Loving You Backwards, the debut album from Blood, flourishes in the subtle, the ambiguous, the shades of gray - In winter of 2021, longtime Austin residents Blood made a fresh start, using a move into a house together in Philadelphia as a chance to reorient and spend time writing music around the clock - As they wrote, the sound of the band began to shift - Blood, in the past, made huge, angry, grandiose, operatic songs - Loving You Backwards, was not that. Instead, this debut record is quieter, less reactive, but no less powerful.
As an organism, Blood circa Loving You Backwards, was a six piece. Tim O'Brien is the lyric writer, but the song writing and arrangement is a painstakingly collaborative process in which the band aims for democracy over swiftness. The record also features the band's first major work with the producer Daniel Enrique Howard, whom the band recorded with at his studio in Brooklyn. Howard helped guide Blood into this new sonic territory. It is not a bedroom project, but instead fully realized, somehow sounding both intimate like Liz Harris' Grouper feels intimate and totally vast in the way that a Talk Talk record feels vast. It's in the same universe as Ought in its earlier iterations.
The songs on Loving You Backwards exist in the realm of ballads, heart-wrenching and weird pop with a post rock sensibility. It explores, as the title implies, approaching a relationship in the reverse, dealing with your past while you try to stay in the present. Loving You Backwards is a record of ideas and big honesty, but it's also a record of genuinely pristine pop. A definitive statement from a band that is more than on the rise as truly excellent songwriters and performers.
