutely straight ahead for the whole time. I remember being like, what the fuck? But in the best way, it felt like sort of a radicalising event for me. I didn't really realise that that's what live music could be. This live music is going to be a problem for me now when it's not that good, basically. It was like oh shit formative

Thank you. I think that we the music that we were making at that time, we kind of still will have a similar disposition, but it was experimental enough to be kind of transgressive. So that if there was a show that was sparsely attended or the vibe was weird, we would do this hypnotic — just going to do this as if it wouldn't matter how many people there were at the show. You decide on the disposition, and what your sort of physical manifestation of the live presentation of it is. Now when we do our shows, we've been fortunate enough for our headlining shows to get a lot more, especially in the United States.

I think there were probably about 20 people, and I probably knew all of them at this point haha.

Yeah, exactly. Fuck, I don't know if there's going to be that many more of them, but that kind of puts you in a different bracket of how you think about music. When you play shows like that, or you play shows to — card carrying, big city, hipster fuckos. Cause this is what I used to think, is you watch the show and you're like, I should start a band? That's what the monologue is. Not necessarily like a judgment, "Oh this show sucks." But just, you're taking it in, and you're thinking. You can forget that there are people that are just fans of music, they just want to go and have this experience at a concert. They want you to interact with them.

I don't do that, but now we'll play a show and John will start like a clap on just a part that's like a 4/4 kick thing. And I think that that really helps people connect to us. Whereas the show that you're talking about, we were purposely trying to alienate people. We didn't want them to have a bad time, but we wanted the experience to feel peculiar. Yeah, it's an evolving thing.

I guess to that end, I have in my notes here, just a bullet point — "New Zealand. Why?" Because the more I think about it these days, especially with everything being expensive and hard and all that kind of a thing. We are the furthest place, a lot of acts just go to Australia and then that's the end of the tour or, we are often tacked on. I'm just curious as to why you, you are coming back, or why it's still of interest to add us into the mix.

Well, I think that when we played Laneway, the Auckland show was one of the best, Auckland and Brisbane were the best in terms of the crowds, and we have friends that are from New Zealand. Our manager is from Auckland originally. We've been there twice, but the first time we went, it was really kind of what we would call music tourism. Where we were just trying to kind of have an experience.

I think we're also just kind of trying to probe. We've had a lot of changes in terms of like what our fan base is like. I was curious to see. Can we go to New Zealand and have good shows? I also, I really love Auckland.

Really? That's a rare opinion, I think.

Well, let me qualify that. I don't love the city, in terms of the nightlife. But the two times that I've been there, both times I had a full day off before. So we would go walk down to that port, hop on the ferry and go to Waiheke and then walk around and swim. Then the other time, I think both times I've been there, I have two days off. So then we've also gone to the black sand beaches, to the north. It's just incredibly beautiful and extraordinarily laid back, especially for that being your biggest city.
 

I should shout out my band mate who is a bus driver on Waiheke. He has the little tour bus with the little Britney mic. I do want to ask, what is cum metal?

You gotta talk to John about that shit, dude. Basically it's a joke. All the music we make is very serious and we take it very seriously, and obviously the lyrics are not tongue in cheek. It's meant to be digested seriously emotionally and aesthetically, but then we've always had fun with the like social media side of things, starting way back in the day. It actually happened before started getting associated with metalcore and what they would call baddiecore. I don't know if you know what that is.

It's like Sleep Token or Bad Omens. I don't know if you're familiar with those bands, but they're fucking enormous. It's a modern version of, I guess like Def Leppard or something — where it's heavy music, but definitely is appealing to young women. It sounds sensual and very melodic and the lyrics... there are things about relationships and human interactions. So that has been dubbed baddiecore.

John as a joke was like, "Nah, it's not baddiecore, it's cum metal"... He just kind of took the ball and ran with it. I think he's tried to get me to name like three different songs that, and I was like, "No, you can't, we can't name a song that, it's like that's too far." But if you want to put it on a fucking t-shirt, that's fine with me. So I guess that's our genre.

I've got to get a shirt with that. I think it's interesting. You raise this idea of — you have that tension between the tongue and cheek elements of what you're doing, in the wider world building of HEALTH, but your music is serious. Do you find that those two things ever kind of cross over or contradict each other? Or is that like a way feels natural for you guys?

I guess so. That's a very good question. It's an interesting thing that I've been trying to figure out, because especially I don't have to interact with the fan base very much. It's sort of been built into my role, I don't do anything on social media.

But there's all this nerd culture shit, all this hilarious, ridiculous meme stuff that Jon does. Sometimes people will make a joke like, "I thought this was a meme page, I didn't know it was a band." When you go to the shows or now when I see the fan base, you would think that maybe there's some sort of division of people who are really into dark brooding music and then people that love anime and video games, and never the tween shall meet. But they're the same people, that's what we kind of realised.

I'm not averse to having a persona or projecting an image of mysteriousness. I think that is how rock and roll used to be and it was way fucking better. Now everyone is like celebrity or not, everybody's life is the same. We're all just looking at our fucking phones all day. Having some sort of like Jim Morrison or whatever Lou Reed kind of mystique is very difficult to portray, but a lot of bands still do it with the way they curate their social media. We just felt like the more realistic way people interact with the world now is they digest all this hilarious absurd incredibly stupid, often internet content. Then they'll still listen to very meaningful and moving music. They're not really separated.

Here's John right here, by the way, do you want to ask him about cum metal?

Hello. Could you give me a summary of cum metal?

John Famiglietti: So cum metal is like — Deftones, Type O Negative, HEALTH. You know, stuff like that.

Well thank you. Very concise. It's an interesting question that we get sometimes, because our social media presence is very fucking stupid. Our lyrics are also very fucking stupid a lot of the time, but also quite serious subjects or I don't know. We in New Zealand we would call it taking the piss quite a lot. But I take the project of our music really seriously. I'm also fine if someone has a laugh at it... Yeah, you're right. It is probably just the same the same fucking people. Is there anything else you want to kind of put out there?

Shout out New Zealand. We got a lot of friends from New Zealand. There's a lot of fucking kiwis in LA.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.