Photo by Eric Coleman

When HEALTH got the offer to score Max Payne 3, bassist John Famiglietti, the band's resident gamer, was psyched. He had hands-on experience with the first two editions of the extremely violent franchise, and was well-versed in Rockstar Games' recent offerings, too. "The first thing I said to [Rockstar] when we had the meeting was: 'Hey, just so you know, I got a 100% completion in Red Dead Redemption.' They're like, 'Really? Dude, I didn't do that, that takes forever!'"

Due for release May 15, the game follows Payne, a former NYPD officer, to Brazil, where he works security for a wealthy industrialist. Famiglietti says HEALTH's sound is used to reflect the physical environment and set the tone for its relationship to Max's mental state (dark and depressing). Their challenge now is to turn these lengthy mood pieces into "a really good, listenable record" for the accompanying soundtrack.

The process of scoring the game has taken the band around six months, and they're still putting on the finishing touches. (We spoke to Famiglietti over the phone after he'd been up all night working on the score.) Though the game has taken up so much of their time, the band are still planning on releasing their follow up to 2009's Get Color sometime this year.

Watch a trailer for Max Payne 3, featuring original music by HEALTH:

Pitchfork: So this game is really violent, right?

JF: Extremely. Dude, it's ridiculous. You're just exploding people's heads in slow motion the whole time. It's violent in the coolest way possible. The little details that make it really awesome: You've never seen people get shot this way before in a game. It's the best shooting of a person ever. You shoot them in the shoulder, the shoulder flies back, and the rest of the body doesn't. Or when you cap them over a table, their fucking dead body hits the table and rolls over. It's brilliant. They look dead. It's really exciting.

Pitchfork: What was the process of scoring like?

John Famiglietti: This game is more like a movie, so there are set levels where all these different fights happen. So we would create a lot of music and then have the stems broken up-- different types of music for different types of shootouts and levels of action-- and they would have to be able to stack on top of each other so it could loop and play indefinitely. And it has to stay in the correct mood. Plus, there's super-loud gunfire happening over the music at all times, so it has to work with that. And you have to keep in mind that, in real life, someone's gonna be playing these levels for a fucking hour-and-a-half at a time. It was pretty challenging.