Please Don’t Kill Yourself: HEALTH on Their Message of Mental Wellness and Redemption

If you’re a fan of prolific rock/pop/metal/noise/everything band HEALTH, you know that being a fan of the band is more like being in a fun fan club than just being a listener and appreciator. Between their cool merch, imagery, and recurring themes that begin to seem like an inside narrative with the band, they definitely give fan club vibes. I purposely say fan club and not cult because cults are bad for your mental health, and HEALTH are not. 

“We’re accessible,” admits vocalist and guitarist Jake Duzsik, not the kind of revelation you’d expect to readily come from a band that have the hip, queer crowd in their back pocket. “We started printing some hats that have reverse text on the hat, and in reverse letting, it says ‘Don’t Kill Yourself,’ so if you’re standing in front of a mirror, it reads in proper order. And it’s like an aesthetically cool, edgy, kind of fashion trope thing, but it also really, genuinely is a good thing for if you’re having a really bad day. Maybe you’re not actively thinking about killing yourself; maybe you are, but it’s just sort of a reminder not to let yourself go that dark.”

Much of HEALTH’s merch, aesthetic, and even music, is like that—on the surface, a fun example of culture jamming, cool, metal-themed imagery paired with more accessible fashion tropes and poppy melodies, bits of electropop, dubstep, black metal, really anything you can imagine, creeping in between the riffs and melodies. While initially, that just seems like a really good way to throw conventions out the window and have fun with music and art, there is a deeper message as well. 

“We’re an underground band, and even though we’ve been lucky to keep doing this and continue to grow and get more fans, it still feels like this very cohesive, underground thing where we’re all connected, so we care about our fans,” Duzsik continues.

He comments that, when he realized that fans of the band were responding well to the merch with positive mental health messages, and also resonating with their lyrics that touch on mental health issues, they needed to provide an actual outlet for folks to reach out if they needed to. They began to provide a number at the end of music videos for those who needed to talk, and to their surprise, the number got called. 

“John (Famiglietti, bass, pedals, electronics) has, at certain times, made me a little anxious just because there are legal ramifications, and you don’t want to give someone psychiatric advice that should be handled by a professional, but there are many people that will call him and ask him for help or just kind of just as a support structure of just like ‘Hey, I don’t really have anybody else to talk to,’” Duzsik admits. “I think they’re just like, ‘I really like this just fucking weirdo, underground band, and I feel like I can interact with this person.’”

He has also noticed that in that group of people who call themselves fans of the band, and maybe even those who reach out to the band for help, many are members of the queer community. 

“I think over the last couple years, we have really noticed that our fan base is pretty extensive in the LGBTQ community,” he says. “You’re putting out records, and you’re playing your shows, and you don’t know exactly how people are interacting with your music. And when you start to get a sense that there could be some way that your music is touching people in a positive sense that you couldn’t have anticipated, I feel like that’s probably one of the better things that can ever happen to anyone who’s putting art, or what would be seen as entertainment, into the world. 

“We’ve even had experiences recently where we didn’t know the records were resonating in the trans community, but then we had actual fans who met on Discord and that sort of helped them come to be more comfortable with coming out to their friends and family, which is, like, an incredibly moving thing to see that happening. We’re not actively taking part in it, but it is somehow related to the music we’re making, and that is very, very moving.”  

Overall, the band aren’t here to preach to you or convince you to make a positive move, but they are here to put both their darkness and light out into the world, and then provide a safety net for those who need help recovering from the darkness. 

“We like to sort of present two different sides,” Duzsik concludes. “We can have those elements that are seemingly dystopian, nihilistic, existential lyrics or videos, but also, because we know that we have this close relationship with our fans, and we know that they’re real people, we like to sort of provide the other side of that, which is to say, like, ‘Hey, we also know that like, people really do have these feelings about life. It’s not just, like, a fucking a cool t-shirt. So, if you’re feeling really, really bad, we would hope that we could help in some way.”

Look out for a new collaboration record out last month from HEALTH, and catch them on their U.S. tour as they stop by and finally get to play post-pandemic in some of their favorite cities, including Denver.