My Review: Killing Joke - Love Like Blood

 Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

22 February 2026

Killing Joke: Love Like Blood

Being captivated by the sombre magic of what ultimately proves to be the British band's most successful single involves a series of often distorted, sometimes excruciating, but certainly compelling insights that draw us into a listening experience that embraces the passage of time. The Second Cold War accompanied Killing Joke's stay in Berlin, where they recorded an album that had this song as its epicentre, its hook, its support for making Night Time their entry into the charts.

Escaping from one's own shadow, from the past that had lined up qualities, and seeking a sense of belonging to continuity are just some of the fingerprints of this appointment with history, which in these minutes finds majesty, vehemence filtered by synthwave pills and post-punk reminiscences, to achieve immortality and touch places and people unthinkable until recently.

Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow, Shigekuni Honda (the wonderful protagonist of the Japanese writer's novel) are the pretext for a molecular gaze, a gnarled spark, a suffering articulated with simplicity, a deliberate oxymoron made fluid, like the few notes of Jaz Coleman's synth, Geordie Walker's sinful guitar, Martin Glover's overflowing bass and Paul Ferguson's martial drumming.

The most famous feeling of elevation of all time is associated with a sense of profound sacrifice, a vehicle that brings eternal life into a grey space and violence that constantly blows its breaths within a text that offers ambiguity and interpretative difficulties. The music is a powerful, crescendoing earthquake, a sum of cables climbing the stairs of heaven to fall into our blind and ravenous desire to keep our attention and total transport alive. 

Geordie turns his instrument into a six-string that uses atmospheric delays, with an arpeggio that surrounds and suffocates, taking care to suggest a scratchy and sad mood. The reverb sounds like an excavator, a scratch that knows continuous undulation, an open scream. Martin pounds his bass, creating an obsessive mantra, exploring the post-punk method to give the twinning of the two musical genres a temporal identity that allows no weakness, an immense act of strength. Paul seeks the sound, stimulating his drumming in a simple but voluminous consequential mechanism, with a cadence that allows for no particular technicalities: there was a need to generate a military embrace without having to worry about any frenzy.

Jaz presents his sacred flood in a destructive, epic way, destroying poetry and creating black petals that change the colour of blood, as if immersed in an orgasm raptured by all respectful logic, managing to make the verses stormy without having to shout them. Everything that is ancient, primordial, vehement, elusive to a soft vision is rewarded here by the sensation of barely restrained cannibalism, generating a truly impressive intellectual and emotional echo, thanks also to his timbre, to the claws of his vocal cords kept constantly under pressure. After years of punk cries and daytime explorations near abandoned workshops and farmhouses, his singing discovers new cards, rules and approaches, constructing a dark tangle, a cave of gothic shadows, a hidden and well-calibrated dialysis...

The groove is extraordinary, thanks to a simplicity that nails you down, grabs your legs and leads them to dance, inside a mental room that knows addiction but without any wear and tear, generating a syncopated and evocative attraction, as if everything were brief but led to the end of the hands of the clock. Love Like Blood swells the brain, fattening the need to lose oneself in the culture of a genetics that transforms pain into a sad pleasure: it is precisely in this aspect that the magic of the song reveals itself.

The protagonist is a warrior of passions, of pulsations, of a frenetic obsession that transforms dreams into the anticipation of a struggle, of a semi-hidden war, of behavioural quibbles that impose an iron discipline made of honesty and determination.    Hansa Studios stands as a protective wall for this operational miracle, a concrete and solid scaffolding, the right whirlwind of sounds and nerves, to be a malignant lump that leads to a transgressive mode of absorption.

Revolutionary, explosive, a moving assembly of theories mixed with an unusual amorous practicality, this artistic pill transforms into the prototype of a nervous and nuclear propensity for continuous explosion, an arsenal that inflicts punishment, generating joy where the arteries are locomotives of constant suffering. 

Capable of historicising a now anachronistic quest (linked to the sacredness of reading, which was beginning to lose ground), this gem acts as an uneven glue, a bond between distant eras, a relentless amplification of a connection with a text and music as abandonment, determining trust and obedience, turning minutes into a train with no return. The context becomes a pretext, an escape, elastic, a yardstick, to unseat history and make it debatable.  

The recognisable and unmanageable melancholy of Love Like Blood is an opportunity to unseat the certainty of knowing a band that slips here, breaking free from previous failure to generate apotheosis, filtered enthusiasm, for a damnation that will never find silence...

https://youtu.be/TnpwuRlXbhk?si=tUwJvWzG8__QeSIE