The wait is over. After 2020’s I Let It In And It Took Everything album turned Liverpool metallers Loathe into one of the UK’s most sensational heavy bands, they’ve finally kicked off their next chapter with new single Gifted Every Strength. Returning to the cover of K! to celebrate with an exclusive interview, the band talk changing tastes, ignoring the hype, and the very real possibility of a mainstream breakthrough…
A pandemic. The death of a monarch. The Conservative party’s fall from grace. The ejection of Donald Trump from the White House and his subsequent return. All of these historic moments have unfolded in the time since Loathe last released a proper album.
To be precise, 1,930 days have passed since the Liverpool alt. metallers unveiled their stunning second album, I Let It In And It Took Everything. Intelligent yet devastating, savage yet beautiful, it had all the hallmarks of a modern classic. It also illustrated just how much Loathe were capable – at its heaviest, it was like being caught in a volcanic eruption. At its softest, its otherworldly shoegaze sensibilities were nothing short of gorgeous.
Arriving just six weeks before the first lockdown, COVID hardly curtailed the band's trajectory – on the contrary, Loathe went stratospheric. Originally heralded as mere cult favourites, artists were soon queuing up to give them a co-sign. They’ve played with Knocked Loose, Code Orange, Korn, Spiritbox. A slot with Gojira’s coming up. Chino Moreno’s a fan, Hayley Williams and Frank Ocean too.
And yet, the follow-up full-length has still not landed. Sure, we got the instrumental The Things They Believe in 2021, followed by the criminally underrated Dimorphous Display and two new versions of Is It Really You?, masterminded by Teenage Wrist and Sleep Token respectively in early 2022. At points, the wait for a new Loathe record seemed interminable. But that is almost over.
They broke their self-imposed silence on May 2 with Gifted Every Strength, arguably their most ambitious track to date. It’s a song with more peaks and valleys than you might have expected, its molten metal shifting and evolving from minute to minute. It’s Loathe to the core, but its backbone is comprised of other feelings and sounds from more disparate genres. Around 80 seconds in, its caustic verse melts into something shimmering and atmospheric. After three-and-a-half minutes, the beat becomes suddenly aggressive, yet not in a way that’s typical of metal either – almost more akin to dance.
It’s boundary-breaking stuff. It might also be one of the greatest metal songs of the year.
“This is collectively one of our favourite songs that we’ve ever done,” declares guitarist and vocalist Erik Bickerstaffe. “It’s like an underground cult classic among our friends. Four to five years it’s been in the works. I would say this is the most eclectic mixture of our collective four brains when it comes to the music we like and what we want out of the band that we've put forward thus far. Even though I don't think it's that crazy of a song, I think it's our craziest song so far.”
Lyrically, it’s a time capsule of what they’ve been through to get here. “It’s about pushing yourself to overcome something, regardless of the outside noise,” explains vocalist Kadeem France. “As a subject, that’s struck quite heavy with all of us.”
“A lot of what we’ve been writing has been quite self-reflective,” adds Erik, “but not in a way that’s necessarily exclusive to us. These are things that everyone experiences, and we’re just looking at it through the lens of musicians.”
Kadeem and Erik are speaking to K! alongside bassist Feisal El-Khazragi on a Friday afternoon in Washington, D.C., where Loathe are on tour with Spiritbox and Dying Wish. They’ve been opening their set each night with Gifted Every Strength, with clips circulating on social media before the song was officially released. It goes to show just how hungry fans are to hear more, the lengthy wait feeling foreign in a time where bands drip-feed singles and EPs to satiate listeners between albums.
So what’s taken so long, boys?
Kadeem laughs, almost unsure of where to start. “Life, really!”
As they begin to unpack the nebulousness of that, it becomes clear that the waters took a while to become still.
“The fact is that we were changing as people so much, and that was changing our tastes,” explains Feisal. “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.”
Along the way, Loathe – completed by drummer Sean Radcliffe – have had a lot to digest. The intervening years have changed them as people and put them through a dizzying range of experiences, from victorious highs to draining lows.
“The entire world of Loathe is built purely out of extremes,” Feisal continues. “There’s no middle ground – we’re either absolutely knackered or we’re onstage, looking at each other going, ‘This is fucking unbelievable!’ The most exhausting part is the psychology of it, because you'll feel some way towards something that happened at a show, but then you have to get over it, because everything else is factually good.”
