Health&Beauty pull together their scatterbrain on ‘Wartime’

Every weekday, DIY’s new music know-it-all Neu brings you one essential new release to get obsessed with. Today’s Neu Pick comes from Health&Beauty.

Choppy and packed with energy, Health&Beauty’s ‘Wartime’ takes the southern rock template and scrambles it to high heaven.

Bubbling drums prop up a saw-blade guitar, while frontman Brian J Sulpizio’s twang knots the whole thing up in a stop-start, fidgety dressing. At the halfway point, though, things turn towards a more swaying, waltz-esque pace, and then segues into a flowing, sky-scraping experimentalism - a heel-turn that only ups the ante on Health&Beauty’s everything-at-once, time-signature testing nature.

“A young man who lived in my neighbourhood in Chicago was about to graduate high school and he was telling me about how the best option for him was to sign up for the Army,” explains Brian on the indecisiveness at the core of ‘Wartime’. “He was also considering becoming a truck driver but I never saw him after the one time so I don’t know what he decided. I wrote the song with the volunteer army in mind.”

Taken from their Wichita Recordings debut, ‘No Scare’, get the first spin of ‘Wartime’ below. ‘No Scare’ is out on August 5th.