Check out part one here!
For the past few years, we’ve been stoked to see a resurgence in shoegaze and dream pop in a new generation of bands. The Wall of Sound is growing and every year, we’re finding more and more rad music that’s layered in dreamy fuzz, crashing percussion, and crushing guitars. With this three-part interview feature, Gaze Into a New Generation of Sound, we want to shine a light on some of these bands. Some have been around for a while and some are brand new, but all of them play music that has us enthralled.
GLIA
Great shoegaze, to me, is experimental and strange, but sort of immediate at the same time. It can be sonically overwhelming, texturally explorative, flattening, but also trance-inducing and expansive—but beneath it all I just love a great melody that sticks with you. I think it can be music for people who feel like outsiders, and it’s hard not to feel alienated in our present moment.
We listen to a lot of different stuff and see what works and what doesn’t. Whatever feels right. I think it’s mostly subconscious and out of our control, but everything I listen to influences me. Even if it doesn’t show itself in an obvious way.
I just try to connect with the music most of all. I think when everything clicks and the audience and the band are totally in the present, that’s the ultimate goal of any live music event, just to be completely subsumed in the now.
I find it exciting and cool to see all the cross-pollination and mixing of genres happening. I think people are open to different kinds of sounds. I love that you can find something very aggressive and very twee playing the same bill.
Right now, I find Aluminum, Full Body 2, April Magazine, Sparkler, and Nuclear Daisies inspiring.
GLIA: Happens All The Time
Label: Signal//Noise Records // Candlepin Records
SOFTIE
Early on I appreciated the level of interpretation in shoegaze and dream pop. Meaning, a common theme of both shoegaze and dream pop is that buried, nearly inaudible vocal. A lyric can determine the mood of a song or record. This always created a unique experience for me as a listener; l’m sure others feel the same. It’s an opportunity for the listener to project whatever mood or state of mind they’re in on the song.
Often it feels like the “shoegaze revival” is just a ploy to create a new generation of gear heads. In the 2010’s, it seemed as if everyone had half stack amps and on the rare occasion a boss metal zone pedal. That has changed dramatically. I mostly recently played a show with a really awesome shoegaze band with three guitarists, all with incredibly elaborate pedal boards and in-ear monitors. It made me realize we might be chasing a sound that is unattainable. I think we’re at the peak of the shoegaze revival, and scramz or screamo is on the horizon. The barrier to entry is just much lower.
It is difficult to not be affected by our musical upbringings and earliest experiences with music. The first alternative guitar music I heard was Nirvana, but parents were playing things like “I Wanna Go Outside In The Rain” by The Dramatics long before that around the house. So I guess a textual guitar sound and melancholy draws me in most, and my poor attempts at recreating those sounds and feelings come out in Softie songs.
The community in the Bay Area is truly inspiring and thriving. There are some great bands here. I’m stoked to be a part of it.
[Text by Nicholas Coleman]
SOFTIE: Strong Hold
Label: Cherub Dream Records
MX LONELY
We’ve always been drawn to large soundscapes and noise; creating a feeling through tone and arrangement.
People are always going to be interested in guitar-based rock music. Shoegaze achieves a futuristic, otherworldly feeling using that old technology.
We try to get audiences to engage through movement/singing along. Our singer Rae will go out into the crowd during the songs “Paper Cuts” and “Too Many Pwr Chords” to try to incite the crowd. MX performances are a lot more punk than most shoegaze bands. We like it when people mosh.
The BK music community is really exciting right now. There are a bunch of bands coming up in the scene, starting to tour and establish themselves. Brooklyn bands we like: Shower Curtain, Velvet, Bloodsports, Ringing, Wiring, Crate, Glimmer, Punchlove, Bedridden, Nodding Off, High.
There are so many good bands doing the heavy alternative/shoegaze thing across the US rn:
Dosser, Day Aches, Keep, Coma Therapy, cursetheknife, Downward, Trauma Ray, Prize Horse, Trembler, Interlay, She’s Green, Palomino Blond, Her New Knife… Too many to count, honestly. It’s inspiring to see so much heavy/noisy music being released and performed by bands who are committed to touring the country and bringing these shows to people at all levels.
MX LONELY: Spit
Label: Candlepin Records
LEAVING
Jackson: I started getting into shoegaze when I moved out to the Bay Area in 2010. My buddy and roommate at the time (Trevor) had just joined Deafheaven with Nick Bassett. He played me Whirr (at the time still Whirl)’s new album Distressor while we were on mushrooms. That was when I knew I had to deeply immerse myself in this genre. It was the wall of sound and complete immersion in someone else’s feelings/vibes that drew me in.
Gregory: I have always been very untalented. So being able to have a bunch of pedals in between me and how bad I sound has always been appealing and resonated with me. Also, Slowdive.
