Health was the harshest band at the Smell nightclub. Two decades later, it sold out the Palladium

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Twenty years ago, Health was a lacerating noise band in a downtown L.A.nightclub, the Smell, famous for ear-splitting acts.

While that scene made a lasting impact on DIY music culture, most of its flagship bands wound down long ago.Somehow, Health only got bigger with time.Its members deftly updated their sound with electronics, metal riffing and industrial rock, most recently on the album “Conflict DLC.” They became a fixture in gamer culture for score work and influenced acts like Sleep Token and Bad Omens.

Nearly two decades after its debut, Health sold out the 4,000-capacity Hollywood Palladium for its Friday show, the biggest hometown headline gig of its career.The Times spoke to the band about how L.A.’s DIY scene shaped them, how Nine Inch Nails taught them to make brutal music a livelihood, and how young trans fans read their experiences into Health’s album “Death Magic.”This Palladium set is your biggest hometown show in your two decades as a band.Did you imagine this as a possibility then, let alone now?Jacob Duzsik, vocals and guitar: No to both things, entirely.

We were part of a very insular, transgressive underground art scene.So there wasn’t any concept of anything like that.

Our goals at that time were to be able to tour and play places like the Smell, warehouses where you would watch from the back and say, “Hey, I think it’s gonna fill out.”B.J.Miller, drums: We were just as ambitious in some ways, though.

Only a year after that, we’re opening for Nine Inch Nails.JD: We have always been ambitious appropriate to our context.The music that we were inspired by at that time and looking to as luminaries never had a broad appeal.

We wanted to make an album that sounds good and play the best possible shows we can.And then the trajectory changed.

The Pitchfork lens gets pointed at the Smell, and suddenly we get to do festivals like Primavera a...