Let Our Enemies Beware

[I am Lono is] a prime example of the thunderous genius of their new EP "Look What You Made Me Do"... everything on it reminds you that guitar music can still be incendiary and thrilling.

- Stephen McCauley, Electric Mainline, BBC Radio Northern Ireland

We're so glad we checked this one out. This really is something exciting, I think. You know - we're looking for really exciting, really forward thinking visceral rock & roll and this band are delivering right now.

- Zane Lowe, BBC Radio One

Let Our Enemies beware are a brilliantly talented and fresh act that are sure to blow you away and leave a buzzing in your ears. Ignore them at your peril.

- Jonathan M, The Mag

Post-rock-cum-something-core bunch Let Our Enemies Beware, [who] prove that, as long as there are guitars, there will be exciting british talent to abuse them.

- Mike Kemp, Rock Sound Magazine
Eden Maine Farewell Show, The Luminaire


There is no band on this compilation more suiting to the title of “Glorious Noise” than London’s post-punk / metal masterminds Let Our Enemies Beware. The band experiment with a crushing blend of aggressive riffs, complex rhythmic structures, twisted vocal melodies, and enormous wavering post rock guitars to create post-metal that is unapologetic, artistic, engaging, and unique. Heavily distorted, generally abrasive, often strange, Let Our Enemies Beware aren’t afraid to explore the vast realms of rock with a sinister sense of humor and colossal force of noise. Their debut album Against Karate is a dark and mesmerizing trip through hypnotic beauty, bludgeoning apocalyptic bursts of noise, and genuine musical anarchy.

- Dan Goldin, Exploding In Sound

Dishing up a healthy dose of visceral post-hardcore, this Kent-based quartet have just unleashed their stunning debut album ‘Against Karate’ on Irish independent Smalltown America (home to Calories and ASIWYFA amongst many others) and we’re loving it at RS towers. Coming across like Fugazi jamming with This Will Destroy You, this is pretty intense stuff and definitely worth a ganders.

- DT, Rock Sound
‘Myspace or Yours’ Feature


Tonight one support band can certainly be touted as the next big thing; Lafaro [8] may be relatively unknown, but their set turns more than a few heads this evening as they play with genuine enthusiasm. As post-rock Kent quartet Let Our Enemies Beware take to the stage they provide a view vividly rendered from their thundering percussion, static wall of sound and sheer volume. Frontman Shareef Dahroug is wild – one instant screaming through what can only be described as a K-hole comedown of the schizoid variety, while channelling the rage of At The Drive-In. Immune to the self-stigmatising crowd in attendance resembling the amassed dead, LOEB respond with fighting musical instinct, playing tracks mostly from last year’s ‘Against Karate’. Despite their onstage mayhem, the quality and cohesiveness of this band is impossible to ignore. As LOEB finish their set by smashing up the drum-kit with their guitars, their crazed performance tonight ranks them supreme.

- Faye Lewis, Rock Sound (9/10) - Monto Water Rats, London

Clearly fans of the post-rock bludgeon/groove, LOEB keenly display their innovative influences on their collective sleeves. But seeing as half of the band’s predecessors have split up, there’s no reason to spurn their post-apocalyptic scrabblings. Amidst discomforting buzzes, lurching rhythms and towering soundscapery, they do find the time to write cohesive tunes with lovingly pleated melodies (‘Personal Space Invaders’), although you may have trouble humming the refrains; smothered, as they are, in art-punk angles ‘n’ jangles. If you’ve been searching for a band who take the instrumental strum und drang of Explosions In The Sky and put Dischord-esque squawking over the top, look no further.

- Darren Johns, Rock Sound (7/10)

Let Our Enemies Beware combine energetically unhinged post-hardcore pummelling and moody post-rock atmospherics. The excellently titled Fools! Philistines! Heretics and Whores! is perhaps the albums stand-out track, sounding not unlike a cross between Hot Snakes and ISIS, with singer Adam really losing the plot in the manner of Mike Patton channelling John Lydon.
Noise Equals Death cranks up the bands sludgier side, while Between Us And The Sun conjures up memories of Sonic Youth at their most dissonant and spectral, briefly invoking the ghost of Radiohead present before exploding into a ferociously heavy climax. Elsewhere, I’m Not Laughing, I’m Choking offers the kind of bass rumbling meltdown that Part Chimp specialise in.
Occasionally a tad on the ponderous side, on the whole Against Karate brings the pain in fine style.

– The Irish Times (7/10)

It’s not overstating things in the slightest to say that Let Our Enemies Beware are one of the most exciting rock bands in Britain. For the time being, the Kent quartet fly under the radar, but surely not for long, because once word spreads about their utterly inspired debut album Against Karate, there will be no stopping them. “The band is a cathartic thing, I suppose,” says the band’s brilliantly unhinged frontman Shareef Dahroug. “It’s shaking off the usual boredom and drudgery of everyday life by shouting at a lot of people in the dark and them, for the most part, thanking us for it.”

