Wait no longer: TheBoyShadow, a new heavy venture from former Loathe guitarist Connor Sweeney, has delivered its first single. A D-beating, dynamic track dubbed “Give Me A Seam & I’ll Show You the Meaning” dropped today through Roadrunner Records, and it’s a heater.
Sweeney, who’d performed on all three Loathe LPs before departing the U.K. project in 2021, has spent the past couple of months teasing the arrival of TheBoyShadow online, beginning back in January with a candlelit clip sporting the message “waiting,” and then again yesterday (March 30th) with the announcement of the new single.
“Give Me A Seam & I’ll Show You the Meaning” begins with a Converge-ish feel of furious rhythms and depraved, noise-pressed guitar dissonance, Sweeney launching a series of monstrous shrieks above the fracas. But the song also swerves through choppy, speaker-panning production twitches, moshes itself through moments where an orchestra of guitars sound like a swarm of bees, and then a gloomy, melodic chorus seriously brings the boom.
A VHS-grainy music video, which you’ll see up above, finds Sweeney stomping and screaming across a room full of severed mannequin hands. An unidentified drummer in a golden mask is also found beating a kit pretty savagely. The geometrically frantic motif suggests what it’d be like if Gary Panter redesigned the Black Lodge.
It’s explained in a press release that Sweeney has spent the past four years fine-tuning TheBoyShadow, and that he “processed his demons” throughout that time to produce music while “surrounded by fellow artists who feel like family.”
It’s as yet unclear who all is part of TheBoyShadow’s family, but the project make its live debut next Monday (April 6th) at the Camden Assembly in London. The show also features performances from Love Letter and Held Under.