Much of the publicity surrounding Deadlights refers to it as Lauren Lakis’ debut, but surely her releases have been appearing fairly regularly since Ferocious in 2018, making this her fourth album? Whatever; the cover photo of Deadlights appears to be a messy, witty and possibly dark homage to the cover of the Cars’ 1978 debut.
There is sometimes a pop sensibility lurking at the heart of Lakis’ songs, but although powerful, it’s definitely not “power pop,” as its melodies are generally submerged in surging and ebbing distorted guitars. Deadlights is essentially a shoegaze record with some strong ‘90s alt-rock inflections, and much of it trudges along disconsolately with Lakis’ dreamy, reverb-masked voice riding the waves of guitar and…
Category: shoegaze
One of the more enigmatic bands of the classic 4AD era, Swallow was formed by Louise Trehy and Mike Mason, who met in early 90’s Camberwell, London. both were deeply involved with the independent music scene of the time; Louise co-founded Setanta Records (home of The Divine Comedy, Edwyn Collins and Into Paradise with whom Mike would occasionally play), and Mike traversed between bike courier, video director, and lighting designer for Spacemen 3, Slowdive, Spiritualized, Curve and Chapterhouse. Prompted by Louise, they started writing songs together, drawing inspiration from a healthy mix of sources: CAN, noise, post-punk, and American forces of nature like Captain Beefheart and Butthole Surfers. Their first songs quickly surfaced and were recorded…
The Suncharms are a band with an interesting history. They date back to 1989, and called it a day in 1993, but not before releasing a couple of EPs. In 2015 they reformed, and since then have released two albums.
…their third album Darkening Sky unfolds as a luminous exploration of reflection and sonic patience, a record that balances emotional immediacy with the quiet assurance of seasoned musicianship. From the opening track, “Midnight Train,” the band establishes a world of expansive indie-pop textures, Matt Neale’s guitar shimmering over a subtle rhythm section, while the trumpet’s late entrance adds a warm, unexpected depth that hints at the album’s willingness to bend conventional forms. The song evokes…
It’s only been three years since Feeble Little Horse last released an album—2023’s excellent, blown-out Girl With Fish—but between the canceled tour, a standalone single, and sporadic activity online since then, it feels like the wait has been far longer. Alas, that ends very soon; Feeble Little Horse are releasing their new album, Bitknot. The band hasn’t shared any further information about the LP, so this comes very close to qualifying for “surprise release” status.
Feeble Little Horse embrace the D.I.Y. nature of the Pittsburgh music scene, from the gauzy, more immediate sound of their live performances to the extra attention they pay and the flourishes they add to their recorded output. They were formed in 2021 by guitarists Sebastian Kinsler…
As humans, we have an inherent desire to connect with those around us. These relationships shape our social interactions and influence us in ways we may not realize, each moment subconsciously ingrained in our decision-making. The people we decide to keep in our lives come with the weight of influence, but unfortunately, these wildly important relationships never hold the staying power they promise. We are all made up of the mistakes, triumphs, and losses that come with building a connection with someone, and how these lessons linger in future relationships. When someone decides to exit your life entirely, their presence takes on a ghostly aesthetic, leaving a void they once filled, and a rush to fill it ensues.
That moment of panic after your support…
The Asteroid No.4 return in 2026 with In Praise of Shadows, their thirteenth full length album and a statement release that reaffirms the band’s enduring place within the modern psychedelic underground.
In Praise of Shadows captures The Asteroid No.4 at their most focused and assured, leaning fully into the shoegaze sound for which they are best known. Swathed in multi layered guitars, dense reverb, and hypnotic melodic drift, the record reflects decades of refinement while retaining the immediacy and emotional pull that has defined the band since their earliest releases.
Formed in Philadelphia in the late 1990s and now based in the San Francisco Bay Area, The Asteroid No.4 have built a reputation…
Fuzz Club are becoming one of the key hubs for all sounds psychedelic – whether it is the music that is fully in vein with the original psych of the late sixties or any of the updated versions from there on to current times. In that respect, to all who follow all things psych, it will probably be no surprise that one of the modern purveyors of psych that are Minneapolis’ Jason Edmonds and his Magic Castles, have found their way to this label with their new offering Realized.
