Loathe‘s long-awaited studio album “A Stranger To You” finally arrived this past July. Fans of the alternative metal outfit enduring a punishingly long wait to get to that point, with the band’s last proper full-fledged release, “I Let It In And It Took Everything“, originally arriving back in 2020. In a recently published chat with Metal Hammer, the band spoke of why it took so long to follow-up that breakout release and the perfectionism that went into it.
While some may assume the band were resting on their laurels, the band’s vocalist Kadeem France told the aforementioned publication that work on the outing was steady:
“We’ve not stopped working on this record, because we had to get it right. It’s been a cycle of writing songs, throwing them out and trying a different approach. It’s easy to shit out a half-decent song, but, if you don’t believe in it, it means nothing.”
His bandmate, vocalist/guitarist Erik Bickerstaffe agreed, stating, “I think we were conscious of not wanting to fuck this record up, so there was this extreme sense of second guessing everything.” Erik later went on to state of what the band ultimately delivered with the outing:
“I really want people to go in and process this album from start to finish. It’s like a recipe. If you just pick out the ginger and eat it on its own, you might hate it. But if you put it all together – like sushi – it changes everything. It’s the same with genres – you might think you hate a certain sound, but, once you’ve tried it as part of a bigger piece, you might love it.”