Jackson: Shoegaze is absolutely timeless. You can play younger people first wave shoegaze bands and they hold up as something that could’ve come out today. For example, this newer ban, Blushing, sounds a TON like Lush, but many young people don’t know Lush and are now discovering them. It’s great how an entire new generation of people are discovering all this great music that came out in the early 90’s.
Gregory: Shoegaze makes you wanna just lay in your bed and rot. And a lot of people feel like that right now.
Jackson: You can tell by the fact that people keep calling us “doomgaze” that we’re from a doom-metal-related background. I think some of that history comes across in our sound, but at the same time we’re super influenced by all different types of music so I’m sure it’s all incorporated subconsciously.
Gregory: None of us really set out to nail a sound. In some ways, it’s just us being us with a lot of added reverb.
Gregory: There are literally so many great bands right now. You could spend a lifetime listening and still not catch all of them. But a few you should not lose sight of are Fawning, Citrus, Renewer, and Deadform.
Jackson: I’ll echo what Greg said, all these bands are awesome.
LEAVING: Liminal
Labels: Protagonist Music // TRANSYLVANIAN RECORDINGS
GLAZYHAZE
It’s hard to say why young people are so attached to shoegaze again. I think shoegaze conveys a very common and shared feeling in our generations: nostalgia. Both in a pacifying sense and in a sense of malaise towards a world that runs and waits for no one, that you have to chase with all the means you have.
Our generation is characterized by great disillusionment. Dreaming and believing in something is becoming increasingly rare, so I would say that shoegaze is one of the ways our generation is shouting this way of being, of living. We do it in an extremely realistic and conscious, deep way, but accompanied with dreamy sounds, as if we wanted to prove to ourselves that there is always hope, that there will be a time and place to feel safe and understood.
It’s difficult to tell you exactly what energy we send out while we’re performing. I think it’s up to each person in the audience to capture what they feel and perceive, making it their own personal experience, in a very free way. Which is exactly what we do on stage, each of us kinda vibes in our own space and lives in the moment. For us, it is crucial that everyone, both in the band and in the audience, finds their own space and feels safe during our set.
There is a small shoegaze scene in Italy, but we think it is a bit stale. It is mainly made up of bands older than us, which makes it not very open to new things and very much oriented towards classic 90s shoegaze/dream pop. In fact, although there is a scene, however small and niche, we don’t really feel part of it, or part of any scene at all.
That’s okay with us, though. In the end, what interests us more than the support of other musicians — as grateful as we are for any form of support — is the passion of “normal” people who feel the same emotions as we do. We simply want to have fun, share meaningful moments, be on the road, and meet new people.
Internationally, Wisp is a girl our age from San Francisco whom we admire a lot and hope to meet, maybe on a stage together sooner or later. Among others, we love Modern Color, Glare, and Trauma Ray, they are really cool.
The American scene seen from our little Italy seems much more compact, present and welcoming. It’s one of our dreams to make friends with our overseas comrades.
Contemporary bands like Alvvays, Wet Leg, Slow Pulp, Soccer Mommy inspire us a lot with their imagery, their use of sound effects and their compositional mix that manages to blend underground and pop; that’s what we’re trying to achieve on our next record, it’s very important for us not to get stuck in old genre clichés.
[Text by Irene Moretuzzo]
GLAZYHAZE: Just Fade Away
Labels: Slimer Records // Coypu Records
LUSTER
The thing that drove me to shoegaze was the sense of urgency that I felt was conveyed in a lot of the early pioneers of the genre. If you listen to the first chords of Loveless, or even “Alison” by Slowdive, those records come in really hot. We’ve always aspired to create that feeling with our music. I have always been drawn to abrasive music. Metal, Punk, Hardcore, and Electronic music are all abrasive in their own respects.
We try to stay true to the original sound of shoegaze for the most part. We’re all into electronic music, so we incorporate glitching/scratching. I use vocoder on my vocals in some songs as a nod to early to mid-2000s pop music.
I think what we try to approach differently is aesthetics. Some of us are avid firearms enthusiasts and I think I kind of got tired of this genre being seen or thought of as soft and non-threatening. There are aspects of tenderness to this music, but have you ever sat in a room full of amps hooked up to various distortion pedals? That creates a really violent sound. Have you ever shot an AK-47? It creates the same internal reaction for me. Why can’t we lean into that brutal aspect of the music we make with our aesthetics?
The youth are getting restless, and most contemporary music they’re being fed is boring them. That’s just speculation though. I know that’s why I got into any type of subculture. I was talking to a friend the other day, and we talked about how hard it must be to be young now.