Edmonds, as the bad’s principal songwriter, has always favoured that trippy, dream-like thread that original psychedelia introduced (not much fuzz or energy rush there), giving it that shoegaze/dream pop veneer, but then updated for the new century. Of course, many critics have…
Following the release of their debut, The Haunted Youth return with their second studio album, Boys Cry Too via Play It Again Sam. Beginning as the solo project of artist Joachim Liebens, the band today reveal the first single to be lifted from the record, deathwish, featuring fellow collaborator and Orlando-based singer-songwriter, Max Fry.
On Boys Cry Too, Joachim Liebens abandons the fragile, bedroom-pop innocence of Dawn Of The Freak – a debut that has since earned cult status back home – in favour of something far more confrontational and emotionally charged. From the towering eight-minute opener in my head to the closing track ghost girl, the album lets go of restraint in favour of something more raw, blending fragile melodies…
White Flowers, the long-running collaboration between Joey Cobb and Katie Drew, exists within what they call “the realm” – a shared creative space, wherein time, rather than being a restrictive force, is fluid and boundless, and music exists as an endless conversation with their past and present selves. Adopting what the band describe as a “sketchbook” approach to writing, White Flowers is the product of a decade’s worth of recordings – snippets nestled away on hard drives, only to truly make sense years later.
On Dreams For Somebody Else, the Preston duo expand upon the dark-hued dream pop of their debut, channelling the catharsis of dance music via repetitive structures and “sad, euphoric sounds”. Working alongside…
Even on the first 30 seconds of Prism Shores’s debut EP the Montreal quartet’s preternatural gift for great guitar jangle is apparent. It’s all there: Crisply arpeggiated chords played with hints of echo and distortion, plus a heaping helping of melancholy — catchy, comforting, a cozy jacket with its collar upturned on an overcast day.
Thirty seconds does not a catalog make, of course, and Prism Shores have been gently pushing their sound outward ever since. Their debut full-length, 2022’s Inside My Diving Bell, added a bit of post-punk heft by turning up the rhythm section, while last year’s excellent Out from Underneath found the band building a sturdier wall of sound by bringing in additional voices, synths, and strings for texture, and some crunchy shoegaze swirl.
When deary, the dreampop three-piece composed of Ben Easton (guitar), Dottie Cockram (vocals, guitar) and Harry Catchpole (drums), named their debut album Birding, it wasn’t just as an homage to our feathered friends, they were referencing the sense of expansion, wonder, and abandon their music evokes. They chose the title to draw attention to the direct impact humans have on the world around us, whether that be nature, or ourselves.
“I got really into reading about birds and all these historical stories and poetry about them,” says singer/guitarist Dottie. “You find these beautiful images of birds that represent hope, but they’re also animals. Some of them, like vultures and crows, are a sign of death to some people. They represent all these different…
The second act of The Julies has been one of the most surprising and unlikely comebacks in recent memory, but then “surprising and unlikely” is kind of the group’s whole M.O.
Hailing from the storied rock ‘n’ roll town of…Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, and with a sound heavily indebted to Britpop, the Julies’ most beloved work is an EP that was released in 1996 after they’d broken up, and which steadily amassed a cult following. It was a reissue of that EP, called Lovelife, in 2020 by the label Lost in Ohio that spurred the group back into action. And if their 2023 album Always & Always sounded, to these ears, tentative in some places — the sound of a band cranking the gears back up to see what they could do — Cherisher is big, loud, and…
One of the clearest examples of an album that crafts a strange and beautiful world not quite like any other is Rocketship’s 1996 full-length debut A Certain Smile, A Certain Sadness. Even upon arrival, this was an experience unto itself, and 30 years later, these eight songs of bittersweet bliss still feel new.
Rocketship spiked their deliciously melodic indiepop with buzzing organs, spacey interstitials and motorik repetition, aligning them with mid-90s peers like Stereolab and Unrest. “A Certain Smile, A Certain Sadness” is an album of unrepentantly vulnerable melodies, unusual seventh chords, lingering ambient interludes, and soft sentiments released at a time when unfriendly, self-conscious punk rock was the order of the day…
“Hypnosis Tapes” opens with a vacuum cleaner played in reverse — an inside joke, apparently — before the fuzzy guitars and humming synths layer in, stacking blips and pockets of sound until you realize you’ve stopped paying attention to anything else. Mute Swan named the opening track appropriately. It immediately puts you into a trance.
