A Stranger To You begins with Entrance, a short hip-hop intro set to serene, almost lounge-style pianos. It’s followed by Block Of Flats, in which a power-pop guitar wrapped in barbed wire gives way to impenetrable bursts of metal and lunging alt-rock. Then comes Fortress Down, where a Foo Fighters riff is fed through Deftones-esque filters, albeit remaining more fierce and punching. There’s another 11 more tracks to come after that, by the way.
Clearly Loathe aren’t playing it safe with their return. Hell, it’d be more surprising if they were. In the five years since their last release (because people tend to forget the ambient diversion The Things They Believe, for whatever reason), their reputation has ballooned steadily but unignorably. Loathe have become the shorthand for a grander, pseudo-experimental take on alt-metal now, despite that being a fairly unprecedented development. I Let It In And It Took Everything was a big swerve from their older metalcore, but still didn’t quite have the revolutionary spark that many have since ascribed to them. Ironically, The Things They Believe showed that off more.
Nevertheless, despite the half-decade interim, you can never claim Loathe to be lazy. A Stranger To You aims to do so much at once that you can well believe those five years were spent figuring out a place for everything. There’s just so much going on here, executed with a synthesis that, to many, will make this seem utterly one-of-a-kind. And they wouldn’t be wrong in that assessment; there hasn’t been an album in this zone of metal in 2026 that’s as sure of every decision it makes as A Stranger To You. Loathe really do have a purpose-built opus on their hands with this one. So why is it so difficult to love?
…well, at first, anyway. Though not totally free of issues, A Stranger To You reveals itself as one hell of a grower, where Loathe’s vision crystallises more and more with each spin. It takes a bit of time to get there, though, and when there’s so much to want to like unabashedly, that can be a bit frustrating. Key to that is the album at its heaviest, where Loathe forgo their usual meticulousness in favour of a compressed, blown-out stodge that refuses to gel. It’s first present on Block Of Flats but is more chronic on Gemini, a song where Feisal El-Khazragi’s bass and Sean Radcliffe’s drums have such an uncharacteristic lack of grace.
Worse still, these moments are such obvious outliers. For metalcore-leaning fare, both Revenant and Meet My Maker are immeasurably more stable. As for a rhythm section showing off some harmony, there’s Harder To Pretend and Fangs, both in an alt-rock vein but full of the density and richness that Loathe lay claim to. The rest of A Stranger To You is on-point in its production and mixing, arguably getting better the further that the band explore. Maybe that’s where these crushing pivots come from, in an attempt to integrate post-rock loudness with metal for what would generally make sense for Loathe’s musical DNA.
Of course, you could also make the (more tenuous) argument that metal is holding Loathe back these days, which is why A Stranger For You is best when doing away with it. That’s not wrong, per se, but it’s worth pushing back on when Loathe aren’t neglectful of where they came from. For as botched as Gemini is, it at least further widens the parameters of what this sound encompasses. The cold, slate-grey production, then, is the unifier that completes A Stranger For You. No matter where it ends up, there’s an insidiousness coiled beneath the surface that gives the album its starkness. Shoegaze cuts like The Way It Breaks and The Ladder find it especially useful, filled in by utter bleakness that could crumble into out-and-out devastation, but doesn’t. Restraint is Loathe’s greatest asset on here, and when A Stranger To You does click and reveal itself as something brilliant, that’s why.
Because, yeah—it takes a while to sink in and appreciate, but this is really something. Loathe have never felt more like their own entity than they do here, entirely unpredictable and confident in how they handle it. There’s a very premium feel to A Stranger To You, not unlike the Deftones albums that are so often in the same conversation. That alone should say plenty; it’s a phenomenon in metal that’s oft strived for and paid lip service to, but rarely achieved. It’s the fact that Loathe go above and beyond that’s even more impressive, as a song like Gifted Every Strength shows in its disregard for cogent form while still managing to work. Add in Kadeem France’s voice that’s an extra axis of boundless diversity and creativity in itself, and Loathe’s ability to floor hits a whole new level.
The perseverance needed to get to that point is well worth it in the end. A Stranger To You feels like, with a few more years to gestate and percolate, it could be one of those tentpole albums in UK heavy music. I Let It In And It Took Everything already was, arguably, but something like this? It’s easier to picture whole swathes of new bands trying to exactly replicate what Loathe are doing here and failing. There’s a nous needed in order to get this right that only comes with time and painstaking practice, and it’s been utterly nailed here. A difficult, unwelcoming and uncompromising album that, if / when you get on its level, is so worth it.
For fans of: Deftones, Fleshwater, Thornhill
‘A Stranger To You’ by Loathe is out now on Sharptone Records.
Words by Luke Nuttall
