Loathe were only scruffy, young Scousers when they released The Cold Sun (2017) and did the unthinkable: made nu metalcore good. Overnight, its mechanical chug riffs and J-horror game ambience initiated the gloom of Starve to Survive, Graphic Nature and Creak. Then, on their 2018 split EP with Holding Absence, they incorporated the shoegaze and dreamcore atmospheres of their splitmates.
For its follow-up, I Let It In and it Took Everything (2020), they re-emerged dressed as Urban Outfitters models, silly sunglasses and all, doubling down on their dreaminess. It brought them underground stardom and founded a whole wave of dreamy, Meshuggah-riffing, bass VI-playing, designer shade metallers: Thornhill, Love Is Noise, Heavensgate.
Since the beginning, Loathe were more ambitious than the bands around them: the Being As an Ocean-esque cinematic moments, Counterparts-ian noodles, deathcore annunciations, post-metal album structuring, the breakbeats and vocoding. Even when I Let it In… saw the mainstream dub them “shoegaze-metal” or “Deftones worship”, songs to which those descriptions could be applied amounted to less than a third of its tracklist. Now, six years later, one core songwriter is gone with the shadows. Are they still capable of reaching those heights?
Early on, Loathe established an immediately recognisable take upon djent riffing, closer to Vildhjarta or Humanity’s Last Breath’s math/deathcore-influenced subgenre thall but without the ghost note consciousness, post-production splicing and ungodly levels of noise gating. Loathe have a more bass-esque timbre due to their many avenues of executing ultra-low tunings and having the bass play in the same octave as the guitars. Early on, this used a bass VI; now bass strings are used on baritone guitar, and sometimes even on a double-neck guitar-bass. A Stranger to You‘s riffing takes that template in the direction of blues-based rock like the White Stripes or Queens of the Stone Age, something experimented with on “Screaming” from their previous effort.
Their traditional style of riffing still appears on the heavy songs “Revenant”, “Block of Flats”, “Gemini” and “Gifted Every Strength”, but this album is Loathe’s softest to date. Those songs are the only four to feature screaming, among the 11 non-interlude tracks. For reference, that is just over a third of this album, compared to around three-quarters on their last effort and 100% of their debut. There are frequent dynamic peaks that recall when they would previously incorporate these heavier elements, such as “The Way It Breaks” or “No Stranger to You”, but they overwhelmingly don’t.
In place of heaviness, A Stranger to You emphasises African-American music styles, particularly R&B and soul. This is most prominent in the third single “Fang”, whose smooth soul melodies and bass lines create a Sade-esque track (djentle soul? Smooth djazz?). See also: “Harder to Pretend”, which begins more characteristically indie-leaning; however, its instrumental conclusion is simply a jazz piano backed by a breakbeat and eventually a wahing funk guitar.
Introductory track, “Entrance”, and the latter half of the interlude “اثينا” are drumless hip-hop. The vocals are handled by Bucki Sugar, a Los Angeles-based jazz rapper and former vocalist for melodic hardcore band Set Sights. Sugar had featured on the band’s self-titled track from their debut, on which he screamed. Here, he’s using the softer voice of his solo material. In “Entrance”, his choice of cadence and backing by jazz pianos recall the introduction to Common’s “Letter to the Free”, while “اثينا’s” airy synths and panning, industrialised tribal drumming make for something more unnerving.
Instead of replacing the dreamier moments that came to define Loathe’s previous effort in most minds, the two are practised in unison. Their dreamy style of dynamic structuring is most evident in the This Will Destroy You-esque crescendos of “The Way It Breaks” or “The Ladder”. When soul-inflected melodies are contextualised amongst these heavier, post-rock structures and textures, Loathe, perhaps controversially, quite resemble their friends Sleep Token.
A Stranger to You possesses the same fuzzy, bass-boosted production style that guitarist Erik Bickerstaffe used on Static Dress’ Injury Episode last month. It works incredibly well on high-quality speakers, but unfortunately, guitars become unrecognisable on cheaper ones. It is stylistic, not a bizarre production choice, as its use varies across tracks. In the vocals for “Fangs”, the fuzz adds a vintage element, complementing the song’s soulful prominence. In “Meet My Maker”, the guitar is so pronounced that it resembles a saw-wave synthesiser, playing into its more dance-orientated style.
This proximity to electronic and dance music is recurring, most obvious in the use of dance beats and breakbeats on “Block of Flats”, “Harder to Pretend”, “Gemini” and “Revanant”. Loathe’s first EP certainly had roots in synth-lovers Attack Attack!’s Shomo-fronted era, but Loathe always dismissed that band’s electronic elements. Bickerstaffe and company’s synths were hidden behind their technical riffs, only used clearly for Silent Hill–inspired horror ambience. Today, they are still set on finding ways to be electronic without becoming electronicore.
Their old friend the vocoder appears on “Harder to Pretend” and “No Stranger to You…”, and various organic elements are spliced into something that resembles hip-hop-style sampling on “Meet My Maker”, “Nothing like the Knife” and “Block of Flats”.
The record hinges on contrasting the mechanicalism of Loathe’s riffing and breakbeats with the looser timings of soul, R&B and post-rock. In this respect, “No Stranger to You…” is the perfect closer. For much of the album, these two faces occupy separate songs or parts; however, here they merge. The driving low-end plays through the dreamy moments, even incorporating brief moments of acoustic layering for emphasis.
While I Let It In and It Took Everything was ambitiously genre-fluid, it was still clearly rooted in nu metalcore and thall; A Stranger to You has flung Loathe far past those borders. Now, their love of R&B, soul and post-rock is just as, if not more, prevalent than their metal roots. Could any other band make this brand of non-metal-oriented post-metal to such quality? Only time will tell. Until then, it is Loathe as one.