Loom isn’t the album experimental musician and producer Katie Gately intended to make. At the time of her mother’s diagnosis of a rare destructive cancer, she was close to finishing an entirely different album. However, she quickly recognized that she “didn’t have the bandwidth to make that record anymore.” So, she returned to her Brooklyn family home and completely recreated the album around the 10-and-a-half-minute saga that deals with substance abuse, “Bracer,” which was her mother’s favorite track. Where her 2016 debut album, Color exhibited a frenzied and fierce listen, Loom reveals equally frantic textures and retains her debut’s display of melodic pop sensibilities. Although, this time around, her voice is front and center, atop harsh sound design.
Gately’s mother passed away in 2018. To convey the enormity of such a loss, she’s added real earthquake recordings and samples of further wreckage, such as peacocks screaming, wolves howling, pill bottles rattling, a machine gun going off, the take-off of a fighter jet airplane, a coffin shutting, and heavily processed audio from her parent’s wedding. The swiftness of her mother’s diagnosis and passing held an impending weight over Gately, and so Loom captures the bizarre nature of imminent doom, but also with some iridescent colors.