We live in the loudest of times. It all began about twenty years ago, when new digital technologies started to radically alter the way music was made, refined, and shared. It suddenly became fairly easy to endow songs with a more aggressive presence: with a click of the mouse, you just made it all—especially the quiet parts—louder. Since then, there’s been a debate over the effects of the “loudness wars” on our ability to appreciate nuance, particularly the dynamic range between loud and soft that, in the parlance of audiophiles, gives music the room to “breathe.” As musicians from Iggy Pop to Christina Aguilera began making their music as thunderous as possible, our standards and preferences gradually changed. Loudness has won. We have come to crave music that is garish, punchy, and, according to the anti-loudness partisans, poorly engineered. But now that we listen to music everywhere—often in a semi-distracted state, across a range of devices and settings—it should come as no surprise that artists want their music to come pre-coated with a glossy immediacy. First impressions matter. Why not insure that you can’t be ignored?

Think of how many contemporary pop hits sound as if they were being belted from within a jet engine. The quiet parts of a Taylor Swift song buzz more boldly than the brashest moments of a heavy-metal album from the nineteen-eighties. The imperfections that resulted when artists pushed their recordings past peak levels have given way, in pop music, to new techniques, textures, and tastes. It’s just how music sounds now, from the noisy, self-conscious revolt of Kanye West’s “Yeezus” and the distorted crunch that occurs when a pop song hits the chorus to the way that MP3s gleam with a pre-formatted sizzle.

Although the Los Angeles band Health has always been very loud, the group might seem to have little to do with these evolving norms. In the past decade, Health has operated on the outer fringes of rock music, indulging an adolescent fascination with noisy, industrial textures. Listening to Health, I often find it hard to believe that the band members play traditional instruments: Jacob Duzsik, guitar and vocals; John Famiglietti, bass; Jupiter Keyes, guitar and keyboards; and Benjamin Jared Miller, drums. It’s easier to imagine them hammering away on pieces of heavy machinery. Their songs are aggressive and turbulent, as though all four were competing to conjure the most impressive racket. (The band’s intensity extends to typography: everything is capitalized, which can give the impression that iTunes is yelling at you.)

Yet there are moments amid the seeming chaos that reveal the band’s care and precision—a sliver of silence on either side of a monstrous drumroll, the way that Duzsik’s dreamy, whispered vocals rise above the hellish shambles, oblivious of it all. HEALTH’s self-titled début, from 2007, was all catharsis, the sound of a band twitching, shaking, and shivering through all its noisiest ideas at once. There was something absorbing about how they structured their ideas, the way their songs could move from deafening and claustrophobic to spacey in a matter of seconds. As a result of the album’s modest success, the group spent part of the following year on tour, opening for Nine Inch Nails, the industrial-rock band that achieved an unlikely pop crossover in the early nineties.

Rock music is littered with young men luxuriating in the awesome power of amplified sound; that aspiration for a brooding, steady headbang can sometimes feel a bit macho and silly. What made “Health” and its follow-up, “Get Color” (2009), unusual was their feeling of neurotic skittishness. The band sounded as though it were continuously shedding its own skin. Its members created their own language of sound. Zoothorn, for example, referred to a specific feedback effect, somewhere between a squeal and a scrape, that they discovered by experimenting with their instruments’ wiring.

Each album was followed by a set of open-minded remix compilations—titled “DISCO” and “DISCO2”—that repurposed the band’s pummelling, thrashing music for the dance floor. By breaking Health’s music down to its constituent parts, the remixers discovered something unexpected about the band: its music could be seen as an over-the-top pastiche of all the standard arena-rock moves, from the epic drumrolls-to-nowhere to solos rendered in metallic squeaks rather than electric guitar.

Noise can be petulant or cleansing, annoying or energizing. It can force us to wonder what we mean when we call something “music.” In 2011, the band made a seemingly peculiar decision, pausing work on its third album to record the score for the video game Max Payne 3. The opportunity offered Health a degree of financial freedom as well as a new kind of challenge. Without having to fit ideas into the container of the song—a concept the band has rarely adhered to—the group refined its approach to tension and texture, finding the grooves buried deep within its factory-floor freakouts. And instead of pushing toward their typically jagged and raw extremes—Max Payne devotees would be sitting with this game for a dozen hours, after all—they tinkered with droning synthesizers and drum machines, exploring the capabilities of the gear with their usual maniacal gusto.

There have been many times while playing Health’s new album, “Death Magic,” which comes out in August, when I’ve completely forgotten what I was listening to. This wasn’t because it is somehow forgettable—far from it. It’s because the album’s extremes are so varied and unexpected. Some of the songs are riotous and merciless, suggesting the experience of being perforated alive. But at other times Health lands on moments of triumphant arena pop so saccharine and innocent that I wasn’t sure I was listening to the same band.

There’s nothing novel about being noisy, a standard that is ultimately relative. Health falls within a lineage of groups, like the Boredoms or Lightning Bolt, that have found moderate success despite having alienated broad swaths of humanity. But the blissful extremes of “Death Magic” feel different. Health spent nearly five years trying to perfect the sound of “Death Magic,” reportedly making the album many times over before reaching its final version, which features contributions from the Haxan Cloak (the British musician Bobby Krlic), known for his masterly use of gloomy bass frequencies, and from the producers Andrew Dawson and Lars Stalfors, known for their work with Kanye West and the Mars Volta, respectively. The band members studied the aggressive wallop of big-tent electronic dance music and hip-hop, trying to understand them at a granular level. They even updated their sonic vocabulary, experimenting with the way synthesizers could be processed to the point that they rattled and quaked, resulting in what they began calling the “dragnet.” The result is an album that feels like an initiation. No matter where I listened to it—in the car, on a computer, on my home stereo—it felt thick and expansive, as if it were colonizing the airspace around it.

It’s a different, more inviting kind of loudness than Health fans will be accustomed to. For many, the band represents the Los Angeles of underground art spaces, of noodling around in the shadows, making a racket while everyone else is asleep. But it’s also a city of celebrity, of bright lights and glamour, debauchery and excess. Nowadays, these two spheres no longer seem all that discrete, if they ever actually were. On “Death Magic,” it’s the moments when they merge that the music begins to feel unnerving—when you realize that Health has actually made a very loud pop album, one that is turned up to daring extremes.

Most of the time, pop music that aspires to live so loudly, on so vast a scale, sells us dreams. For all the pop euphoria on “Death Magic,” though, there are the hangovers. When the band announced the album, in April, it released a video for one of its least abrasive songs, “New Coke.” “Life is good, life is good,” Duzsik sings sweetly, though he sounds unconvinced. The strobe-flash video features the band and its friends parading under neon lights, enjoying a night out, invincible. It looks like a lot of fun. And then, at the end, when it’s all too much, everything skids into slow motion, and the band members take turns vomiting in spectacular detail. ♦