“Cleanse my soul and let the pain subside.”
To say this tour has been long awaited is an understatement. Scratch that – absolutely everything ‘Loathe‘ is long awaited. We weren’t around to review it in 2020, but Boolin Tunes might not exist without I Let It In And Took Everything. Since its release, modern heavy music hasn’t sounded the same, even as Bass VI guitars and Meshuggah-meets-Deftones influences have saturated the scene. Nobody’s done it better, and everyone from Spiritbox, Knocked Loose, and even Sleep Token owe much of their modern production to the breath of fresh air that Loathe have breathed into the genre. To finally get our headline tour across the UK, after one such tour was cancelled in 2022 (still not over it), feels right.
Words by Dobbin T, photography by Asha Sitarz – contact Asha prior to an image use.
Love Is Noise
Incredibly early doors meant this reviewer couldn’t catch Love Is Noise, though we can confirm they’re electric live from prior experience. Everyone we chatted to said they did a perfect job of warming up the crowd, starting moshes and crowd-surfs. They are a fantastic choice as a Loathe opener as they are so well positioned within modern metalcore with their bright, summery sound; To Live In A Different Way is an album that’s not to be missed.
Zetra
Zetra have been rinsing the world with tour after tour, from headlines to prized support slots such as HEALTH, Zeal & Ardor, Godflesh, and perhaps most significantly for their gothic styling, Creeper and Ville Valo. Between these appearances and many UK festivals, most of the audience will have made their mind up about the band, one way or the other. This writer is firmly in camp Zetra, loving their glassy atmospheres, soft vocals, and charmingly dated synths. It would be wrong to call them a shoo-in for this particular audience – tonight they brought the line up breadth and breathing room, rather than even more heaviness. (Perhaps the real reason they’re such a good fit with Loathe is that both bands have proudly released longform ambient albums directly alongside their ‘business as usual’ records, joining a club that contains choice acts like Blood Incantation, REZN, and Wolves in the Throne Room. We love to see it.)
To my ears, Zetra sounded even better than their last Electric Brixton performance, especially vocally, with Jordan really impressing from his keyboard stand. For this audience they stuck to the slightly beefier material from last year’s self-titled album, only playing their Kittie cover from the new EP Believe. Their stage has been updated once again with an incredible ‘portal’ right out of Labyrinth, or possibly a theme park ride queue; the kitschy charm is essential. Its screen flickered between cold steel lightning and a disembodied mask during closer “The Mirror” to perfectly align with the lyrics. “Call Of The Void” was their throwback to their early Bandcamp synth days, an inclusion that will send me diving into their back catalogue for more. My only complaint was not bringing a harsh vocalist on for “Starfall”, whose original performance by Serena Cherry of Svalbard gives the track an especially powerful quality. Zetra shone through as so much more than tonight’s variety act, with dedicated fans sending lots of energy, and even the sceptics I spoke to didn’t find them to be a bore. If the marketing around the latest Stranger Things series has bottomed out your stocks in 80s nostalgia, top up with Zetra – they’re infinitely cooler.
Loathe
Setting the mood with burning incense and the incredible aura of AFIA Oil on loop, Loathe began their set with “Gifted Every Strength”, their incredibly tantalising single from 2025. Throwing every part of Loathe’s sound in, with perfect precision, power, soundscaping and groove, where else could they really have begun? In terms of content, it could be the perfect time to see Loathe, as we heard almost every song from I Let It In And Took Everything alongside choice deep cuts from their early EPs. As not a single one of these songs feels worth retiring yet, upcoming headline sets will have to make tough choices for omissions.
A mainstay of the Loathe experience will always be variety. Each song shifted the focus, far beyond beatdown-ballad-beatdown-ballad, which a more pop metal-oriented act would default to. When it was heavy, my goodness, it was – the likes of “Aggressive Evolution” and “Broken Vision Rhythm” gave way to furious crowd motion. Much like the experience of seeing Knocked Loose in the modern day, the volume of audience members means there wasn’t space to throw the shapes that these riffs truly deserve (Loathe, surprise set or not, come and play Outbreak anytime). As long as you don’t mind a sweaty push pit, the pit experience was brilliant. Feeling the crowd react, not just to the big moments, but to the small ones too, created a sense of camaraderie – the whole crowd anticipates and feels all the Loathe-y microadjustments that make me want to move.
The lighter moments hit their extremes, too, with dedicated synth duets and pieces like “Two-Way Mirror” and “A Sad Cartoon”. The latter was a real highlight, with Erik Bickerstaffe commanding the mic and giving an incredible vocal performance. Followed by a slice of The Things They Believe, a refreshed Kadeem France returned to the stage for the brutal “Heavy is the Head That Falls with the Weight of a Thousand Thoughts” – a brilliant demonstration of the band’s breadth.
Besides “Gifted Every Strength” and the unreleased “Revenant”, the earlier cuts included The Cold Sun’s “Dance on My Skin” and “Babylon…”. Looking back, their 2017 work was fundamental to the band, yet they hadn’t quite come into their own, still crafting that certain je ne djent quoi. These particular tracks remain the most important, with “Dance on My Skin” demonstrating that they’ve had mastery over The Riff since their early days. “Babylon…” felt contemplative and interstellar, the perfect lead into the set closer “I Let It in and It Took Everything” which featured a harsh vocal from Love is Noise. The remaining tracks were “Dimorphous Display” and “White Hot”, yet more quality from the back catalogue that Loathe might never play again.
They encored with two perhaps inevitable tracks, the flashlights-on ballad “Is It Really You?” and pitstarter “Gored”, and finished at a tidy hour, pre-10pm. Seeing so many friends and fanatics at the show injected a sense of community that will last a long time. We are all still so gratified and perplexed by Loathe’s music and performances after all these years. And, surely, the next chapter is finally about to begin…
