Loathe are in an enviable position. At first, the Liverpool four-piece followed a familiar trajectory for metalcore acts—coalescing from various corners of local scenes, gradually sleekening their sound, playing those broad “heavy music” festivals in Europe with names like Metaldays and Destruction Derby. Then they embraced shoegaze at the exact moment that the genre started gaining cultural cachet. Their second album, 2020’s I Let It In and It Took Everything, bridged the formidable gap between the mainstream and the more pigeonholed outskirts of modern heavy rock. Following a 35-minute ambient companion to ILIIAITE released a year later, Loathe have been in road-dog mode, accompanying everyone from Knocked Loose to Korn to Three Days Grace on a near-constant spree of world tours. Later this summer, they’re opening for Interpol. Whether playing to nu-metal, metalcore, hardcore, post-grunge, or alt-rock audiences, Loathe never feel out of place—it’s hard to imagine them getting booed offstage like Deafheaven did in front of Lamb of God crowds a decade ago.
A Stranger to You proves that Loathe have the chops and genre-fluency necessary to usurp the legacy acts that cannily tap them as tourmates, but its juggling-act execution also reveals the pitfalls of omnivorous ambition. Every song on the nearly hour-long album contains brief moments that graze brilliance or, in some instances, achieve it. “Gemini” and “Revenant” have breakdowns that are more inventive but just as invigorating as their hardcore reference points; “Block of Flats” and “Fortress Down” have anthemic passages that cast the rest of modern metalcore’s melodic shortcomings into sharp relief; “Harder to Pretend” and “Meet My Maker” deploy lurid digital effects to thrilling ends only matched by the Armed on ULTRAPOP. The most noticeable level-up from I Let It In and It Took Everything is the hooks, but it’s difficult to attribute the faults or strengths of A Stranger to You to any deliberate shift in sound or strategy.
Presenting a satisfyingly catchy passage and immediately throwing it into the garbage disposal is a risky strategy, but metalcore was founded on the belief that the potential payoff trumps the comfort of standard song structure. Loathe’s DNA suggests that they’d excel at their most eclectic. At this point in their career, though, their onslaught of mashed-up pedalboard effects, far-flung influences, and quiet-to-loud whiplashes is identifiable even at their most subdued and straightforward. A Stranger to You is frontloaded with songs hellbent on interrupting themselves, most egregiously when the blistering ferocity of “Gemini” is upended by an industrial four-on-the-floor beat, or when “Harder to Pretend” is just hitting a prog-pop groove and then fades into a bland hears Aphex Twin’s “Flim” once outro.
Loathe don’t have to do this—they’re not 5 Seconds of Summer courting an edgy image by citing Nine Inch Nails as an influence, or Travis Scott and A$AP Rocky name-checking Björk on their undying quests to be validated as experimental artists. I Let It In and It Took Everything already threw a wrench into metalcore’s inherently diverse sound. A Stranger to You finishes with three patient-yet-adventurous songs all over 4:45 in length, and their collective lack of breakneck transitions allows the album to finally settle.
While Loathe’s baffling compositional choices may jump out first, the album’s most glaring flaw is its production. It’s busy by design, and even the most capable producer would have an uphill battle slapping together ambient interludes, slowcore balladry, radio-rock hooks, and brutal breakdowns. Loathe have always been committed to self-production (their 2017 debut is their only album that credits an outside co-producer), but A Stranger to You begs for more exacting supervision. This is the muddiest album I’ve heard since bargain-bin C-listers entered the loudness wars of the 2000s. The moments of abrasiveness hit like a landslide, and when Loathe try to be pretty, the tones are even more starkly amateur and ugly. There’s never any distance between the bass and guitars. Conversely, the drum tones fluctuate between sloshy and shrill, either contributing to the chaos or cutting through like a fire alarm.
Maybe Loathe, with their rigorous touring schedule, have chosen to optimize their songwriting for their live act. It’s easy to see how these songs, with their lack of patience, could hold audiences in thrall between invitations to mosh and to soundtrack anthemic climaxes in films. That’s where the money is these days, and only the most expert studio rats—say, Nine Inch Nails, Tame Impala, or Steely Dan—have been able to reverse-engineer careers into polished touring acts. However, it’s odd to see Loathe, a band so indebted to the technological advances that have allowed low-budget punk and metal trailblazers to grow from DIY scrappers to hi-sheen titans since the early 2000s, shit the bed sonically.