“Near the end of a tour, I’ll be like, ‘Oh God, get me home,’ and then I’ll be home for three or four days and I’m like, ‘What am I doing?!’ And I’ll want to be on tour,” adds Kadeem. “When I have times when I’m frustrated, I tell myself, ‘Cherish this moment.’ That's really where I'm at right now. What I'm trying to do is make the most of it, as exhausting as it can be sometimes. And not to be cheesy, but to live in the moment.”
Loathe have given up reading the comments. The human brain’s not built to have the opinions of so many strangers stored inside it, anyway. And as they’ve grown, the messages awaiting them aren’t always so full of love. People demand more. They complain, and sometimes worse.
“We have a bit of a love-hate relationship with social media,” admits Erik, who nowadays switches it off to maintain a clearer state of mind, unsullied by public perception. “When I was doing this when I was younger, there was no validation. There was no, ‘You’re doing great, buddy, keep going,’ but there was also no, ‘This sucks.’ I was just happy in myself, and I was just very content about what I'm doing, and that frame of mind is what I'm trying to get back into. I feel like reading the comments and being aware of what everybody thinks can hinder your creativity and your confidence.”
This isn’t happening to Loathe in a vacuum. Erik points to Bad Omens deleting their social media pages after their boundaries were crossed by one fan too many as the most extreme example of what rising bands can face. Their peers in Sleep Token recently pulled back their previously impenetrable veil with Caramel to address invasive fans who had made frontman Vessel ‘terrified to answer my own front door’. Loathe might not have yet reached the size of those bands, but they’re starting to see the tip of the iceberg.
“I feel like it’s something that people don’t really talk about,” Erik says. “I’m not starting a fucking movement to be like, ‘Everyone be more aware’ or whatever, but people don’t realise that what they’re saying is to a real person.”
He prepares to say something he thinks might prove controversial. He hesitates at first, contemplating whether he wants to commit it to print or not. “We don’t owe anybody anything.”
He says this with earnestness, not arrogance. They, nor any band, aren’t here to supply fan service, or to bow to the pressure of the baying masses behind screens. Loathe do this for themselves, on their own timelines.
“We started this without any outward influence, so why would we take that influence now?” Kadeem asks, to back up his bandmate.
“We started this without any outward influence, so why would we take that influence now?”
This doesn’t mean Loathe don’t want to be generous. In fact, they’re quite the opposite. They readily engage with people when they can – “We’re the most social anti-social people you’ll met,” Feisal says wryly, with Erik adding, “We’re never going to be a VIP band.”
“All of us would give our shirts off our backs to help someone,” Feisal continues. And it's an ideology that can extend to their fans as much as their peers. Need a ticket for a show? They’ll help you out. But will they drop the album just because you’re snapping your fingers? That’s not how it works.
It's easy to clamour and demand when you don’t know what a band’s going through – or just how long music can take to surface, from gestation to recording to release. There are even more cogs whirring away from the public’s gaze when a band are as DIY as Loathe. It demands effort – effort that not everyone can understand without having firsthand experience.
“Every single thing that comes out by this band is done by this band,” says Kadeem. “Only recently we had merch come out that wasn’t done by us and that was a big deal. It can be a lot of pressure, and it can feel like that hard work is overlooked when people are like, ‘Hurry up, hurry up.’”
The other question they’re often pestered with is whether they’ve abandoned the UK altogether in favour of touring across the pond. It’s an exaggeration to say that they have, but it’s true that they have made a second home for themselves 5,000 miles away in America. Offer after offer has landed in their inboxes, taking them to the other side of the Atlantic once again. Their UK shows have become more sporadic, usually at festivals, and they’ve not done a headline tour here since 2021. (A planned run in 2022 was cancelled when they chose to prioritise making new music instead.)
There is a marked difference between performing in those two countries, but it largely comes down how much the crowds have seen them previously. Back in the day, Loathe were circling the UK on a regular basis, even once managing a month-long tour of a country where most bands can muster eight dates at most.
“I think in the UK, people have seen us in our most adolescent form,” considers Erik. “They've seen us [when we were] very, very young, figuring it out, and they basically saw us cut our teeth from the very beginning to where we are now. I think there may be an element of like, ‘Oh, we've seen them, we know what they’re like.’ In America, we were just this thing that appeared out of nowhere. I think there's a little bit of a difference in that regard. Maybe our label [SharpTone] being in America plays a big part in it, and I think the music that we play just strikes a chord. It’s been a big part of what’s sustained us throughout the years.”
