Words by Annette Geneva
Photos by Pete Mellows
There are certain gigs where you walk out feeling like you have just been re-wired, like your brain created a new core memory and not just another one of hundreds or ridiculous tabs it has open that you never really go back to. HEALTH at The Odeon was not quite that. The room was filled, but not full, with a crowd that skewed heavily towards gaming enthusiasts, industrial-music diehards and a younger, club-ready contingent who looked like they could have gone directly from the dance floor to a warehouse party without changing shoes. It was a Wednesday night in Hobart, though, and Wednesday nights have their limits. Hobart is still a sleepy little place when the sun goes down on a school night.
King Yosef was first up, and his 30-minute set was a pretty brutal way to tell the room that this wasn’t going to be a quiet night. The American industrial hardcore producer came armed with material from Spire of Fear. There isn’t much unnecessary theatre to what King Yosef does. Drums, electronics, distorted vocals and enough low-end to make your internal organs reconsider their positions. He sits somewhere between hardcore, noise, industrial and electronic music without particularly caring about keeping the genres in separate boxes. It was a good fit for the bill and, importantly, it felt like it belonged in the room.
Then came Perturbator. The French darksynth producer was probably the most obvious indication that this lineup had been assembled around sound rather than venue expectations. His, (their as a two-piece), set has all the ingredients of a late-night warehouse rave that has developed a serious cyberpunk problem: pounding live drums, enormous synths, strobes and songs like Apocalypse Now, The Art of War, Humans Are Such Easy Prey. And it was fun, for majority of the crowd in the middle of the dance-floor.
The lighting was excellent and Perturbator knows exactly how to make a room move. The problem was that The Odeon was asking everyone to experience it as a concert when it really wanted to be a rave. I kept thinking: The Hanging Garden. Put Perturbator in there, lose the theatre architecture, let the lights go completely feral and you’ve got the kind of night this music is made for. At The Odeon, there was a strange disconnect between what was happening on stage and what the room seemed designed to let people do with it. On the upside – you could really feel like you are part of the duo on stage because of how strongly the bass vibrations travelled off-stage.
After a short interchange HEALTH hit the stage. The lights went down and instead of the usual recorded intro or dramatic countdown, A Cruel Angel’s Thesis from Neon Genesis Evangelion floated into the room. For a band whose entire aesthetic lives somewhere between industrial club night, dystopian anime and the digital apocalypse, it felt like the curtain rising on the correct universe.
Then VIBE COP hit. No easing into it. No gentle hello. Just drums, noise, bass and Jake Duzsik’s voice cutting through the whole thing. TRASH DECADE and HATEFUL followed, pushing the set further into that particular HEALTH territory where something can sound simultaneously enormous, miserable and weirdly danceable. Then FEEL NOTHING, which remains one of those HEALTH songs that seems almost designed to be heard in a room full of strangers. The irony of hundreds of people yelling along to a song called Feel Nothing isn’t lost on anyone.
ANTIDOTE brought one of the biggest punches of the night. It’s a great example of what HEALTH have become particularly good at: taking something that could be filed under industrial metal and making it feel like a nightclub track at the same time. The guitars are there, but so is the beat. You can mosh to it or dance to it, and the band doesn’t seem particularly interested in which one you choose.
The set then landed on MAJOR CRIMES, one of the songs that makes the band’s connection to gaming culture completely obvious. HEALTH have always had one foot in that world, from Max Payne through Cyberpunk 2077, and you could feel that crossover in the room, especially judging by the type of crowd that showed up the the show.
TEARS was a standout. There is something strangely beautiful about HEALTH when they pull back from the blunt-force industrial stuff and let the melody sit on top of all that noise. It gives the songs room to breathe without making them any less bleak. The back half of the set moved through DON’T KILL YOURSELF, before DSM-V closed the night. That sequence has become a fairly established shape of the 2026 set, and it works: increasingly dark, increasingly massive, then finished rather than dragged out with the obligatory fake encore.
And this is where I found myself slightly conflicted.
HEALTH sounded great. There is no argument there. The performance was tight, controlled and technically masterful. The production was huge. The sound was huge. The songs translated into the audience. And the lights. Bloody hell, there should’ve been a strobe warning. There were moments when the stage disappeared completely into white beams and smoke, or the band emerged from the darkness for a few seconds before being swallowed again. Visually, it was one of the strongest parts of the night.
The downside was that I couldn’t actually see much of the band. Which, depending on your relationship with HEALTH, might be the point. But I expected more chaos.
HEALTH’s social media presence makes them look like a band who might climb into the audience, set fire to the lighting rig and then post a shitpost about it afterwards. I was expecting some kind of interaction, some unpredictability, something that made the distance between stage and crowd disappear. Instead, it was pretty tame. Not bad. Just tame.
I’ve seen Deafheaven at the Sydney Opera House while sitting politely in a chair, which remains one of the strangest heavy-music experiences I’ve had, so at least HEALTH had a standing crowd and a room full of raised fists. But even then, there was a slight feeling that everyone was waiting for the night to tip over into something more unhinged.
Maybe that was the Wednesday-night factor. Maybe Hobart just needs a little more time to warm up. Because the audience was there. And that might actually be the most interesting thing about the whole night.
HEALTH have found a very specific audience in Hobart: gamers, industrial kids, metalheads, ravers, people in black and people who probably spend an unreasonable amount of time listening to music that sounds like the end of civilisation. That audience exists here. It filled The Odeon without quite filling it. And that’s worth noticing. The night wasn’t the sweaty, chaotic, life-altering industrial rave I had half expected. It was something more restrained: a very good band delivering a very good performance to a surprisingly specific Hobart audience on a Wednesday night.
Hobart is sleepy.
But apparently there are a lot of people here who want the apocalypse with a dance beat.
