Scene // 001
21/10/2026
HEALTH wrote two songs for the Street Fighter film
An industrial noise band got handed a film with a budget and a whole world around it. Nobody is handing me one, so I built mine.
What happened
HEALTH, the industrial noise band out of Los Angeles, put out two new songs on 16/10/2026: Negative Edge and Brainrot. Both were written for the new live-action Street Fighter film, not lifted from an album and licensed after the fact.
The soundtrack album came out digitally the same day on Milan Records, the day the film opened in cinemas through Paramount Pictures, directed by Kitao Sakurai. Film Music Reporter has the full track list: Negative Edge sits at track two and Brainrot at track ten, inside an original score by Leo Birenberg and Zach Robinson. Thirty-nine tracks, two of them HEALTH.
The band told Bleeding Cool, as Stereogum reported it, that they are lifelong players of Street Fighter and huge fans of songs written for movies about movies, and they named the lineage they wanted to join: Men in Black, Wild Wild West, Demolition Man, Streets of Philadelphia. Songs that exist because a film needed them, and then outlived the film.
Sources: 14/10/2026 Film Music Reporter · 16/10/2026 Stereogum · 16/10/2026 mxdwn
Where Kael Novus stands
Industrial has always been soundtrack music. Strip the vocals off a HEALTH song and you are left with a place: a corridor, a machine room, a street at three in the morning with the lights still on. The genre wants a world around it. It is restless on its own and settled the moment there is a picture to sit under. That is not a weakness. It is the whole point of the sound, and it is why the first industrial records I ever loved felt like scores to films that did not exist.
So what HEALTH got here is the thing every heavy band quietly wants and almost none of them get. Somebody handed them a world. A film with a cast, a budget, a release date, a city to set it in, and two slots on the album where the singing happens. They did not have to invent the place the songs live in. The place was built for them, and they walked in and did what they do. Good on them. Negative Edge is three and a half minutes of exactly the band they have always been, and Brainrot is shorter and meaner. Neither one sounds like a band on its best behaviour because it is on a studio soundtrack. That is the part I respect most.
Nobody is handing me a film. There is no studio, no slate, no budget line with my name on it. So I built one. The videos are the film. The songs are the score. Every clip I have put out for Born in the Static pt.1 is a scene from a picture that was never shot, and the record is the soundtrack to a future that has not arrived yet. When I write a track I am not writing a single. I am writing the music for the moment in the film where something breaks or something leaves.
That is the real difference between what HEALTH did this week and what I do every week, and it is not a complaint. They got the world first and wrote the songs into it. I write the songs first and build the world around them one clip at a time, because that is the only way an independent project out of a home studio in Brisbane gets a world at all. The method is backwards. The result is the same kind of thing: music that only fully makes sense with a picture over it.
If you have never heard HEALTH, start with the two new ones and then go back to Death Magic. If you have never heard me, the track under this post is where pt.1 leaves the ground.
Playing under this
Kael Novus
BEYOND THE NOISE
If pt.1 is a film, this is the shot where the camera leaves the ground. The title does the soundtrack job on its own.
Full track