Metal Is Dead
Drake changed Loathe guitarist and co-vocalist Erik Bickerstaffe’s life on the 10A bus from St Helens to Liverpool. Granted, the Canadian rapper wasn’t physically there on the seat next to him as they chugged through Dovecot and Knotty Ash, but his creative spirit was.
It was 2014, and Erik was still a member of Our Imbalance, the band that acted as a precursor to Loathe. Until that point, he had been a militant metalcore fan: if it wasn’t Attack Attack! or We Came As Romans, he wasn’t interested. “I was: ‘Fuck hip hop, fuck country music, fuck Behemoth, fuck everything else,’” he says.
That bus ride upended everything. “I was like, ‘Actually, I’m bored of this Attack Attack! album, I’m going to listen to Nothing Was The Same by Drake,’” he says. “I didn’t know any of his music, didn’t care about that stuff. But the artwork interested me.”
As Erik listened to Drizzy’s 2013 high water mark, the scales fell from his eyes. There was more to life than crabcore and sideswept fringes. In fact, there was a whole world out there that he’d shut himself off from.
That literal journey was the start of a longer metaphorical one that changed the direction of Erik’s life and that of his band. Walls crumbled, boundaries dissolved and a whole new future opened up in front of them.
