# They Fear Us

They Fear Us is the second and final studio album by British metalcore band Ithaca, released on 29 July 2022 by Hassle Records. It was the band's only album with bassist Dom Moss. Recorded at The Ranch Production House with producer Lewis Johns, the album displays a varied sound incorporating elements from a diverse range of genres. Its lyrics are centred on themes of "divine feminine power", revenge, trauma, and healing. Ithaca employed purposefully unconventional aesthetics for the metal genre in the album's cover artwork and music videos.
They Fear Us debuted at number 46 on the UK Independent Albums Chart and received critical acclaim for its songwriting, progression, and vocalist Djamila Boden Azzouz's performance. The album appeared on several year-end lists for 2022—Kerrang! and Metal Hammer ranked it within the top three, with the latter naming it the year's best metalcore album—and earned Ithaca nominations for "Best Production" and "Best Single" (for its title track) at the Heavy Music Awards 2023. The band toured the United Kingdom and Europe with Pupil Slicer, Get the Shot, and Thrown and performed at various festivals in support of the album and embarked on their first and only tour of the United States. In November 2023, the band performed the album in its entirety at The Dome in London.

## Background and recording

In February 2019, Ithaca released its debut album, The Language of Injury, through Holy Roar Records. The band were in Copenhagen in the midst of a European tour supporting the album when Denmark enacted lockdown measures against the COVID-19 pandemic, forcing them to cancel their remaining dates and return to the United Kingdom, which enacted its own lockdown restrictions weeks later. Their efforts to work on new material, which had just commenced, were subsequently stalled. In a May 2020 interview with Metal Hammer, guitarist Will Sweet said that although guitarist Sam Chetan-Welsh was "doing a lot of writing" and that the band could send sound recordings from their phones to each other, they were not talking outside of "the odd Zoom session" and had put writing on hold until they could be in the same room together. During the pandemic, the members of Ithaca dealt with grief, mental health issues, and internal conflict. Azzouz learnt that her mother was very ill. Chetan-Welsh said that the pandemic helped its members self-reflect and work on their mental health—he was able to work through his past trauma dating back to the recording of The Language of Injury—and take more creative risks. Bassist Dom Moss said that Azzouz's lyrics became less introspective and vicious as the pandemic receded. In addition to this, the band split from Holy Roar in September 2020 after its founder, Alex Fitzpatrick, was accused of sexual misconduct. On 7 May 2021, the band announced that they had signed to Hassle Records.
Azzouz said the writing of They Fear Us was largely an organic process. telling No Echo: "We've never gone into writing anything with a specific sound or idea in mind but inevitably it all comes together in the end! It's a real tough process, a real labor of love." Chetan-Welsh, who handled most of the album's writing, taught himself how to record demos during the pandemic and also worked on programming drum loops and synth parts. In an interview with The Midlands Rocks, he stated that he would usually bring in a riff or "basic song structure" to the band, based around a pattern by drummer James Lewis, who would also write around his riffs. The band would then "co-build", with Azzouz providing feedback about song structures with her vocals. Azzouz credited Chetan-Welsh with coming up with some of the album's "more creative and out there ideas", though she said she was "sceptical a lot of the time": "[T]here was a lot of, 'Trust me, it’s going to work' on his part. [...] it was just me getting stuck in my own head." Chetan-Welsh said that although he handled a lot of the initial writing, he felt "very strongly that it wouldn’t be what it is" without the rest of the band’s input. Azzouz said that despite the initial difficulties in writing as they could not work in person, Ithaca became good at working together online, and felt that the pandemic brought a sense of urgency to the few times they were able to meet up in person.
Once writing was completed, Ithaca recorded They Fear Us at The Ranch Production House in Southampton with producer Lewis Johns. Compared to the brief recording window of The Language of Injury, the band spent a month working on the album, giving them the freedom to try out their ideas in the studio. The band employed both programmed and live synthesisers, including a Yamaha DX7 and a Fender Rhodes; Azzouz credited Johns with writing many of the album's synthesiser parts. Johns also wrote a horn arrangement for "You Should Have Gone Back". Chetan-Welsh said that Hassle Records "didn’t ask any questions" during the album's recording and "more or less" thanked the band when they turned the album into the label.

