Category: shoegaze


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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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.

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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…

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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…

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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…

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“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.

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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…

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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…

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“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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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Canadian duo Softcult’s gorgeous debut album takes its title from the famous Alexander Den Heijer quote: “When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.” The idea of fearless change in pursuit of something better is a mission statement Mercedes and Phoenix Arn-Horn know well. The twins spent more than a decade playing in pop–rock group Courage My Love, but walked away in 2020 after life on a major label got too stifling to continue.
Softcult arrived shortly after in 2021 with Another Bish, a spiky dream-pop anthem that saw the pair refusing to be tamed. Four grungy, Riot Grrl-influenced EPs followed alongside handmade zines, a close-knit online community and tours supporting Muse and Incubus.

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