The album’s design features an orange-toned image on a black background, along with white typography that reads “Vol4”. That’s a description of the cover of Vol4 :: Slaves of Fear, the most recent album by Los Angeles–based noise-rock band HEALTH, but keen-eyed music fans—especially those of a certain vintage—are bound to recognize that it also describes the sleeve of Black Sabbath’s fourth LP, released in 1972.

When the Straight reaches him at home in L.A., HEALTH singer-guitarist Jake Duzsik says the resemblance was more than a happy accident. “It would be a pretty big coincidence if it wasn’t intentional,” Duzsik notes. “You know, a lot of people don’t notice that. You can really kind of tell the pedigree of people’s musical tastes, because you either know immediately or you don’t.

“We had joked for a long time—maybe around the first record, even—we were like, ‘Maybe when we get to the fourth record we should call it Vol4, as a little nod to Sabbath,’” he continues. “It’s my favourite Sabbath record, by far. You know, Sabbath, when you hear our band, you’re not immediately thinking, like, ‘Oh, that must be an influence.’ But it is an influence, and was a huge band for all of us formatively.”

Duzsik is right; Black Sabbath isn’t an immediately obvious touchstone for HEALTH’s music, but the band’s balance of industrial-grade rhythms, white-noise squalls, and delicately wrought melodies is gaining it a toehold in the heavy-metal sphere.

HEALTH’s sound arguably has more in common with the likes of Skinny Puppy and Nine Inch Nails than it does with anything that fits the conventional definition of metal, but Duzsik’s lyrical themes, as heard especially on Slaves of Fear and 2015’s Death Magic, are as dark as those of any black-metal act, albeit far more reflective. Through his songs, Duzsik comes to terms with the inevitability of his own demise and struggles to find ways of coping with times that sometimes seem hopeless, whether personally or politically.

“I guess I would consider myself primarily preoccupied with existential issues in terms of trying to find some semblance of happiness or meaning in the face of meaningless and unreckonable, unavoidable death—which is something that I can’t seem to get out of,” he says. “I’m not trying to compare myself to some existential writers, but it’s like the through-line of Camus’s body of work, or Sartre’s—it’s kind of reexamining the same ideas through different lenses.”

For Duzsik, the contemplation of mortality took on a deeply personal dimension while he and his bandmates—bassist John Famiglietti and drummer Benjamin Jared Miller—were making Slaves of Fear. “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it, and in the process of trying not to think about it, I’ve also done a lot of drugs, done a lot of drinking,” the singer admits. “This isn’t something that I included in the press materials, but it would be, I think, disingenuous not to include the fact that, in the process of making and finishing the record, my mom passed away. When that kind of thing happens, it’s pretty fucking hard not to think about, especially if you’re someone who’s constantly thinking about it anyway.”

Duzsik’s uncompromising explorations of dark topics might strike some as morbid, but for HEALTH fans navigating tough roads of their own, the singer’s unflaggingly sincere words can be a godsend.

“We actually do get quite a few people—and we’re very thankful for it—who express a gratitude about the records or the lyrics helping them work through a difficult time, whether it’s personal or familial or substance abuse or depression, that kind of thing,” he says. “It’s not cynical; the lyrics are purposely trying to confront those things that a lot of us deal with on a personal level in our own lives.”

HEALTH plays Venue on Saturday (April 13).