News
Loathe announce A Stranger To You album release show in hometown of Liverpool
Scouse fans rejoice - Loathe are celebrating the release of their long-awaited album A Stranger To You in Liverpool on the day it comes out...
Navigation menu for Kerrang!
The Cover Story
Loathe: “Art takes time, and artists should be allowed to take as long as they need”
Few albums of the modern age have been as anticipated and long-waited-for as Loathe's third full-length. Six years since I Let It In... made them one of the world's hottest metal bands, Kadeem France and Erik Bickerstaffe take us inside the making of A Stranger To You.
- Words:
- Photography:
Erik Bickerstaffe has a cache of buzzwords he’s found himself returning to as of late. ‘Extraordinary’ is top of the list. ‘Otherworldly’ is up there, too. ‘Cosmic.’ ‘Supernatural.’ ‘Divine.’ They’re heavy-duty adjectives, he knows. But it takes such terminology to express both the sound of Loathe’s daring new music and the increasingly globe-trotting, mind-expanding reality of being in the band.
“People have that saying, ‘Last night was like a movie!’” the guitarist grins. “But our whole life is like a movie, at the moment. So much of what we do is extraordinary. So many experiences are insane. We did our first-ever Australian headline tour with Static Dress last month and pretty much everyone on the road with us has, at one point or another, recorded music in my shed. We’d gone from St Helens’ Thatto Heath around the world to play 2,000 people at the Melbourne Forum!”
Lugging sackfuls of well-worn clothes into a busy laundromat in the west of France this afternoon, a few hours before stage time at a sun-scorched Hellfest, it’s not all Hollywood high drama. But as Erik and frontman Kadeem France invite us to plug in and hit ‘play’ on long-overdue third album proper A Stranger To You, the onslaught of colour, ideas and attitude truly is out of this world.
Last time Loathe were on the cover of Kerrang! in May 2025, it felt like the album was imminent.
“It wasn’t done,” Erik shrugs, simply. “To be brutally honest, it just wasn’t complete.”
Life got in the way, they explained of the five-and-a-half-year delay up to that interview around the release of massive advance single, Gifted Every Strength. And it got in the way again and again.
“It’s been a long time since this band and the wider world has had a conversation,” says Erik as he unpacks A Stranger To You’s characteristically abstract album title. Loathe and their fanbase may not quite have become strangers, but distance has opened. “There’s a lot of catching up that needs to be done. It’s over six years since I Let It In... was released. And we were writing some of those songs two years prior to that. Nearly a decade later, I’m a completely different person. Everyone in this band is. ASTY is our updated résumé. It’s about getting reacquainted. It’s old friends coming back to each other.”
Previously, Loathe dealt in complex, interlinked concepts rooted in the shadowy subconscious mind: existential anxiety, suppressed trauma, self-loathing. But as Erik, Kadeem, bassist Feisal El-Khazragi and drummer Sean Radcliffe have been whipped into a storm of success, songwriting has become less about agonising self-analysis than capturing the band’s exceptional everyday.
“Is A Stranger To You as emotionally heavy as I Let It In...?” Kadeem ponders. “Maybe it’s not as intense as [that album’s dissections of personal trauma] or stories about [reconnecting with my absent] dad. But there are a lot of emotionally heavy parts. This record is shaped by personal growth, with all the trials and tribulations that come with that. There’s pressure, too, to meet the high expectations that come with our success, that’s seeped right into this music.”
Indeed, Kadeem has a different, darker take on the title. Rather than a distance with fans that needs to be closed, he points to the separation between artists and their patrons that should be respected, and how people invading that space can exacerbate an already stressful situation.
“People can feel entitled to your life when you’re in a band,” the singer sighs. “I have so much love for the listeners who support our music, but at the end of the day we are strangers to them. Not to harp on too much about the internet, but people on there can feel very entitled to your personal life without knowing the ins and outs. Now that the door is open and people are peeping in, it has gotten harder and harder to maintain tunnel vision and not let that stuff affect what we’re doing.”
