Loathe are restless. Going back to their first EP, 2015's Prepare Consume Proceed, the Liverpudlian band has pushed at the boundaries of modern heavy music. With each successive release, the band has expanded their sound to encompass a range of influences, everything from electronic and industrial music to shoegaze and post-punk, all while having one foot planted firmly in the realm of metalcore. Now, more than six years after the release of their acclaimed breakout I Let It In And It Took Everything and nearly five years after the departure of guitarist/backing vocalist Connor Sweeney, Loathe have reconfigured their core sound on A Stranger To You, their boldest, most ambitious album yet.
Following the jazzy piano and spoken word intro, one of two featuring rapper Bucki Sugar, the first proper song, "Block Of Flats," makes clear the Loath of 2026 is a different beast entirely. By the end of the first chorus from guitarist Erik Bickerstaffe, the band has already run through psychedelic-tinged funk, an explosive, digitized metalcore verse, and into full-on soul and R&B. Metalcore has become just one of many tools in Loathe's expansive, impressive arsenal. The guitars, drums, and bass still sound huge, but this new wider range of influences has the added effect of making every potential twist and turn feel that much more unpredictable. The song circles back to metalcore frenzy before dropping into an ambient breakdown and a final, surging chorus, courtesy of Olli Appleyard from Static Dress. Somehow, things only get more exciting from there.
I'm no longer denied / Peace I knew I'd find / Purpose in the rain / Patience of a saint
Reaching far beyond the Glassjaw and Deftones influences that marked I Let It In And It Took Everything, Loathe's forward-thinking approach has yielded a thrilling amalgam of seemingly disparate styles that includes synth-pop, post-rock, prog, modern jazz, and, on at least one occasion, adult contemporary. When the riffs and screaming do crop up, as on the second single, the chaotic, thundering "Revenant" (featuring Jami Morgan of Code Orange and NOWHERE2RUN) and the maniacal, crushing blitz of "Gemini," it's coupled with layered, cutting-edge production.
"Ever forward, forever motion" repeats Bucki Sugar on the album's second spoken word interlude, the woozy, disorienting "اثينا (Athena)." These words are key to the album and Loathe's ethos as a band. Much of the album is concerned with charting new territory, like the synth-heavy rush of "Fortress Down," featuring singer Kadeem France on second guitar, and the pounding, dancey, constantly shifting "Harder To Pretend." The latter features excellent, bold bass/synth work that recalls Jaga Jazzist at their most exuberant and winds up feeling much bigger than its three-and-a-half-minute runtime. Elsewhere, the rain-soaked ballad "The Way It Breaks," with vocals by bassist Feisal El-Khazragi, finds the heartache lurking beneath the band's past flirtations with shoegaze and dreampop. The searing, psychedelic guitar solo from multi-instrumentalist Mansur Brown pushes the emotion into the stratosphere. And that warped, wobbly shoegaze outro works better than it has any right to.
It's a cliché to say a band has matured when they crank down the distortion but Loathe should be commended for cutting their displays of emotional vulnerability with an unexpectedly dark bit of self-awareness. To wit, another animating idea across the album is that of a misbegotten rebirth/resurrection. Invocations of the Greek goddess of wisdom and war and allusions to revenants (an animated corpse resurrected to haunt the living) suggest they've been through some shit over the last five years and come out the other end wearing their scars on their sleeve. Haven't we all?
Chasing these lines that I've drawn, my patience is / Thinning, I'm falling apart as the world stares / Grinning, passed my own thoughts I can't see / A stranger to you, familiar to me
While not a full-on concept album, there are certain threads that recur across the album; certain musical and lyrical ideas crop up again in varying contexts. For example, the album's title is derived from a line in "Revenant" but it's also alluded to in "Fangs" and closer "No Stranger To You..." Similarly, "The Way It Breaks" builds on a line from "Block Of Flats." It's clear the band is striving for something that adds up to more than the sum of its parts. More often than not, the band succeeds mightily.
On paper, the sweet, sunny love song "The Ladder," with its gentle chords and soft strings, is a potential soft rock/pop crossover; in practice, it sticks out like a sore thumb. The most surprising thing about the track is its complete lack of surprises, which makes it the closest the album comes to an outright disappointment. The production keeps the track from becoming sonic wallpaper, but, at five minutes, the track overstays its welcome. The song's harmonic framework gets revived at the end of this new, longer version of "Gifted Every Strength"; the problem is, the original post-rock outro is still there, so the result winds up feeling like one outro too many, leaving an admittedly lovely guitar piece feeling tacked-on.
And, for all their invention, the band are guilty of occasionally locking themselves into patterns. So many tracks have outros, but the quality ranges from great ("Harder To Pretend") to serviceable ("Fortress Down") to incongruous ("Gifted Every Strength"). Similarly, while "Nothing Like The Knife" makes sense as a discreet track from a lyrical standpoint, musically it doesn't amount to much in isolation. These missteps don't detract much from the album's overall quality, but they do dampen the immediate impact. It's not the most seamless listen, but that does feel, to a degree, intentional.
But when the band is firing on all cylinders, those quibbles quickly fall by the wayside. Take the standout "Meet My Maker" which returns to the album's theme of death/rebirth theme ("Gift of life strike me twice / Tell nobody," confides France in a soaring tone that reminds of Kid Cudi). Built atop bass and drums that bring to mind commanding Radiohead cuts like "Weird Fishes" and "Myxomatosis," the track is bright, bold, and bursting with energy. That energy winds up spilling over into the second single, "Fangs," which takes the band's new sound further into funk, pop, and R&B, summoning a thick, bouncy bass that sounds like Royal Blood with a hint of menace. The sprawling "Gifted Every Strength" doubles as a late album centerpiece and a survey of the band's considerable, well, strengths. Bickerstaffe's prog rock guitar solo into the Bark Psychosis-like outro is another album highlight.
From the opening jazz chords to the dissonances that creep in at the end of the grand, soaring not-quite-title track closer "No Stranger To You," Loathe have crafted an album that demands your attention and rewards it handsomely. Hopefully we won't have to wait so long to hear the next stage in the band's evolution.
A Stranger To You is out now on SharpTone Records.