The band came to our attention via the good people at Smalltown America records, who got involved after spotting them playing live in London. From there, a spot on one of the label’s Public Service Announcement compilations (9 if you’re interested) and a tour with our very own And So I Watch You From Afar and LaFaro followed, and now LOEB have a rabid, slavering beast of a full-length to show for it all. This is 20 years of noisy bastard guitar music neatly distilled into 45 minutes – the mean ferocity of Shellac, the heart-bursting conviction of At The Drive-In, the creepy atmosphere of Slint and the utter fucking mayhem of …Trail Of Dead when Conrad’s in one of his moods. “Live, we are the aural equivalent of a nervous breakdown,” says Dahroug. “You can decide whether it’s any good for yourself if you don’t mind losing your hearing to find out.” Believe us, sir, we’ll take that risk.

– Chris Jones, AU Magazine

I must admit that there are days when I'm asking myself: What the hell are you doing here?! But then I come across a band like Let Our Enemies Beware and think: Gee, you gotta inform folks over here of their existence! (...)

'Let Our Enemies Beware' sounds a bit martial, and so, logically consistent. Shareef Dahroug (voc, g), Adam Elwin (g, voc), James Boast (g) and Christopher Boast (dr) are doing their very best to blow your head away on stage and during recordings. But in a more subtle way, integrating elements from metal, hard and mainly post rock, here and there reminding me of their labelmates And So I Watch You From Afar and even of a tougher variant of Faith No More - crossover at its very best. While ASIWYFA are committed to pure instrumental rock, the vocal element is an important part of LOEB's music. Therefore they're doing without a bass player, a fact I first noticed when I read the 'Who We Are'-section on MySpace. (...) It's also pure fun to read the titles of their tracks and the verbiages on their bandblog at blogspot.com. Behind all that martial acting lies not only high intelligence, but a good portion of the best English humour, too.

- Robert Wantke, sortednoise.net
Track Of the Day - October 09


Now, I know I said the other day that kids who can turn their amps up to 11 aren’t all that, but I was just being a bit dramatic. Also, these four Medway lads have in just two loud and short minutes proved me badly wrong.

Pow is the sound of road-raging grand prix driver shaking up and popping bottles of pent-up adolescent guitar rage instead of champagne. It’s a ninja-efficient relentless carpet bombing of thrash metal mannerisms. It’s Enter Shikari if they stopped mucking around with the keyboards and got on with business. It’s Anthrax with better dress sense and cooler reading habits. It’s all about the Sixties cartoon character Batfink. It’s killer.

- Neil Queen, Times Online
Single of the Week - May 08


Cloaking themselves in a squalling maelstrom of noise come Chatham renegades Let Our Enemies Beware. This debut teeters deliciously between the suffocatingly precise and moments of raw mayhem. ‘Personal Space Invaders’ is all slow release menace, the measured post-rock rhythms leading us towards yawning man-trap choruses. The corrosive ‘Fools! Philistines! Heretics and Whores!’ finds guitars chopping out serrated edge riffs as Shareef Dahroug howls like the freshly bereaved. Stirring indeed. Elsewhere, ‘Between Us And The Sun’ makes a thrilling transition from eerie atmospherics to abattoir howl, guitars slowly running amok. Even the song titles – notably ‘Noise Equals Death’ and ‘I’m Not Laughing, I’m Choking’ – are worthy of commendation. From first to last then, Against Karate is a no-holds-barred excursion into rock’s more inventive and exhilarating territories, as unrelentingly inspired as it is unforgettable.

- Francis Jones, AU Magazine (8/10)

Oh yes, this is a beauty. The first time a heard this Against Karate I was truly taken back to the time of the late and legendary John Peel. Somewhere between a set of lank fringes moaning about their bedroom wallpaper, DJ Slipmatt and his chipmunks, and something untraceable from Malawi, Peel would throw in some noisenik angst that would prick the ears and make you think ‘fuck, what was that?’ Let Our Enemies Beware are in the final surprised expletive category. Excellent. On the further listens you begin to calculate the sum of their influences, but realise with delight they far and ingeniously exceed them. My best approximation is that Let Our Enemies Beware are post-rock-metal-progressive-punk-hardcore, but I’m not sure. They can be Mogwai just as easily as they can be Fucked Up. They can do Godspeed with as little effort as they can do Faith No More. They lurch, they soothe and they shred. Lovely. All this comes together in Adam Elwin’s vocal. At times he barks and growls like Pink Eyes (‘Pow! Right in the Kisser!’). At other moments he sounds likes Mike Patton at his more screeching and intense (‘Fools! Philistines! Heretics and Whores!’). On occasion he can sound almost tender, but then jerks into pure punk sneer and youthful torment (‘Noise equals Death’). Marvellous. If you need to take a breezeblock to your current musical malaise then look no further...