“This record is shaped by personal growth, with all the trials and tribulations that come with that”
There is plenty of positive discourse around Loathe, online. The ‘LOATHE (Loafposting)’ group on Facebook, for instance, is mostly a good natured mix of memes and hardcore fans nerding out. But while a mocked-up news story announcing ‘METAL BAND LOATHE HAVE JUST ANNOUNCED... ABSOLUTELY NOTHING’ might make observers smirk, it’s the sort of thing that weighs on a band.
“I think it’s amazing that people are so passionate about our music that they’ve built their own community around it and it’s taken on a life of its own,” Kadeem continues. “That’s so cool. But it’s a slippery slope. You can check out one thing, then end up down a rabbit hole. I use Reddit now and again. I’ll go on there to look up something else, then I’ll see a post about Loathe and click on it to find out what people are saying. Then, for days afterwards, I’ll get notifications on all things Loathe, people’s reactions to what we’ve posted on social media, all that stuff.
“It’s gotten so bad in the past that I’ve had to delete the app. Around two years ago, when the album was almost done but not quite there yet, I’d already be feeling pressure, then I’d look at my phone and there would be someone asking, ‘What’s going on with the Loathe album?!’ It’s just not what you want to see!
“And it is a lot of pressure. The stakes are higher this time round. I’m 30 years old now. I don’t have anything else. I don’t want anything else. When you’ve put your life into a project like this, the fact that everything could go wrong in the course of a single day becomes something of which you’re very aware of. Of course, I have faith in this music. But there’s always that ‘What if?’ I was in my early 20s the last time we made an album. Everything is different now. Sean is married. Feisal is married with two kids. We’re adults. This isn’t just a hobby at this point. It’s our whole lives.”
“What’s the animal that buries its head in the sand?” asks Erik, scratching his head.
Er, an Ostrich?
“That’s the one! We go from being ostriches to being peacocks over the course of this album.”
It’s a hell of a metaphor. Stripping away the feathers, however, it all comes down to how Loathe’s coming-to-terms with themselves was the ultimate force that shaped A Stranger To You.
Looking back over their six-and-a-bit-year journey, neither Erik nor Kadeem can easily pick out individual moments. Gear nerd Erik has oddly lucid memories of Feisal working a Digitech Whammy pedal with his hand for the unique sound of Gifted Every Strength, and of laying down guitars for the album’s other advance single Revenant in the back of a bandwagon speeding down the highway in some empty desert in America. Kadeem recalls dozens of instances showing close friends their work, gratefully absorbing that affirmation after having left fans waiting for so long.
Thankfully, the 14 tracks of ASTY tell a captivating story in and of themselves. A sophisticated construction of finely balanced emotions and complex moving parts, it exists unmistakably within the Loathe universe. But as the record shifts, in Erik’s words, from “negative introspection and imposter syndrome” to “joy, pride and excitement”, they are exploring uncharted new territory.
Held up alongside the gloomy, internalised soundscapes of I Let It In..., for instance – and 2021’s instrumental companion piece The Things They Believe – it feels more expansive, ambitious and optimistic, from the juddering, house-inflected uncertainty of first track proper Block Of Flats to the towering post-rock of central highlight The Way it Breaks.
The progression here is weirdly reminiscent of how director Ari Aster segued from the cult claustrophobia of Hereditary to the bright open spaces of Midsommar without sacrificing an ounce of twisted creativity or captivating weirdness. Kadeem smiles at this comparison. Really, though, fans will only know A Stranger To You when they sit down to listen for themselves.
“It’s about that journey we’ve been through, how things have grown, how we’ve grown as people, the love that people have shown for our music,” the singer nods, warmly. “It’s about trying new things, stepping into different styles, embracing them. At first it’s scary. It’s easy to second-guess yourself. But if I Let It In... opened doors for us creatively, this is us running through them!”
“I Let It In... opened doors for us creatively, and this is us running through them!”