I’d like to think that while we are pretty quiet on stage as far as interacting with the crowd, we put out an energy that leaves people wanting more. Connecting with sound as opposed to words has always appealed to me, but I’d always opt to not overstay our welcome on stage.
We have all been playing music for decades now. Our community is vast. We have friends who have made it to majors, friends who have done it completely DIY and have become successful, have disappeared, and have left a legacy. We’re all just lucky to have a great supportive community of people we’ve all known for so long. There is also a younger generation of people out there who message us and tell us we inspire them and they like our music, and the feeling is mutual. We have friends that exist in all types of art, that have all stemmed from the punk and hardcore community.
Photo by @_a_j___w
The bands we have become really close with lately who are doing awesome things: Glare and Glixen are on the brink of blowing up. We are so stoked for them. They’re homies for real. We have to give a shout out to Wisp because she has been a homie since before she blew up. We are stoked for her success and we recognize her efforts to always put people on to smaller bands.
Listen to Clique
Listen to OAA
Listen to Sonnet One
Listen to Doused
Listen to Sparkler
Listen to Cold Gawd
Listen to Flying Fish
There are too many bands, too many friends. We post about them constantly.
[Text by Adrian Castillo]
LUSTER: Dopamine Loop
Label: Funeral Party Records
SPARKLER
What drew us into shoegaze is how incredibly diverse it is, and it’s all fairly beautiful. So many songs are a full experience in and of themselves. There are not many boundaries you can put on the genre, and it allows for so much freedom of expression from unique artists. So many people/artists treat it as a fully artistic experience, it’s more than just the music.
Shoegaze is kind of stereotyped or clichéd to be written by and for the lonely weirdos. Maybe the resurgence is because a lot of people felt it resonate within themselves in that way when we were all lonely weirdos between 2020 and whenever your city or state opened back up. Or it’s just the internet and accessibility to music. Everyone wants to find their “thing” in the “underground,” and here we are.
No two people think the same way, and we’re coming to find out none of us hear things in the same way (at least between us four). Outside of myself (Chris) and Tron, we’ve had so many member changes and they’ve all come from different musical backgrounds. Our biggest thing when writing/recording/performing is exploring all of our options. Using every resource available, experimenting with different sounds, ideas, or instruments, and mostly being able to be expressive in the music. We don’t want to be some tight, rigid, soulless act. That shit’s boring and we want to enjoy ourselves while playing. After all, it’s just rock n roll.
Live, we send out king tide energy. We wanna flood your ears and then recede. We want to be high energy, we want to be punk, we want to have fun, and we ARE going to smile. We’re going to be authentic so each performance has outside influences, but we’ll never give you some corny gimmick of being “too cool”.
We surround ourselves with genuine authentic artists. People who create for the love of it. People who are trying things because it interests them. I think we’ve found a really good community of artists. We’re incredibly lucky to have a great label, and great label mates. We’ve found some really cool people who are genuinely willing to give advice, help out, or contribute. It’s great having people like that who are far more experienced or well versed, but don’t think they’re “bigger” than you.
Our labelmates in Doused are inspiring. They write great stuff and are on similar terms as us as far as not enjoying the internet side of it all. They just want to make music and stand by it without the gimmicks. Blossom is great. Obviously our other local San DIegans. Mateo is still very young and is always asking questions or for advice. I was not even playing an instrument at his age and he’s already years ahead, we should be asking him for advice. Another is Pure Hex. Their new record is phenomenal and they are some of the coolest and most fun people to be around. Truly genuine people and fantastic performers. And lastly, our bandmates. We have a good group. Past and present, everyone is always working on their own stuff in and outside of music. They care a lot about mastering their crafts, and that alone is inspiring. Always staying motivated and striving to be better, and that alone is a tall task for a lot of people, including myself.
[Text by Chris Sennes]
SPARKLER: Big Sonic Chill
Labels: Signal//Noise Records
Flesh and Bone Records
JASPER BYRNE
I’ve always enjoyed psychedelic and hypnotic music, from dub to techno to spiritual jazz. It’s a way of reaching that trance-like state. When I got my first walkman as a kid, my dad gave me The Velvet Underground and Nico, and I always think that must have started the love affair!
I think the spiritual, healing, meditative aspect of shoegaze, the dreaminess that is both escapist and in the present moment, is the perfect antidote to the current state of the world. In an aesthetic sense, maybe it’s an antidote to the overly-polished, YouTube-tutorialized beatmaking of 2024.
I’ve always wanted to make futuristic music, so for me it’s about exploring what wasn’t said the first time around. It’s the same way jungle and jungle-techno interests me, in that it was quite short lived and there were a lot of directions left unexplored. I’m personally interested in the intersection between synths, samplers, and shoegaze, for example…
[Text by Jasper Byrne]
Jasper Byrne, Sonic: Mirrors
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