At one point, Loathe’s third album felt like the stuff of myth. It was real, it was coming, but it seemed so distant that it could have been the figment of the imagination.

All of that is about to change. The curious thing about A Stranger To You, the Liverpool metallers’ first album in six years, is that a record as rich and as distinct as this couldn’t have been created in a confined window of time. Their evolving characters and tastes needed time to percolate, and the album’s all the better for it. Like slow-cooked food, the longer it’s in the oven, the deeper the flavours.

Bluntly, this is one of the most original albums of the year. It represents Loathe at their most unique, a swirling, shifting composite of influences from wider realms and time periods than most modern metal dares to tread. Significantly, the first lines heard once the needle is dropped on Entrance is contemplative spoken word, delivered by close friend and collaborator bucki sugar in an audacious yet beautiful swerve. Then, a warped, industrial slash of guitar cuts through to begin Block Of Flats, an explosive marvel of a track that swan-dives from light to shadow and back again before Static Dress main man Olli Appleyard runs in for a guest turn that lifts the whole song into another gear entirely.

That’s just the start on this kaleidoscope of sounds. Fortress Down jangles and undulates, Gemini clangs and chugs, and NOWHERE2RUN collaboration Revenant’s initial shimmer is quickly engulfed by a pitch-black, thrumming heaviness. There’s a clutch of surprises too, from the waltzing The Way It Breaks that just has a touch of their shoegaze mistiness of old, while Harder To Pretend has a dancefloor-friendly ripple to it. The Ladder is a vulnerable acoustic ballad that’s unlike anything that could have ever been expected from Loathe, but it still holds its place without being overshadowed.

There’s grit and there’s shades of grey but so much of this record feels like cracking open a treasure chest and finding a rainbow. There’s joy and there’s colour, nowhere more so than on the triumphant multi-part epic of Gifted Every Strength, before No Stranger To You finishes things on a note of beauty that nods to the sound of 2020’s breakthrough I Let It In And It Took Everything with an evolved, sentimental touch.

It caps off a record that’s challenging yet not impenetrable, one fans will want to devote time to, that’s also vast in its ambition, and executed to stunning effect. Maybe, from this, they’ll go on and redefine heavy music all over again.

Verdict: 5/5

For fans of: Code Orange, Moodring, Deftones

A Stranger To You is released on July 17 via SharpTone.