Six years is a long time to wait, but within the first few minutes it’s obvious that this record was made by a band who spent that time carefully and purposefully working out how to pull off an extraordinarily high quality album. Loathe have always been genre shapeshifters, but nothing will prepare you for the breadth of styles on A Stranger To You. Across its fifty five minutes this record covers as much ground as a Mr. Bungle record or Avenged Sevenfold’s Life Is But A Dream..., but it never hints at silliness and never feels ridiculous.

Mad in terms of its stylistic range and completely serious in its execution, this is a combination that should be impossible to achieve. The album opens with a deliberate slow burn with two minutes of spoken word over piano before Block Of Flats enters with a trebly, heavily processed guitar that suspends itself in space before the band finally crashes in with a huge stomping riff dropping back out for the gothic verses and crashing back into enormously violent choruses, with the vocals pushed to ragged extremes. Fortress Down brings more groove and Gemini is a filthy stomper with a hard techno breakdown that comes out of nowhere. Harder To Pretend is the closest thing to a traditional alternative metal single before employing a vocoder and disco guitar. Revenant goes back to crushingly violent industrial breakdowns with lyrics that are completely indecipherable, and The Way It Breaks is tender slow motion shoegaze that’s the polar opposite. Meet My Maker has the catchiest chorus on the album, anguished with an industrial tinge that’s also quite radio friendly. Fangs alternates between creeping evil and uplifting chords, and then The Ladder could appear on a Take That record it’s so velvety and soothing. A Stranger To You is a hell of an experiment to attempt, and Loathe pull it off as an ambitious and profound accomplishment.