The Dome, Tuffnell Park, London

HEALTH are the sort of band for whom musical adjectives like “visceral” and “muscular” were invented. Alumni of the downtown Los Angeles DIY scene alongside artists like No Age and Mika Miko back in the mid-late noughties, over the years the noise rock outfit have cultivated a reputation for two things: brooking no compromise and putting on one hell of a ferocious live show. 

True to form, the black-clothed quartet stride on to the stage at the dingy Dome in Tuffnell Park, North London, and immediately embark on an all-out aural assault of the audience. Guitarist and keyboardist Jupiter Keyes whacks out a tribal rhythm on an upturned bass drum (he and willowy-haired bassist John Famiglietti will swap the drum between them throughout the set), vocalist and guitarist Jake Duzsik thrashes his axe around with wilful abandon and drummer BJ Miller exacerbates the carnage. Heaven help the uninitiated, because this is brutal.

  • © Róisín Murphy

Gradually though, something magical happens. Duzsik and his band begin sculpting melody from atonality. New singles like Stonefist and New Coke emerge from the sonic wreckage gorgeous, fully-formed and triangulated somewhere between Nine Inch Nails, Boredoms and Depeche Mode. The foursome are gearing up for the release of new album Death Magic, their first in the six years since 2009’s Get Color (notwithstanding the Max Payne 3 soundtrack in 2012) and the contrast between old and new throughout the night couldn’t be more stark.

Granted, odd tracks from earlier in the cannon – like Die Slow and its mutant electronica, and USA Boys (recorded in Trent Reznor’s home studio, fact fans) – sit quite comfortably with more recent entries in the set list. Duzsik’s voice has always been incongruously sweet, too, no matter how warped and transmogrified it’s invariably been. In the main though, tonight’s performance charts a pretty radically different path ahead for HEALTH, one marked less by outright abrasion and more by concerted song craft. Even if they do play a 20-second screeching guitar encore – old habits and all that.