Album review: Loathe – The Things They Believe
Liverpool metallers Loathe challenge the boundaries of their musical universe with surprise instrumental offering The Things They Believe…
Words: Sam Law
Sometimes, you’ve got to play the hand you’re dealt.
A year on from the release of their astonishing second album I Let It In And It Took Everything, Liverpudlian alt.metallers Loathe should have been on the mother of all victory tours, giving their complex, cathartic sound full life in packed live arenas around the world. Instead, they’re stuck at home, frustrated by a stratospheric trajectory so cruelly cut short, and pent up more than ever having not yet truly expunged the tribulations of that record’s tortuous creation alongside their fans. Rather than dipping into defeatism, though, they’ve adopted and plumbed the aspect of their sound best suited to life in lockdown.
The Things They Believe‘ – a name borrowed from the film adaptation of
30 Days Of Night, according to the band – is a solely instrumental, sample-loaded, ambient experience, with saxophones from
The 1975’s John Waugh Sideman on two tracks and plenty of layered swirling atmos to wash over you. If anything, it’s an “escape record”; a form of dark and moody ambient escapism from our stranger-than-fiction world. For how do you sum up a year like 2020 in a few lyrics? That’s easy: you don’t. You create sounds emblematic of the day-to-day.
I dig how this album art is in-line with the design aesthetic of ‘I Let It In And It Took Everything.’