{"id":548268,"date":"2026-07-18T23:54:24","date_gmt":"2026-07-18T23:54:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/548268\/"},"modified":"2026-07-18T23:54:24","modified_gmt":"2026-07-18T23:54:24","slug":"loathe-a-stranger-to-you-review-metalcore-masters-offer-stylistic-swerves-and-surprising-beauty-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/548268\/","title":{"rendered":"Loathe: A Stranger to You review \u2013 metalcore masters offer stylistic swerves and surprising beauty | Music"},"content":{"rendered":"

Loathe took six years to make this fourth album, explaining they wanted to make it very special. Accordingly, A Stranger to You ventures far from the Liverpudlians\u2019 metalcore origins to create an odyssey of mixed and colliding genres. Punishing riffola and slabs of industrial noise coexist with balm-like electronics, acoustic guitars, shoegaze, tinkling jazz pianos and guest rapper Bucki Sugar\u2019s spoken-word narratives (\u201cever forward, forever motion\u201d). Other guests include vocalist Olli Appleyard from Leeds rockers Static Dress, production duo Nowhere2run and \u2013 most unlikely of all \u2013 slinky jazz-soul producer Jordan Rakei.<\/p>\n

Loathe: A Stranger to You<\/p>\n

Precedents for this sort of radical metal departure include Deafheaven\u2019s Ordinary Corrupt Human Love<\/a> and Linkin Park\u2019s divisive but compelling A Thousand Suns, but, if anything, Loathe make even more musical handbrake turns. Block of Flats hurtles between gentle atmospherics and guttural vocals. The soaring Fortress Down and Meet My Maker suggest a slightly heavier Muse. Harder to Pretend recalls \u2013 of all things \u2013 Herbie Hancock\u2019s groundbreaking early 70s jazz fusion, while The Way It Breaks haunts as effectively as Disintegration-era Cure.<\/p>\n

Loathe haven\u2019t abandoned heavy music \u2013 the likes of Gemini and Revenant<\/a> are granite-hard \u2013 but the frequent metamorphosis is underpinned by excellent songwriting. The wildest curveball, the plaintive The Ladder, is simply an astonishingly beautiful love song. In lesser hands this album could have been a ragbag, but the band\u2019s bold vision is so masterfully executed it makes for a thrilling ride, in which you never expect what\u2019s coming next.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Loathe took six years to make this fourth album, explaining they wanted to make it very special. Accordingly,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":548269,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[146,85,46,409],"class_list":["post-548268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=548268"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548268\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/548269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=548268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=548268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=548268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}