Ultimately, though, when handed the opportunities that would have made their teenage selves foam at the mouth, they could hardly refuse.
“It’s just mental that we’re able to do that for our jobs, especially having the people around us that we do, like Adam Rogers, our sound engineer,” says Kadeem. “We’ve known him since we were 15 and we used to sit and watch A Day To Remember tour vlogs and the Parkway Drive DVDs together. For us to be out here doing it for a living now is so surreal.”
Inspiration can come from anywhere, and Loathe have made no secret of the influence they take from outside metal’s borders. When talking to K! about his musical heroes two years ago, Kadeem was name-checking the likes of Erykah Badu and Earl Sweatshirt. As a teenager, Erik’s world was rocked when he spontaneously departed from his usual metalcore albums to listen to Drake’s Nothing Was The Same. This open-mindedness has allowed them to bend genre like nobody else.
Curiously, right now, they’re finding the past more inspiring than the present.
“The tropes of metal and rock I’m personally very, very bored with,” Erik admits. “I really don’t look forwards for inspiration in music. Not to say music’s not in an amazing place, which is exciting, but in the metal sphere, it’s like the ‘We have this band at home’ meme. But there's just an unbelievable amount of music in the past that was blessed by limitation in terms of what it could do, and how it went about doing it, and the lack of limitation in music now is actually lessening the quality of music. It was a lot more real, a lot more tangible, a lot more creative, and a lot less copy-and-paste.”
As they’ve matured, the more they’ve been able to appreciate. “I was in this bar with my wife ages ago and Ronan Keating comes on and I’m like, ‘What is this?’ She was cracking up,” laughs Feisal. Erik, on the other hand, recently came around to The Doobie Brothers. In fact, Gifted Every Strength might not have been what it was without the influence of Pink Floyd, which Erik points to as the reason they’ve done a six-minute song.
“The lack of limitation in music now is actually lessening the quality of music”
While their pool of influences has expanded, it hasn’t necessarily helped to ease the friction their own sense of perfectionism creates.
“There’s something particularly difficult about doing a Loathe song,” Feisal ponders, while Erik jokes: “Maybe in 60 years it'll be easy!”
“We go back on ourselves, and we go forward on ourselves so much,” Erik continues. “Somebody else has to come and grab and rip us away from it. But working together has gotten a lot easier. I think part of the product of growing up together and touring together and everything else that we mentioned is that that's really had a positive impact in the way that we get things out of each other, but I would still say it’s an arduous process.”
Nowadays, however, Loathe aren’t just the ones being inspired – they are the inspiration. Already, I Let It In…’s sound is starting to trickle down into the consciousness of a new generation of bands, further cementing its status as a classic. To be influential is already a weighty thing to digest in itself, but what Loathe find most amusing is how much it contrasts the humble nature of the album’s genesis.
“It’s so funny,” says Feisal. “It’s like the butterfly effect, isn’t it?” Red Room’s vocals were tracked in a friend’s house with the Rottweilers he was rehabilitating at the time, snarling outside the door. Two Way Mirror was finished off in the dead of night when the band were so fatigued they were practically in a zombified state.
“That’s what music is: it’s just a gift that keeps giving, and things will be pulled [from one source] and then move to the next thing, and then the next thing from that will pull from the last thing. That's the life-cycle of music. It's very humbling to think that people look at our music, which, sometimes was created in very non-gracious situations, and revere it in a certain way.”
Maybe it could even get bigger than that. If Knocked Loose, Spiritbox and Sleep Token are all reaching for the big time, then it’s not an outrageous possibility for Loathe to do the same. In Erik’s eyes, they’d be happy to be passed the torch.
“I believe that our music is capable of [mainstream attention],” he says. “I don't think we would be outlandish in those spaces either. I think it'd be pretty fucking cool. I think we have a flavour that a lot of people don't have, not to be audacious, but maybe we'd be very interesting for a lot of people outside of the sphere that we're in at the moment.
“I feel like there's something bubbling under the surface – people want interesting, weird music, and there's a space for everything. There’s just a revolution of people wanting interesting, introspective, creative, weirdo shit.
“I'd love to be some part of that.”
Gifted Every Strength is out now via SharpTone. Stay tuned for more on the upcoming album.
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