- Angrybonbon, Both Bars On

As this Kent quartet begins to play, we notice their glorious shards of rock have enraptured half the crowd while the rest are left to bemoan "another post-rock band". Led by a zealous half-Egyptian frontman, they blend the dynamics of Mogwai with the exhilaration factor of Faith No More, winning over the doubters with their interesting grooves and chaotic demeanour

- Raziq Rauf, The Fly magazine
The Tatty Boggle


LOEB sound colossal: like a thunderstorm in your grandmother's proverbial tea-cup, a brilliant delicate balance of power and noise and vast 'soundscapes' arranged into a kind of beautiful chaos. Releasing a new album through Smallown America later this month, we can expect an excited, enthralling set from what many will discover this weekend to be their new favourite band.

- Genin Records, Red Roar Festival Programme

Let’s skip straight to the end, shall we? Bypass the so-often-pointless comparisons to acts already operating in the sphere of mainstream rock and roll, to those whose work you’ll own already and thus remark, albeit silently, “Oh, well I do like them, so I must like these” (even though you know it never goes down like that), and plough on to the money shot, the precipice upon which this cliff-hanger was hung. Ready?

Let Our Enemies Beware are roughly eighteen leagues ahead of ninety percent of British rock bands out there, right now, this instant. Dhu Rakina doesn’t just prove this in a matter-of-fact manner; it crushes bone and pulps brain, stomps doubt and embraces insanity. It is neither metal nor punk, not post-rock or its hardcore cousin. It is rock music played by rock fans bearing wicked smiles and it makes me feel fucking brilliant. And now, the back story: Let Our Enemies Beware hail from the same Kentish soil as previous DiS-does-RoTa players Up-C Down-C, but whereas their friends ply a trade mastered by many – that of post-rock dynamics turned up and blown out – this group of musicians are in a pigeonhole entirely of their own. Sure, you’ll think there are hallmarks of many an already-encountered style, but Let Our Enemies Beware’s way with sound manipulation – their ability to contort regular compositions into hideous mutations, to crank their output to ‘epic’ and then crash it to Earth like a meteorite, shattering what was beautiful into a hundred flaming shards of deadly intent – is truly wonderful. ‘(Personal) Space Invaders’, for instance, begins with a skin-prickling rumble a la Mogwai and their ilk, but soon engages its superchargers and propels itself into bizarre-rock territory, all Patton scatting and twinkle-twinkle guitars. It hovers for a while before its 'chute is cut and the whole piece erupts into the listener’s ear canal. It sears like a bastard, but the sensation is so irrationally incandescent that one can’t help but rewind and do it all again.

‘I’m Not Laughing, I’m Choking’ is a similarly schizophrenic affair, all Mono-meets-Mastodon riffs building into a buzzing Botch-like finale. ‘Fools Philistines Heretics And Whores' treads equally uneven boards, a John Lydon snarl pulling the teeth out of a Faith No More covers band while a small child cries itself dry in the sin bin corner of the room. It pulses and grows and pops – “fuck you” the frank payoff line – before tripping over itself ‘til its nose is broken and its toes are all stubbed out. Over the course of seven tracks (at 37 minutes this is basically an album, not an EP) Let Our Enemies Beware run riot through record store racks, stealing what they can’t breed themselves and pouring fertiliser on their already wild imaginations. What’s more, they do it in a manner that implies that they’ve having fun, the time of their fucking lives, committing it all to tape. Dhu Rakina is malevolence and menace, intrigue and invention, bliss and bombast. It’s just about everything you want in a new band.

Of course, none of the above references really stick. That's the beauty of this release: it's both immediate in emotive effect, making the brain fizz like a suger rush, and alien in its construction. It is original in a fashion that the alleged mavericks in the music press, those that look simply to prog or folk to augment their otherwise MOR stylings, can only dream about. Refresh your memory and backtrack: Let Our Enemies Beware are roughly eighteen leagues ahead of ninety percent of British rock bands out there, right now, this instant. That’s actually selling this EP a little short; I’m under great restraint not to proclaim that this band is the best domestic rock act I’ve heard all year. That they’re unsigned is the biggest industry crime since that whole Jonathan King debacle. Someone with a little cash and the inclination, do us a favour and put this in those aforementioned racks.

- Mike Diver, Drowned In Sound (9/10)

If you've been searching for a band that make your ears feel like they've been raped by an overweight 55 year-old Boy Scout with severe autism, see a doctor.

