Jeremy Moore is no stranger to extremity. The Washington D.C.-based multi-instrumentalist and composer has built a body of work across multiple monikers including Zabus, Bell Barrow, and Zero Swann among them. Each one a different angle on the same obsessive pursuit: music as psychic ordeal. Where Zabus tends toward a post-punk framework pushed through psychedelic processing, and Bell Barrow excavates something more skeletal and liturgical, Zero Swann has always been the most volatile of Moore’s outlets.
The Ones Who Love is the project’s follow-up to 2025’s Benefactor, a no-wave monolith that hit with blunt-force sensory violence. This new record sharpens that vision while corroding it from within. The blown-out fuzz of its predecessor has been replaced with cavernous reverb, twisted note bends, and the sustained emotional agony of deathrock. Moore has described the record as tracing “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.” What might read as baroque conceptualism in another artist’s hands lands here with uncomfortable literalness.
Recorded at The Prisoner’s Cinema in DC across September and October 2025, with mastering handled by Andy Baldwin at Metropolis Studios, The Ones Who Love arrives on Saccharine Underground in April 2026. It is also, perhaps paradoxically, some of the more accessible music Moore has released under any name. To clarify, not accessible in the commercial sense, but in the sense that tracks retain an immediacy that allows audiences inclined to experimental and outsider music to locate themselves within the work far more readily than in, say, the more opaque reaches of Bell Barrow’s catalogue.
Angular post-punk and haunting vocals guide much of this music through the darkened corners of introspection. Deliberately out-of-whack, motorik-adjacent percussives hide behind a wall of mid-buried feedback that floats through it all like weather. Opener ‘Chrisom’ drags these characteristics and its bouncy chords through the darkest night with an atmospheric deathrock energy. It’s a delirious track of immense gothic undertone, establishing the album’s emotional terrain before any chance to settle.
‘White Lips’ arrives with a sudden urgency and a rush that pulsates through the entire track. Rumbling, processed guitar riffs feel less like riffs and more like atmospheric clouds, hovering rather than cutting. “The master of second chances” bellows Moore’s deep and defining baritone. The track concludes in very dark, very sonically confronting ways, scratching an emotional itch with a heavy delivery that sits somewhere between emotional deathrock, post-punk, and dark shoegaze. It is a highlight of the record.
‘Knackers Yard’ follows with angular sensibility and committed delivery, featuring hot and cold moments of intensity, a cloudy atmosphere and raw, unflinching lyricism. ‘Shrine Slavery’ escalates into something more manic. Then the title track arrives, and the record pivots. A constant industrial hum and thump underscores trip-hop-adjacent percussives and dark, shadowy riffing. It wrestles between darkness and conventional rhythm before throwing the conventional off entirely. Heightened atmosphere combines with a minimised performance delivery for something more confronting. The mistaken romance of the title becomes wholly ominous: “The ones you love” sounding less like a declaration and more like a song of betrayal, of something turning in your hands.
‘Pig Scalder’ returns the manic energy. ‘Tidal Skull’ carries angular riffs, a consistent hum, and motorik or completely out-of-time beats that coalesce from individual strikes into atmospheric noise, building imperceptibly into the fabric of the work. ‘Only Sorrow’ delivers a heightened performance, reinforcing a quality that runs throughout: while there is variation between tracks, notably on the title track, much of the record functions as a cohesive sum of its parts. The emotional noise of it all recalls a shoegaze approach even without committing to its conventional sonic grammar.
‘Storage Organ’ is the penultimate moment, returning to trip-hop-inflected rhythms and exemplifying some of the record’s quiet diversity. Ruinous decay and loss underpin this passage of the album, with high-pitched guitar ringing floating above before a deranged freak-out conclusion adds a glorious extra layer of abrasion before the record closes. ‘What You Never Wanted’ wraps things up with noisiness, chunky bass, cascading feedback, and a fade-out for the ages.
As one of Moore’s more immediate works, there is something in the precision of the derangement here. The way the deathrock atmospherics and post-punk angularity are deployed with such (un)controlled intent makes The Ones Who Love both emotionally accessible and genuinely unsettling. It is a sinister album about love as a destructive force, and it makes the case without argument, without explanation, and without mercy.
The Ones Who Love by Zero Swann is out now on Saccharine Underground. Find the album at the following links:
Bandcamp · Saccharine Underground · Instagram · X / Twitter · YouTube
