Album Review: Mr. Lovebomb by Isaia Huron
The Greenville pastor’s kid writes and produces a concept album about running through women and knowing better the whole time. He’s got the ear and the honesty; the songs prove it.
Greenville, South Carolina, sits in the Bible Belt, and the church musicians who come out of those congregations carry something particular: technical command paired with an instinct for manipulating a room’s emotions in real time. Isaia Huron grew up in that world. His father pastored a congregation and was a civil rights activist who received threats from the KKK. But his mother directed the choir, and by fourteen Huron was drumming professionally for a megachurch of four thousand.
He rapped as a kid with two friends at church block parties, a trio he’s described as “like Alvin and the Chipmunks” for Christians, and outgrew the arrangement. He taught himself production on Ableton, uploaded his first track to SoundCloud in 2016, and approached the platform like a musical diary for years. The pandemic killed his drumming gigs, and that’s how he started putting out music under his own name, cycling through EPs until his 2025 debut CONCUBANIA earned an NPR feature and a following. Mr. Lovebomb is his sophomore LP, and he built every piece of it himself. Wrote, produced, sang. The premise, in his own words, traces “the unraveling of a man who built his life around the chase.” Gospel training lives in the chord voicings and the way Huron bends his voice from baritone warmth to a cracked falsetto.
The man Huron plays on this record meets a woman in the opening minutes, promises to learn her and love her starting tonight, admits his habits have left past partners in tears, and shrugs it off. “But that’s their issue,” he sings on “Give You My Word,” and the deflection is so casual it barely registers as one. The singer-songwriter spots every red flag in himself and keeps going. “Breakfast and Matcha” is the most damning thing here. Huron suffering in silence, watching shows where people just fight instead of movies, convincing himself he’s in love, then creeping away in the nighttime to see a side piece while his girl sleeps. He comes back before sunrise with breakfast in his left hand and matcha in his right. There’s no confession-booth gravity to it; he just describes his routine. And “Pablo Honey Song #2” runs the same nerve from a different angle. Three in the morning, he’s calling another woman, insisting they don’t have to touch so it’s “justified,” borrowing the Radiohead nod to concoct his booty call as something tender:
“Like Pablo Honey Song 2, I know I don’t belong to you.”
The rationalization is so clean you could almost respect it.
A road trip on “Wool” contains the most perspicacious piece of storytelling on the whole LP. New woman, her feet out the window on the highway, driving ninety on the seventy-five on a Friday, Beyoncé playing, sun going down. Everything is good. Then they get to the restaurant and she’s rude to the waitress, makes her anxious, and Huron is done. No dessert, just wants the check. The entire track pivots on a stranger’s discomfort at a dinner table, and that’s a rare kind of songwriting. A single behavioral detail kills a crush. “Propane” is the funniest and most unpredictable cut on the record. His girlfriend spirals over old texts on his phone, wants him to block everyone, get a new number; he insists nobody is a threat, loves her with all his fiber, all his being. She’s upset he doesn’t post her on Instagram. He says he’s shy, uses it for work only. And then the section flips when she calls him a gaslighter, and he’s baffled:
“I thought I left you electrified and inspired
What you mean I’m using propane?”
The confusion might be genuine. Or it might be the last trick in the lovebomb playbook.
Live players give the production its warmth. Ethan Polk-Trauman on bass and guitar, Ryan James Carr and Darius Kearse trading off drums, Stefan Haerle adding saxophone and trumpet on “Side Slider.” Huron’s own ear for gospel-rooted harmony shapes the chord progressions, which carry a churchy weight and move in ways that standard 90s-throwback R&B doesn’t bother with. He’s credited Tonéx’s Out the Box, the eclectic double-disc gospel album from 2004, with shaping that instinct. It surfaces on “Wew,” which starts as a slow-burning confession within the librettos before its section lurches into a party-mode chant that matches the uptempo groove. His tone is thick and slightly grainy, conversational in the verses, capable of pushing into a strained falsetto that sounds like someone used to projecting across a sanctuary but choosing to keep the volume down. He doesn’t belt when he could, and the tracks feel like overheard conversations rather than performances.
Huron’s concept asks you to stay interested in a man who notices his own patterns and won’t break them, and the tracks about demanding women test that commitment the hardest. “This Girl Wants Everything” earns its place with a contradiction halfway through (“I don’t mind running dry if you’re the reason why”), but the complaint underneath it also winds through “Wew” and “W.T.A.” in slightly different clothes. “W.T.A.” goes graphic about the physical dimension; “Wew” gets theatrical once it swerves to a party chant. And the distinction between them is more tonal than substantive; back-to-back they thin out. But on “Versions,” Huron tells a woman she’s seen every broken side of him, then hands her the LP’s most useful metaphor:
“When we fight, you’re fighting with a low-res version of me.”
He can distinguish his failures with extraordinary clarity and still send them into a room and expect the other person to absorb them. The confession is also a strategy. And on “Side Slider,” he’s waiting on a text from a new woman saying she can slide through tonight. He’s watched vows and wedding rings never mean anything, and instead of grieving that, he’s recruited it as permission. The loop restarts. He’ll bring matcha.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Wool,” “Breakfast and Matcha,” “Propane”