## Composition and lyrics
### Overview

They Fear Us is a metalcore album. In an interview with Kerrang!, Chetan-Welsh described the album as "prog-hardcore". According to Rodney Fuchs of Ox-Fanzine, the album transcends the metalcore framework of The Language of Injury into a more stylistically varied sound "far beyond a genre designation." Similarly, Mandy Sycthe of MetalSucks wrote that Ithaca "blur genre lines to the point that no one knows whether to call the record hardcore, metal, metalcore, or something else entirely." Its tracks have been described as incorporating influences from alternative rock, blackgaze, industrial metal, mathcore, new wave, nu metal, power pop, and shoegaze. RaduP of Metal Storm and Patrick Lyons of Pitchfork both highlighted and compared the album's sound and greater shoegaze influences to Svalbard, Rolo Tomassi, and Deftones; the latter wrote that the "only remnant of Language’s whiplash-inducing transitions is [Ithaca]’s deft weaving between burly beatdowns and more buoyant, arena-ready fare." Azzouz utilises more clean singing than on Ithaca's previous album.
Azzouz stated that Ithaca wanted to experiment with the metalcore sound without "recreating" or "carbon copying" it, whilst paying tribute to bands that inspired them in a new and interesting way. The members of Ithaca's interests in djent, gospel, disco, and 1990s R&B music served as additional influences, alongside artists including Deftones, Prince, Van Halen, and Talking Heads. Chetan-Welsh drew influence from 1970s prog music and jazz, which he began listening to during the pandemic. In an interview with Distorted Sound, Azzouz also said that, after years of avoiding it for personal reasons, she began to embrace clean singing again during recording after realising she "needed to look at it the same way I look at screaming and use my voice as an instrument."
Thematically, They Fear Us centres on themes of "divine feminine power", alongside revenge, trauma, and healing. Its songs also deal with "male power structures", self-discovery, and self-reflection. Azzouz viewed They Fear Us as a "more joyous and triumphant" album than The Language of Injury and viewed both albums as connected, in that she had taken the former's "anger and self loathing" and turned it outwards, from herself towards others. Chetan-Welsh said that although much of the album is dark, the album is more optimistic towards the end, as he viewed nihilism as "cheap currency" in metal music and wanted to show that "it's possible for you to heal from your trauma." In an interview with Boolin Tunes, Chetan-Welsh said:
   If you seek [healing from trauma], you'll have the internal infrastructure to be able to stand in this power and that is an act of rebellion to the structure of male power. If They Fear Us had a concept, it's that really.

### Songs

Azzouz described "In the Way" as a "revenge fantasy". "The Future Says Thank You" is about leaving a toxic environment. Lewis said that the song's call-and-response guitars and "ending off-snare" were both accidental, and that the band wanted its keyboards to capture "a specific John Carpenter/Goblin/giallo movie sound". Azzouz felt that the album's title track best represented its themes of "inner power, femininity and how people are afraid of us... and should be afraid of us." The song incorporates a dhol-like drum break and a field recording by Chetan-Welsh of a priest leading a Ganga Aarti ceremony—a ritual to Mother Ganga—at his mother's funeral in India. "Camera Eats First" is about self-hatred, understanding the causes behind it, and the dangers of basing one's self-perception on how others see them. The song's opening drumbeat was a practice beat Lewis used for his feet as a warm-up. After suggesting it could work as a song, Chetan-Welsh came up with the song's riff; during recording, the band added explosion noises to the track.
"Cremation Party" was written after a bassline by Moss and subsequently completed on a digital audio workstation by Lewis and Sweet; the former credited Johns for helping with its samples and turning it from a "riff soup" into a song. Lewis described "Number Five" as an homage to Kittie. "Fluorescent" was written about Azzouz's mother's illness. Lyons compared the song musically to Deftones circa Diamond Eyes with its "rich palette of digitized guitar effects". Characterised by Emma Wilkes of Kerrang! as a "majestic miniature epic", "You Should Have Gone Back" begins as a progressive metal song before "explod[ing] into post-hardcore nirvana". "Hold, Be Held", featuring guest vocalist and friend of the band Yansé Cooper, is about healing, honesty, and embracing trauma and fragility. Musically, the song marks a drastic departure from the rest of the album's material, being a pop ballad featuring gospel and shoegaze influences. The song drew comparisons to Bloc Party and The xx. Chetan-Welsh said he deliberately wrote the song in the style of producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis to evoke and match its themes of nostalgia and sentimentality.

## Title and artwork

In an interview with The Guardian, Azzouz said that deciding the album's title to be They Fear Us was a "natural" one due to its empowering nature. In an interview with Kerrang!, she disclosed that the "They" in the title refers to "people that have made you feel less than [you're worth], people that have made you feel that you're not worthy for whatever reason, or people who have hurt you in the past."
Inspired by the Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense, Ithaca utilised aesthetics that were purposefully unconventional for the metal genre in the album's artwork and music videos, drawn from its members' Arab and Indian cultural heritages and camp, "70s retro", Pre-Raphaelite art, and queer art and fashion for inspiration. Chetan-Welsh said that he wanted to be "disruptive" and inspire people from different cultures in heavy music: "I want those people to say: 'I've never seen a band that looks like Ithaca; I’m gonna go and do that.' "
Tying in with the "divine feminine power" theme, the album's cover presents Azzouz as a queen, seated on a throne in an orange dress with a crown, surrounded by her male bandmates in white and grey attire. Chetan-Welsh said that the rest of the band were meant to appear as a "defensive line" behind Azzouz so that she could not be challenged. He further noted that by holding hands and touching each other, they were communicating their own femininity and intimacy. This visual was featured throughout the album's press photos and music videos.