Loathe’s love of sounds from outside the world of rock and metal is hardly a secret, but the range of influence now on show is startling. Pressed on how deep inspiration runs, Kadeem namechecks acts from neo-soul stars D’Angelo and Eryka Badu to genre-hopping jazz pianist Robert Glasper.
“I showed one of my friends the song Fangs,” he laughs. “They were like, ‘This is how it would sound if [London smooth jazz icons] Sade were a metal band!’ From jazz to hip-hop to electronic, we’re such big fans of drawing from outside metal and finding space for them in a heavy sound.”
Playing live almost constantly since 2021 emboldened that mindset, too. Seeing people respond physically to their organic song-structures and shapeshifting atmospherics is reflected back throughout ASTY, from the increased deployment of Sean’s body-moving beats – not to mention the hardcore EDM outro on new mosh anthem Gemini – to a renewed emphasis on light/dark or soft/heavy dynamics and palpable sonic textures.
“At this point we’ve been doing Loathe for longer than we haven’t,” nods Erik. “What happens when we play live almost subliminally seeps into the songwriting. It comes back to having this be as human as possible. That’s a big part of what’s lacking in modern music where everything has been programmed or computerised. Nothing here is computer-generated. We could never release an album of 10 lab-modified ‘singles’. That’s not the way we do it. That’s just not our band.”
“It’s always been a big part of our creative vision how what we create translates onstage,” adds Kadeem. “We’ll write a riff and start talking about how the stage lighting will look. We’re always giving each other goosebumps going, like, ‘Yo, imagine what it’ll be like when this bit kicks in live!’”
Nothing has been more vital to Loathe’s development as a collective, though, than communication.
“It’s about how you choose to communicate, or how you choose to receive communication,” Erik explains. “We share a common goal in where we wanna go and what we wanna do, but in the past, in our infancy as a group, we allowed our emotions to take the wheel. Things became heated. We have arguments, as any creative group of people do. We have disagreements We have falling-outs. But on this album, we’ve been in control of everything, from every sample of music to every pixel of artwork. We’ve had to learn to get a handle on things where we can pick our battles on what’s really worth quarrelling over and to have discussions without having full-blown arguments.”
Erik rejects the idea that he was ever Loathe’s ‘mastermind’ or any kind of ‘bandleader’, but as the kind of creative who struggled to take more than six hours away from the album process for the past six years, he struggled as much as anybody to relinquish control. Ultimately, he’s glad he did.
“It’s a slow burn,” he smiles. “It’s like a diet. You don’t really notice the effects until other people start pointing them out. It’s not valuable at all to have a stranglehold on certain things. These are my brothers who I’m inspired by every day and respect more than anyone else on Earth. It’s just been a gradual process of all of us moving towards the same thing at the same time. That democratic approach might open up the potential for delays. But what’s way more important than hitting a deadline is getting to where the four of us are equally proud of what we’ve made.
“And, sure, there is still individual creative input, but now it’s more a handshake than a headbutt.”
By the time A Stranger To You drops on July 17 it will have been 2,351 days since the release of I Let It In And It Took Everything. That’s longer than the span from 1999’s Slipknot to 2004’s Vol. 3: The Subliminal Verses, longer even than it took Deftones to get from Around The Fur to 2003’s self-titled masterpiece. Rather than dwelling on the prolonged gestation of this album, Loathe are focused on the road ahead. The anticipation is almost over. It’s time to deliver – on their terms.
“Adele does this thing where she just drops a record when she feels like it,” says Erik, rolling his shoulders with unmasked admiration. “She releases the album, tours it, then goes away again for however long it is until she feels like coming back. I think it’s beneficial for people to be reminded that art takes time and artists should be allowed to take as long as they need to be happy with what they’ve made. That’s how you know when something authentic and correct is being put out into the world rather than something with ulterior motives or without real care and passion put into it.
“And sometimes scarcity builds anticipation. The time between releases can be an opportunity for people to really build a connection to the band, to build their own relationships with the music.”
