The Liverpool band Loathe reached maturity with disconcerting speed. Formed in the mid-2010s, it took only two albums for them to establish themselves as one of the most singular propositions in British metal. I Let It in and It Took Everything is one of those records that redefine the contours of a genre: a work in which the most violent metalcore embraces the cottony softness of shoegaze, without ever choosing a side.
The critics were not fooled: an 86 average across ten reviews, and cult-album status acquired almost instantly. They rightly hail a writing of rare ambition and a production of extraordinary depth, able to make the wall of saturated guitars coexist with the ethereal layers inherited from Deftones — an explicit, acknowledged reference.
The record advances by striking contrasts. Detonations of djent and raw screams give way to ambient stretches of fragile beauty, where the voice becomes a suspended murmur. This permanent dialectic between fury and appeasement, between chaos and contemplation, lends the whole a rare emotional charge, almost cinematic in its breadth.
One might reproach the band for a debt sometimes too visible to their models, foremost among them Deftones, whose very vocal inflections Loathe take up. The filiation is owned, but it now and then bridles an identity that asked only to break free. A detail, at bottom, so far does the emotion prevail over the question of strict originality.
Verdict: 8.5/10. An enveloping, harrowing record proving that heaviness can be an art of nuance. One of the major landmarks of its decade’s metal.
