You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Herway.

The band helped formed in Los Angeles in 2005. Their newest record, Death Magic, came out in 2015. They spent four years trying to make it. They described themselves as a noise band, but for this record, they reinvented their palette and their process.

In this episode, John and Jake from Health take apart the song Stone Fist, which they made with their bandmates Jupiter Keys and B.J.M.

And just a heads up, this episode has some explicit language. Now, here's Stone Fist on Song Exploder.

I'm Jake from Health, and I sing and play guitar.

This is John, and I play bass. Though, I guess we're all doing a lot of stuff on computer. The whole song started completely computer-generated as the Duh, kinda riff.

I had a synth sound that I had made, and I put it in reverse and just chopped this really tiny segment, and then just cranks all the distortion. And I was like, oh shit, this rocks, we're a business.

We've always been making aggressive music. Typically, historically, we've done something like that with a guitar, and like, shitload of guitar pedals. That sounded really intense, but you do lose clarity when you record that.

And there was already a mission statement of the band that was like, we're supposed to try to have it sound new. We just knew we had to start using computers, because we were a noise band, like, as about being able to create aggressive elements, and so it's like, there was a new range of things available to us.

I kinda had this realization where it was just like, pop music on the radio is like heavier than, like, cool underground, like, gnarly bands.

And it's like, this lady Gaga song is kicking my dick off, like, telephone, and I'm like, this is fucking nuts!

That's like a big part of why the record sounds like this. It was hearing those things, and just being like, if you could apply that technology that made those sounds that aggressive,

and that apparent, and like, do it tastefully, like, it'd be fucking crazy.

There's a lot of goofy shit in there.

So there's a live snare. There's a white noise sound. And then there's like a cartoon punching sound effect.

I want these really heavy drums, but like, the way to get really heavy is you need it to sound kinda goofy.

So we have this, like, push and pull with a loving dumb shit, but thinking you're not a dumb person, I don't know.

The first fine is like, and though we know how far we've come, we stay possessed by what we've lost.

We're obsessive of the past. We're obsessive of memory. And it's just like, no matter how far you've gotten, if you're successful, unsuccessful, married, unmarried, whatever thing, it's like you still have all this fucking baggage.

And a lot of times, regardless of the point that you're at, that kinda tends to weigh you down more than where you've gone.

Love's not in our hearts and we both know. Love's not in our hearts and we both know. Love's not in our hearts and we both know. Love's not in our hearts and we both know. Love's not in our hearts.

I'm trying to do an anti-love song anthem. This is the not exciting part of a relationship that is not usually in a pop song where you're just kinda like, secretly,

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