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Shoved to the Sidelines: Loathe @ History

Mosh pit

I woke up on September 20th hungover and nearly forgot I had tickets to see Loathe that night. Everything that day felt blurred around the edges, and the Liverpool band seemed to exist somewhere in that same blur. They’ve spent their career refusing to settle into a single genre, and at a live show, that refusal becomes disorienting. Their foundation is djent, a style of metal built on distorted, down-tuned guitars and palm-muted chugging you feel in your chest as much as your ears. Pulling against that is shoegaze: the hazy, reverb-soaked offshoot of 1980s alternative rock, where vocals dissolve into the guitars until you can’t tell them apart. Vocalist Kadeem France moves between those two worlds, from death growls to soaring, emotional belts that feel brutal one moment and tender the next. Call it shoegaze-metal if you need a label, but the music doesn’t fit neatly under one.

The band broke through in 2020 with their sophomore album I Let It In and It Took Everything. Then they went quiet for years, long enough that fans started treating a third album as a rumour. A Stranger to You arrived on July 17, 2026. Critics hailed it as one of the most original records of the year. To me, it’s the band’s most fully realized blend of shoegaze and metal yet. After a summer of European festivals, Loathe brought the new material across the Atlantic.

As it turns out, music that swings between violence and dreaminess is ideal for a mosh pit.

By the time I got to History, I had missed both openers. I squeezed through the crowd toward the pit just as the floor erupted into something closer to a brawl than a concert: heads whipping, bodies colliding, nobody standing still. For the uninitiated, moshing is a staple of heavy music shows, a kind of dance in which people slam into each other on purpose.

I’d been in mosh pits before, so I knew what waited inside: body odour, elbows, strangers pressed far too close. Metal crowds tend to be dominated by men, and this one was no exception, a churning mass of big, sweaty guys in black band tees. Standing at the edge, I could feel my heart racing a little faster than the music. But I also knew what was on the other side of that nervousness. For all its chaos, the pit is something close to sacred, a release that only comes from surrendering to the music together.

I was hemmed in by broad backs rising and falling, too tall to see over. Somewhere beyond them was France, his growls cutting straight through. The crowd heaved with each one. I wanted in, so I pushed my way into the pit.

Inside, I shoved whatever was closest. Bodies crushed against my chest until I could hardly breathe, and an elbow clipped the side of my head. That’s the strange thing about a pit: the violence depends on trust. When someone goes down, the crowd clears a space and lifts them back up, so your body learns to read every shove as an invitation rather than an attack.

The bodies moved like waves, crashing so hard I couldn’t hold my ground, throwing me back toward shore again and again. I kept getting spat out and fighting my way back in. I braced myself every time, but I couldn’t push hard enough against men twice my size. I kept washing up at the edges.

Catching my breath on the sidelines, I saw the men in the middle crash and rebound off one another like the floor belonged to them. All I could do was watch.

Partway through the set, a few men ran along the inside of the pit, driving everyone back until the crowd parted like a sea, a wide stretch of empty floor between us. This is what Loathe’s songs are built for: the held breath of a quiet passage, then the drop. France growled, and both sides crashed together. Bodies toppled into bodies, and the whole floor surged. I pushed forward with my hands out in front of me until the current took my feet. A pair of arms caught me before I went under.

Then the current changed. The men stopped throwing their weight into me the way they threw it into each other. They moved around me, then past me, then away from me, until the tide had carried me back to shore. Only then did I notice how many women were already standing there. A pit only moves because every body in it pushes against every other. Once the men stopped pushing against me, I wasn’t part of the water anymore.

I’d seen this happen at other metal shows. The guys get familiar with each other, and an inner circle forms within the pit. Some of them seem genuinely surprised to find a woman in there. Others assume you can’t hold your own, or that you don’t know what you’re doing, and they hesitate to push you at all. That hesitation keeps you out more effectively than being pushed and shoved.

A girl beside me kept glancing between me and the pit. I leaned in and yelled over the music, “There aren’t many women in there!”

She grinned. “Then we have to go in ourselves!”

She charged, and I charged after her. Holding hands and headbanging to the drums, we shoved through the sweaty men, carving our own path until we were part of the water again.

Near the end of the set, Loathe played “Is It Really You?,” their most popular song and, in my opinion, their most shoegaze. France asked everyone to turn on their phone lights, and the room became a field of small, swaying stars. For four minutes, the whole crowd breathed together as the sweat cooled on our skin under the cold rush of History’s AC. After an hour of collisions, the band had let the room exhale.

On the music alone, Loathe delivered. At least, I think they did. I couldn’t tell you which song played when, even though I know every one of them by heart. When you’re in the pit trying to keep your head above the water, you don’t keep track of what’s playing. You just react to it.

What I’ll remember most is the push and pull of being a woman in that crowd. All I wanted was what everyone else had: to get shoved around, knocked over, and lifted back up. Instead, I kept getting gently sorted out of it by men who had already decided who belonged.

I get it. Some of the men at Loathe were twice the size of the women. Sometimes my own body did the sorting, because it couldn’t withstand a six-foot man with a beer belly barreling into it. But it’s frustrating to want something with your whole body and have that same body keep giving out on you.

Still, the girl beside me was right. Nobody is going to hand you a place in the pit. You have to take it. Moshing is an escape from everything you’re carrying, even a morning hangover. Everyone deserves a space to drown it all out, and the people who get knocked over for wanting in need it most.