Loathe have announced A Stranger To You, their first full-length album in six years. The follow-up to 2020’s genre-scrambling I Let It In And It Took Everything arrives July 17 via SharpTone Records, and if the new single “Revenant” is any indication, the Liverpool band spent the interim getting heavier, stranger, and more collaborative than ever.
“Revenant” features NOWHERE2RUN, the project from former Code Orange members Jami Morgan and Eric “Shade” Balderose. The track is dense and claustrophobic, layering downtuned riffs that flirt with nu-metal over frantic hardcore vocals and icy synth textures. There’s an industrial edge running through the production that never quite settles into a single genre, which has always been the point with Loathe. They’re a band that can pivot from tremolo-drenched shoegaze to chest-caving breakdowns within the same song, and “Revenant” pushes that contrast even further.
The album’s guest list signals ambition across the board. Beyond NOWHERE2RUN, A Stranger To You features contributions from jazz and trip-hop artist Jordan Rakei, the conceptual pop-screamo band Static Dress, prog and jazz-rock guitarist Mansur Brown, and rapper bucki sugar. That’s a wide net for a band often filed under metalcore, and it tracks with the “sonically adventurous” billing the press release claims.
The six-year wait between albums wasn’t a silence so much as a recalibration. I Let It In blew up in ways the band didn’t fully anticipate, and in an interview with Kerrang! last year, bassist Feisal El-Khazragi explained the gap candidly: “The fact is that we were changing as people so much, and that was changing our tastes. It’s taken a while for the dust to settle within our tastes and to land on something that we felt comfortable with, that we can put out and present as a band.”
Last year’s standalone single “Gifted Every Strength” served as the first signal that new material was coming. It now sits at track 13 on the album’s 14-song tracklist, which runs from an opener called “Entrance” through cuts like “Fortress Down,” “Nothing Like The Knife,” and “Meet My Maker” before closing on “No Stranger To You…”
A Stranger To You Tracklist
1. Entrance
2. Block Of Flats
3. Fortress Down
4. Gemini
5. Nothing Like The Knife
6. Harder To Pretend
7. اثينا
8. Revenant
9. The Way It Breaks
10. Meet My Maker
11. Fangs
12. The Ladder
13. Gifted Every Strength
14. No Stranger To You…
Loathe have a stacked touring schedule ahead of the release. An Australian run with Static Dress kicks off May 9 in Perth, followed by a European summer that includes Rock Am Ring, Rock Im Park, Hellfest, Graspop, and Copenhell. Stateside, the band is booked at Lollapalooza in Chicago on July 31 and Louder Than Life in Louisville on September 18.
A Stranger To You is available for pre-order now. The album drops July 17 via SharpTone Records.