“The time between releases can be an opportunity for people to really build a connection to the band”
Undeniably, still, where Loathe were on the crest of a wave in early-2020, trailblazing a sound that would define heavy music for the early part of the decade, the time away has seen them leapfrogged by bands jumping into a space that they helped open up, from globe-straddling giants Sleep Token and Bad Omens to young guns like Thornhill and Dayseeker. It might be argued, even, that perhaps Deftones themselves, whose frontman Chino Moreno famously tweeted Loathe’s 2020 single Two-Way Mirror, owe at least a little bit of their all-conquering resurgence to a groundswell started by these fervent devotees.
“I don’t necessarily think about it in those terms,” reasons Erik, “because we’re not striving to be in the same space as anyone else. From the beginning, what we’ve done is purely for ourselves. At the same time, I do think it’s amazing that people cite us as an influence. That never goes unappreciated. And there’s always been that calling card: ‘If you’re a like minded artist, into the same stuff as us, let’s be friends!’ Over the past six years, that’s turned out to be a lot of people.”
Fans already know about the appearance from NOWHERE2RUN’s Jami Morgan and Eric ‘Shade’ Balderose on Revenant. Repaying Loathe’s work on Ant In The Afterbirth, it’s devastating stuff.
“Code Orange are one of our favourite bands of all time,” enthuses Kadeem, still struggling to suppress his excitement. “If you could go back to when we were working on [2017 debut] The Cold Sun to tell us one day we’d have Shade doing effects and Jami singing on a song, we wouldn’t believe you.”
Elsewhere, New Zealand-born soul and jazz singer-songwriter Jordan Rakei lays vocals on The Ladder and classically trained guitarist Mansur Brown adds a dreamy solo to The Way It Breaks.
Having been the photographer on Loathe’s 2018 tour, there’s another full-circle moment as Olli Appleyard of Static Dress joins in on Block Of Flats.
“Both our bands are at a point in our careers where it feels like we’re about to ‘do it’,” reflects Kadeem. “Is there any competition there? We’ve never really seen it that way. We’re more like close friends. If anything, we inspire each other!”
No guest is more key than old friend bucki sugar (aka Marawan Abdelmola) who serves as the album’s ‘narrator’, rhyming a hazy hip-hop voiceover on opener Entrance, and interlude Athena.
“bucki is one of our best friends,” laughs Erik. “Believe it or not, we met when we were, like, 13 on [now-defunct video chat site] Omegle. He came over from the States and stayed with us. Me and Kadeem went over to him. He was in the studio when we were making The Cold Sun and featured on the song Loathe. He drove on our first-ever U.S. tour. More than another musician, he’s family.”
“Some people in the band were sceptical,” Kadeem basks in the hard-won vindication. “There’s a fine line in ‘trying to be hip hop’ where you can be cringe. But bucki’s execution was just perfect!”
Loathe’s hot streak of making exactly the right sounds in exactly the right place at exactly the right time shows no sign of slowing down. Admitting that he had no idea whether Loathe would be accepted by the hardcore community when they first showed up at Outbreak Fest in 2022, Kadeem is pumped to be back in Manchester this Saturday for their fourth appearance at the mosh Mecca, welcoming Feisal’s back from paternity leave. Erik, meanwhile, is aiming to make July 17’s album launch at the 1970-cap Liverpool Olympia the greatest show that Loathe have ever played.
Beyond that, could Loathe finally become the crossover superstars they’ve been threatening to? Could songs this unapologetically weird, wicked and unwieldy somehow crack rock’s mainstream?
“It’s hard to say,” Erik reckons. “But I believe in our music. There’s a wave happening where people are appreciative of interesting music. And, if it’s anything, I hope that Loathe’s music is interesting.”
Kadeem, meanwhile, signs-off with tongue partially in cheek and a cheeky smile.
“I don’t know if I could handle ‘going mainstream,” he says, shaking his head. “I’m just about handling this right now!”
A Stranger To You is released on July 17 via SharpTone. Loathe play Outbreak Manchester on June 27 and a one-off album release show at the Liverpool Olympia on July 17.
Check out more:
Related Content
