Love Rarely: The Art of Emotional Impact
LOVE RARELY has its moments. Sometimes imperfect, fleeting, or tender, for Dan Dewsnap, it’s those infrequent occasions when he decides to listen to album closer Through Families. Letting it linger, he always likes to leave a sizeable gap afterwards, and takes some time for himself to feel the silence. “It’s weird, because I never thought I’d feel emotional listening to one of our own songs,” he begins truthfully. “When I wrote it, it all came out at once. I didn’t touch it for like a year. The way the guitar parts flow in and out, it just feels right.”
Working with vocalist and partner Courtney Levitt on the lyrics, Dan wanted to speak from personal experience. Centring the song around an estranged family member who struggled with alcoholism, it cuts hard with cascading guitar parts and cauterising screams. For Courtney, who also joins Distorted Sound on Zoom with Dan a few days before the release of their debut album Pain Travels, the track has become one of the most authentic on their debut album. “I think it gets across the things that we’ve been through to the absolute deepest level. It’s not like skirting around anything. It’s like, this is exactly how much I hurt, and you’re going to feel it and hear it.”
It’s true – for LOVE RARELY, pain certainly does travel, but ultimately this was a search for meaningful connection. With Dan and guitarist Lew Taylor writing the guitar parts for the record entirely isolated, the band would then all come together to develop and later record in makeshift spare room studios. Navigating the process with a need for authenticity, they made room for imperfection, picking up the audio from children playing in the street outside.
The record gleams with their Leeds hometown. Whilst often described as a scattergun of genres – ranging from emo, mathcore, post-hardcore, and even the transatlantic answer to swancore – LOVE RARELY incorporate the city’s signature hardcore elements for a grittier sound. No strangers to the scene, Courtney reminisces about going to gigs and playing heavy shows at the iconic Boom venue as teenagers over ten years ago. Watching bands like COUNTERPARTS and DEFEATER have been early influences on the LOVE RARELY sound. ”If you want to go and watch traditional hardcore, you want to jump around the room and bang your head. If you want to go watch emotional hardcore like DEFEATER, you stand there with a pit in your stomach. You still get to bang your head at the same time. I love to double up on it.”
“It’s sort of upsetting that as a local band, you can’t play it more. You’ve got to sort of space it out so it’s more impactful when you play.” When the call came from Liverpool post-hardcore mob LOATHE to play Leeds Warehouse, selling out within 15 minutes, Courtney cites it as one of the best shows she’s ever played, setting the motion for other opportunities, including a tour with SWEET PILL last summer, and more recently the UK supporting slot with THE CALLOUS DAOBOYS and KNIVES. Including a date at the infamous Key Club, the band didn’t realise how special the situation was until getting off tour. “As soon as we sort of melded in, everyone just got on so well. And it just, it just felt amazing.”
Unmistakably, in anticipation of the release of Pain Travels, Courtney and Dan feel nervous and at times out of depth, not realising that their debut would eventually amount to the heights it has. In all of this chaos, on their album release week, it can be normal to feel uneasy, but their biggest hope is that sharing their story can resonate with others.
However, it will be a while before LOVE RARELY feels the full impact of Pain Travels. So much of the work they’ve put in over the last year hasn’t sunk in yet, as a lot of the album – outside of Mould, Whiplash, Disappear and Severed – will be played for the first time at their release show in early May. Courtney speaks on behalf of the band about their decision to finish with Through Families. “Every time you finish a show, you always feel an overwhelming feeling. When all the crowds like doing the most because it’s finished. I think the more emotional ones are probably going to be when we feel it.” With festival appearances on the horizon, namely 2000trees, Truck Festival and Burn It Down, this is just the beginning. “I can’t wait till all the album songs are sort of in rotation live.”
Whilst it seems like things are moving fast for LOVE RARELY, since their first release in 2022, Dan explains that it’s taken over a decade of hard work to define themselves. In some ways, all the emotions when writing Pain Travels have been leading up to this moment. “We spent, like the majority, probably 90 plus per cent, of our music career, pointing songs out to no one. People are paying attention. It’s wild. We’re just lapping it up. I’m trying to sort of remember every single thing that happens.”
Pain Travels is out now via Big Scary Monsters. View this interview, alongside dozens of other killer bands, in glorious print magazine fashion in DS129 here.
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