## Release and promotion

In December 2021, Ithaca released a teaser video for They Fear Us. On 4 February 2022, the band announced the album and released its title track as its lead single. A music video for the song, directed by Paul Cooke, was released on 24 February 2022. The album's second single, "In the Way", was released on 5 April 2022. On 31 May 2022, they premiered the music video for "Camera Eats First" through Rock Sound. "The Future Says Thank You" was released as the fourth and final single on 21 July 2022. The album was released on 29 July 2022, debuting at number 46 on the UK Independent Albums Chart.
Prior to the album's release, Ithaca were due to tour Europe supporting MØL in February 2022, which was cancelled. The band also had to cancel an appearance at that year's 2000trees festival owing to Azouzz's visa not getting approved on time, following her move to Berlin with her husband. In August 2022, Ithaca embarked on a short headlining tour of the United Kingdom; they were supported by Pupil Slicer on all but two dates. After performing at the ArcTanGent festival, the band embarked on a tour of Europe with Respire. In March 2023, Ithaca, Get the Shot, and Thrown embarked on the Merciless Destruction Tour of Europe. The planned first show of the tour, which was due to take place at Die Stadtmitte in Karlsruhe, Germany, on 10 March, was cancelled due to a hostage situation at a nearby pharmacy. Azzouz said that the band were locked in the venue with three other people who came early to the show as police dealt with the situation, whom they drank and played card games with until they were allowed to leave early in the morning the following day.
On 1 June 2023, Ithaca announced their first and only tour of the United States, the Y'All Fear Us Tour, and released a music video for "Fluorescent", starring British comedian Ed Gamble. The band said the video was intended to reference 1970s pop singers "who masked their trauma in the softest focus", reflecting the song's tone. In July 2023, Ithaca performed on the main stage of 2000trees. Between 23 September and 7 October 2023, the band toured the United States and performed at the Louder Than Life and Aftershock festivals. On 25 November 2023, Ithaca held a special concert at The Dome in London, "A Very Special Evening with Ithaca", where they performed They Fear Us in its entirety. The band were supported by Wallowing and used keyboards, a brass section, and additional vocalists during the concert.

## Critical reception

Professional ratings :
| Review scores ||
| Source | Rating |
| Kerrang! | 5/5 |
| Metal Hammer | |
| New Noise Magazine | |
| Ox-Fanzine | |
| Pitchfork | 7.4/10 |
| Rock Hard | 5.5/10 |
| Sputnikmusic | 3.5/5 |
They Fear Us received critical acclaim. Emma Wilkes of Kerrang! awarded the album a perfect score, praising its diversity and heaviness. BrooklynVegan reviewer Andrew Sacher called the album "one of the most inventive metalcore releases I've heard this year." Elliot Leaver of Metal Hammer praised Azzouz's performance and its song structures, deeming it "[a]bsolutely essential listening." Antonio Poscic of PopMatters highlighted how the album made "disparate styles flow elegantly into one another" on tracks such as "You Should Have Gone Back" and "Hold, Be Held".
Nat Lacuna of New Noise Magazine called the album a "radical statement piece" that shows Ithaca "pushing forward to new heights by whatever means necessary [...] letting everyone know that they are never arrogants but always assuming their rightful place." Patrick Lyons of Pitchfork highlighted the progression of Ithaca's songwriting and Azzouz's vocals from The Language of Injury, stating: "They Fear Us is bolder than its predecessor—more confident in its melodies, more unconcerned with heavy music posturing—and Boden Azzouz matches this evolution in her performance: She has shifted from seething outward angst to seeking strength within." In a mixed review from Sputnikmusic, Mitch Worden praised Azzouz's improved vocals and range as Ithaca's "greatest asset", but felt the album's "streamlined" production removed its songs of their staying power and "grit".
According to Matt Mills of The Guardian, They Fear Us was one of 2022's "most lauded [metal] albums". Kerrang! and Metal Hammer ranked it as the second and third best album of 2022, with the latter selecting it as the year's best metalcore album. Addison Herron-Wheeler of New Noise Magazine ranked it first in her list of the best "Metal and Heavy Punk" releases of 2022. Sacher, in BrooklynVegan and Invisible Oranges, respectively ranked They Fear Us as the 24th best punk album and the 6th best metalcore album of 2022. PopMatters ranked it as the sixth-best metal album of the year. MetalSucks and Rock Sound also included it in their end-of-year album lists. At the Heavy Music Awards 2023, They Fear Us and its title track received respective nominations for "Best Production" and "Best Single", although they won neither award.

## Track listing

All tracks are written by Ithaca.

## Personnel

Adapted from liner notes.

## Charts

Chart performance for They Fear Us :
| Chart (2022) | Peak position |
| UK Album Downloads (OCC) | 52 |
| UK Independent Albums (OCC) | 46 |