Washington D.C.’s Zero Swann returns with The Ones Who Love, a suffocating descent that sharpens and corrodes the vision introduced on 2025’s psychedelic no-wave monolith, Benefactor. Where its predecessor struck with blunt-force sensory violence, this new album operates differently—slower, closer, and far more invasive. It doesn’t attack. It presses. It stays.
Driven once again by Jeremy Moore, The Ones Who Love thrives on sustained existential pressure, excavating the psychic wreckage of extreme isolation and despair. Here, intimacy curdles into confinement, tenderness mutates into appetite, and devotion becomes predatory. Moore states:
“The record traces obsession as both a psychological affliction and an esoteric contamination: an intrusive mental state that devours the self, and a spiritual distortion that spawns parasitic thought-forms, binding the listener in unseen astral gravity.”
This is a sinister album about love as a destructive force—romantic, spiritual, ideological, and self-directed. There’s an insidious nature to the unfolding of the tracks, where the blown-out fuzz of predecessor Benefactor has been replaced with cavernous reverb, twisted note bends and deathrock’s weighted darkness—the musical equivalent of sustained emotional agony. The Ones Who Love doesn’t offer catharsis or release; it documents fixation as a closed system, a ritual loop with no exit. Zero Swann doesn’t ask what obsession costs. It demonstrates the damage in real time.