I didn’t get Loathe on the first listen. I got them on the fourth, walking somewhere cold, when a riff opened up like a ceiling collapsing in slow motion and I forgot where I was going.
I Let It In and It Took Everything is the album I point to when somebody asks me what modern heavy can sound like when it stops trying to prove it’s heavy. The guitars don’t chug. They swell. They shimmer and collapse and rebuild. It’s like watching a building breathe. There are sections that sound like drowning on purpose and you don’t want to come up.
The clean vocals sit inside the wall of sound instead of floating above it. That’s the trick. Most bands treat cleans as a surface, a hook, a breather. Loathe buries them in the fuzz until the melody feels like it’s fighting to reach you. That tension is the whole record. Pretty and crushing at the same time, not taking turns.
People call them shoegaze-adjacent and then the metalcore purists get defensive about it. I don’t care about the genre committee. What I care about is that “Screaming” made me pull over once. Not because it was aggressive. Because the guitars shifted into this massive trembling chord and my chest did something I wasn’t ready for in traffic.
Heavy music doesn’t have to hit you in the face. Sometimes it surrounds you. Sometimes it fills the room slow, like fog, and by the time you notice you can’t see the door you don’t want to leave anyway.
That’s this record. It doesn’t demand attention with volume. It earns it with texture. Every return listen pulls a new layer out of the noise. A buried melody. A second guitar you missed. A drum pattern doing something patient underneath the chaos.
If you want breakdowns you can count on two hands, this isn’t the one. If you want something that feels like standing inside a sound instead of getting hit by it, put this on with good headphones and no map.