- Methuselah 'Cannibal' Aesop, Barely Legal


It takes guts to cross the river, to journey south into lands foreign to a body so familiar with the insides of North London dives that it practically bleeds Buffalo Bar paint when sliced by misfortune. Guts of steel, and a will of iron: see, Lewisham after dark is no place for the weak of heart, and the cowardly lions that roar so proudly when the situation suits. It’s a dark place, an alien place – a place you’re likely to spy and turn tail from without so much as tasting the air (fried chicken and rotting vegetables, since you asked).

But wait, be fair: not much of the above has much of an anchor in the realms of reality, or of honest-to-God truth (with the exception of lily-livered North Londoners fearing their southerly cousins’ neighbourhoods, that is); what is needed for the wandering stranger to venture south is a band, one that really matters. Every other night’s headliners over at Brixton’s cavernous Academy simply don’t cut it, be ‘it’ the mustard or whatever else you’d like to see parted (can one really cut mustard?); no, no – what’s needed is fresh blood, ready to spill out over territory assumed hostile prior to arrival. Tonight, at the back of a well-attended Lewisham boozer, Let Our Enemies Beware are such a band. They’ve blood aplenty, circulating close to the surface, a pinprick away from being shed; their music is immense, every way capable of having the crowd at the aforementioned shrine to poor lager feel weak at the knees in awe.

Tonight is the band’s first London show; indeed, if what we (I) hear is correct, it’s their first ever show beyond their home turf of Chatham. Many of the fresh-faced rock kids in the crowd are here to cheer on mates – LOEB open a bill of three, the two acts above them borrowing rather too heavily from established acts to the point where cliché doesn’t come close, however accomplished they may be – but even punters with the very lowest expectations for the Medway four-piece are soon convinced to edge forward. Closer and closer they step, beers in hand, to the action happening both on stage and off it: guitarist ‘Unkle B’ (or James to his mum) is forced to stand before the corridor to the toilets, his pedals simply too many to be accommodated by the tiny stage. (Well, it’s not that tiny really – LOEB’s drumkit, though, is fairly large.) A shout comes from behind me: “You’re amazing!” It’s unclear whether the gentleman from whence it comes is friend or just another person sucked in by the mighty sounds now reverberating wildly about the room, but he’s spot on the money opinion wise.

The band’s set is taken entirely from their last (self-released) EP, Dhü Rakina; the highlights are many and varied, the music something like an unholy amalgamation of Mr Bungle, Mogwai and Muse. A guy in a Deftones top – who later emerges as the singer of the second band – goes positively ape shit, his girlfriend tugging at his pants, urging him to sit back down and stop showing her up. His face tells a story no words could ever convey – this is something really special, an act that does matter; a band of brothers in full flight, unafraid of where they’re headed and going the most roundabout way possible to get there. Every subtle intricacy is balanced by the kind of brutality no pub was ever designed for, that no arena could possibly stomach. Here they build a wall of distorted sound that pierces the eardrums like a spear through a Victoria sponge; there they shed the post-rock postures and adopt a violent hardcore stance, second guitarist (LOEB have no need for a bassist) Adam Elwin taking over vocal duties from the flexible larynx of regular screamer Shareef Dahroug (who charms the crowd between songs with ease). When they reach their peaks, the views are sensational; the tingle down the spine – the one that runs from the very base of your skull to the ends of your tiniest toes – is simply exquisite and lingers for no little while. The skin feels electric, the senses dance with delight.

‘I’m Not Laughing, I’m Choking’ is a frenzied post-cum-punk rocker that somehow straddles around eight sub-genres with only two legs, equal parts disharmony and discordance, hypnotic throughout. The band’s trump card tonight though is ‘(Personal) Space Invaders’, a song so massive it could be used to bring expired council estate buildings crashing to terra firma from around five miles away, saving on both fuses and explosives, not to mention the obligatory cartoon-style plunger. Describing LOEB’s songs in simple, comparative terms is no easy feat – the references to other acts above are but convenient hooks on which to hang something that really suits nothing in fashion today, or tomorrow – so I’m left at your mercy, really. Don’t hate me for saying that you really have to see LOEB to understand my cat-caught tongue; really, you do have to.

Leaving Lewisham seems that little bit harder come the band’s set closer, a stirring eight minutes of malice and malevolence delivered when they were meant to play for just four. The river crossing, too, loses its relevance – the north-south divide only exists to dissuade fussy northern fools from ever seeing bands of substance and soul, I’m sure of it.

Still, they’ll be better, ten-fold, as and when they too step across one of the many Thames bridges and into a much, much bigger playing field. Today, Lewisham is conquered; tomorrow, who knows what other boroughs will fall victim to LOEB’s multi-faceted charms? Right now, few other bands at an unsigned level matter so much.

- Mike Diver, Drowned In Sound, The Fox & Firkin (9/10)