That pull defines Skin Slip, the Tucson band’s sophomore album and the final recorded work of founding guitarist Thom Sloane, who passed in 2024. Frontman Mike Barnett has said these are their best songs, Sloane’s best playing. He’s not overselling it. The album was recorded before Sloane’s death, and it sounds like a band locked in — joyfully testing how far their sound can stretch and change shape without losing their identity.
When Crimson Whisper emerged out of the ether in 2024, it was with an EP of synthy, metallic textures, muscular live drums, and gossamer vocals, making for a giddy version of shoegaze that incorporated some dream pop and post-punk vibes. As intangible as their sound was the lack of background on the project. That EP, Flutter, was followed the next year by a mini-album and another EP. The Shelflife label stepped in to give the band their first label release, Flutter & Beautify, a track-for-track compilation of their two EPs. Meanwhile, it was revealed that Crimson Whisper consists of San Francisco-based singer Na Lim and an unnamed member of an “established shoegaze band.” The mysteriousness extended to Beautify, which on occasion incorporated…
After building momentum over a few years of local shows and an international tour, Hong Kong shoegaze quintet Lucid Express returns with their second album, Instant Comfort. Blurrier and less glossy than their 2021 debut, the new record is situated at the sweet spot of screwed-down dream pop, ethereal vocals draped over lush guitars and synths, with a few tense, discordant edges.
Instant Comfort was recorded in the band’s studio, an island within an island, perched in an industrial district outside central Hong Kong, with views of both skyscrapers and the Chinese border. It’s a sanctuary from the grinding realities of the city, and their music likewise plays like a delicate and immersive retreat, a space that feels temporarily above reality. Vocalist Kim Ho’s…
“Three people will die listening to this album,” the Bandcamp description of Nashpaints’ first record since 2020, Everyone Good is Called Molly, reads. “Zzz they will endup in the same place.” There’s no backstory to Finn Carraher McDonald, only mystery and angelic voicings spread across decaying pop tapes with a butter knife.
Lead single “Boyfriend First” is this seven-minute mass of swirling noise with guitar streaks you’d have to break your nails just to make. There’s a lot of color in here even as the static fattens and the synths undress, because McDonald has melodies coming out the eyes. “Boyfriend First” sounds more like Natalie Imbruglia covering Deerhunter-or maybe it’s Deerhunter covering Natalie Imbruglia-in a sewer tunnel than the Duretti Column…
Numero present ’90s shoegaze band Should’s ’98 debut ‘Feed Like Fishes’ + 10 period bonus tracks.
The folks in Phoenix’s Half String talked up this trio when they were Austin, TX’s shiFt (before they moved north to various universities and gave up their name because of another band called Shift). And it’s easy to see why: Should would have fit perfectly into Arizona’s former “beautiful noise,” post-dream pop scene.
Even without the interestingly sedate but grasping cover of the Wedding Present’s “Spangle” (and, on another record, 18th Dye’s “Merger”), their sound makes it apparent that they can match the English in pairing inventive, modern guitars to lulling tunes for nighttime singing. You could see “Sarah Missing” appearing on a Slowdive…
Back in the early nineties, when Kevin Shields and My Bloody Valentine came up with their Loveless album, they practically broke the back of Creation Records, which soon after went bankrupt. Yet, nobody at the time envisioned what kind of influence that album would have decades after its initial release.
Its ripple effects keep washing up on listeners to this day, and the latest proof comes in the form of Come Back Down, the new album by Nashville (yes, that Nashville) duo Total Wife. It is too easy to say that Luna Kupper and Ash Richter, who comprise Total Wife, are just ‘simple’ fans of MBV and all things that were good about the original shoegaze for two reasons.
First of all, following in the footsteps of…
Between Whitelands‘ first and second albums, it evolved from an unfocused alt/indie solo project into a Slowdive-inspired shoegaze four-piece that landed on the Sonic Cathedral label. That second album, Night-Bound Eyes Are Blind to the Day, made new fans including Slowdive’s Neil Halstead, who toured with the group in 2024. Whitelands singer/guitarist Etienne Quartey-Papafio and band further develop their sound on third album Sunlight Echoes, which finds them taking their audioscapes in brighter, dream poppier directions on occasion while also expanding their swirling, hazier atmospheres. Quartey-Papafio’s lyrics remain sociopolitical in nature, as he bears witness to the genocide in Gaza on the buzzy, clattering, and angsty “Dark Horse,” and…