Photo by Steve Gullick

The lore behind Loathe has only grown in the six years since the UK experimental metalcore band last released an album in 2020’s sophomore effort, I Let In and It Took Everything, and it’s only been to their favor leading into their return in announcing its long-awaited follow-up, A Stranger To You. Chalk it up to listeners wanting what they can’t have, the way which they stylistically blurs a really fascinating in-between of heavy music and vacant, shoegaze-adjacent sounds that have equally resonated with modern audiences in the years since, or a slow-gestating, revisionist discovery in the viral age.

Regardless of the reason, you can’t say that the quartet fingers aren’t on the electrifying pulse with the album’s first official single, “Revenant”. Anyone who may have stumbled upon them during Knocked Loose’s 2024 tour behind may find this to be very much their shit in its hard-bodied barrage electrified by cataclysmic friction produced from a run-in from NOWHERE2RUN, a.k.a. Jamie Morgan and “Shade” Balderose of Code Orange to match its fatalistic fault lines that transforms everything into dust. That said, do you accept Loathe’s invitation to self-destruction?

Directed by: Zak Pinchin & Loathe

Loathe’s A Stranger To You will be released July 17th on Sharptone Records.