Coming off the back of a breakout 2025 that saw them hit stages at the likes of 2000 Trees, ArcTanGent and Portals festivals, they’ve carried that momentum into 2026 with a sold-out support run alongside heavy-hitters The Callous Daoboys. For a band still in its relative infancy and only now delivering a debut album, Love Rarely already feel remarkably self-assured, as though they’ve skipped a few of the tentative early steps most bands rely on to get their feet under them. There’s a sense, too, that this is a band arriving with intent rather than simply testing the waters. From the outset, Love Rarely present themselves with the kind of confidence that comes from knowing who you are and what you’ve been wanting to say.
The emotional weight of the writing on Pain Travels is undeniable; there’s a deep well of barely contained rage on tracks like ‘Through Families’ and ‘Haunted’, as Courtney Levitt stares down generational trauma and familial rupture with an unflinching gaze. These are not songs that hide meaning within complex metaphors or lyrical vagueness. Lines land plainly, often brutally, and that directness is one of the record’s greatest strengths. It’s matched by an excoriating vocal delivery that cuts through the band’s dense, often restless arrangements. The counterweight to the harsh vocals is skilfully incorporated cleans that build depth and emotional range into the sound. Elsewhere, songs like ‘Severed’ and ‘Dormant’ widen the lens, touching on self-contempt, illness, and the long shadows cast by difficult upbringings. As heavy as that sounds, everything is handled with straightforward honesty, leaving no space for extraneous romanticism.
Musically, Love Rarely operate in a space that feels both intricate and volatile, pulling from math rock, emo, and hardcore without ever settling too comfortably into one lane. Twisting guitar lines knot and unravel over an elastic rhythm section, while sudden bursts of intensity give way to moments of fragile restraint. Yet there are times when the penchant for restless basslines and math-rock intricacy threatens to dampen or even defuse that intensity, with the constant motion and off-kilter bounce slightly undercutting the emotional punch. It’s a minor imbalance, but one that’s hard to shake on a record with its sights so firmly fixed on diaristic realness. When the sweet spot is struck, like on lead single and bona fide anthem ‘Will’, the results are palpable, with catharsis, tenderness, and complexity moving in dazzling unison.
Written and pieced together across bedrooms and makeshift recording setups, Pain Travels carries a real sense of closeness, with five musicians meticulously shaping something deeply personal from separate corners before pulling it into a cohesive whole. That fragmented process feeds directly into the album’s core themes, where individual experiences of trauma, isolation, and familial burden are drawn together into something communal and, at times, quietly hopeful. There’s a tangible DIY spirit here, not just in the production, which was deftly handled by guitarist Lew Taylor, but also in the way all the elements of the record feel carefully and patiently assembled. Perhaps this is why the close-to-the-bone openness of the album never comes off as gratuitous. Instead, it reads as an attempt to process a heavy cargo of lived experience and, ultimately, to move forward.
With Pain Travels, Love Rarely have produced a layered, heartfelt record that’s bristling with life. It’s messy in places, but so are the lives we all lead. Pain travels far and wide, and so too does this kind of passion and the love that emanates from it.