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.
Category: shoegaze
Like with any other rock genre (or sub-genre), the death of psychedelic rock has been proclaimed so many times that the proclamation itself became redundant. The reasons may seem quite simple – the appeal of psych rock remains to this day, whether in its original or ever-coming changes in shape or form, with the original core (and ideas) remaining intact in one or more elements that define psych rock as such.
With Under Dark Skies, their latest album, Los Angeles outfit Tombstones in Their Eyes just prove the point. With the band going through intense personal changes (including the passing of guitarist Paul Boutin this October), the band still firmly remains in the songwriting hands of John Trainor, one of its original founders,…
Souvlaki is Slowdive’s second studio album, originally released in 1993.
Though not as big and swirling as Just for a Day, there’s more of an attempt to put advanced song structure and melody in place rather than just craft infinitely appealing, occasionally thunderous mood music. Everything is simplified, as if Brian Eno’s presence on two songs – he contributes keyboards and treatments and co-wrote one tune after turning down the band’s invitation to produce – hammered home the better aspects of “ambient” music. This is no Music for Airports though.
On the opening “Alison,” the largely uplifting “When the Sun Hits,” and the darkly blissful “Machine Gun,” Slowdive are still capable of mouth-opening, spine-tingling flourishes.
From their home in Belgium, Slow Crush have carved out a place at the forefront of modern shoegaze. The band’s distinct sound, built on shimmering textures and propulsive rhythms, has earned them a dedicated global following.
After a few years of deliberate quiet and reflection, they’re ready to re-emerge with something new and transformative. Their latest album, Thirst, released on Pure Noise Records, is a powerful leap forward. The band decamped to The Ranch in Southampton, U.K., to work with producer Lewis Johns, creating a ten-track cascade of sound that is both heavier and more emotionally resonant than anything they’ve done before.
…The Belgian quartet’s vocalist/bassist Isa Holliday says that the overarching themes on…
In the same way that the legendary label, 4AD had their in-house collective, This Mortal Coil, a revolving door of music makers generally associated with it, so John Michael Zorko gathers around him many of the great and good who orbit the Projekt Records sun to weave together the sonic beauty of that defines his Falling You project.
And it is not just the form that draws comparison to that earliest of British independent labels, the music found on Metanoia, the latest album, could easily have been one of the 4AD stable, back in the day. Metanoia means to change, but more specifically, a transformation forged from adversity, an idea first found in the writing of ancient Greece, and specifically in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which this album takes as…
Following the release of their celebrated debut album, 2024’s Triple Seven, noisy, romantic indie stylists Wishy return less than a year later with something old and something new. The compilation Paradise on Planet Popstar brings together their 2023 EP, Paradise, and six new songs dubbed Planet Popstar. Spoiler alert: the latter’s ultra-fuzzy, gushing title track (“Love at the speed of light”) is one of the highlights here.
But first, in case you missed it, Paradise offers five slightly melancholier tracks that demonstrate that Wishy arrived as a concept pretty much fully formed by what was their second EP, with its intriguing mix of boy songs, girl songs, boy-girl songs, hazy dream pop, buzzy shoegaze, bouncy jangle, and rich harmonic palettes…
Just for a Day is the debut studio album by English rock band Slowdive, originally released on 2nd September 1991 by Creation Records.
Just for a Day is Slowdive’s first album, and it shows; when one listens to the magnificent sound of Souvlaki or the brilliant experimentation of Pygmalion, it becomes clear that Just for a Day was only a step toward the greatness they would later achieve. Its sound is quite like Souvlaki’s – swelling waves of flanged guitars, layers of wispy vocals floating in and out of the mix, and sweet lazy pop songs – but the production sometimes turns the band’s plush, sweet sound into the sort of cheap and cheesy pleasantness one might expect from a new age artist. A few tracks hint at the sound that would be fully achieved on Souvlaki…
There is so much noise coming at you all the time these days. The constant bombardment of stuff you aren’t interested in while you try to get things done, it’s exhausting. Greet Death, Michigan shoegazers, are taking on the constant noise of life with their own noise. Their newest album, Die in Love, out via Deathwish Inc., is their answer to two of life’s biggest noisemakers, love and death. Greet Death offer their perspectives on these age-old topics in ways that are both all too familiar and yet uniquely their own.
Die in Love opens with its eponymous track, which contains immediate, MBV-esque noise. This is an often cited touch point for any shoegaze album, but it’s always a welcome influence. “Same but Different Now” is about a feeling most…
Nick Quan’s song “Heavensafe,” which runs big feelings through a bigger pedalboard, features a funny declaration: “I’ve turned to slop again.”
This past August, when the extraordinary guitarist released Warbrained, shoegaze might have been saying so, too. By then, its latest — and most puzzling — progeny was “cloud rock,” a budding vanguard that subverted its central extremes: numbness first, and noise, if at all, second. On record, Quan, a digi-rock savant who has toured with Slowdive, sounds groggy yet ridiculously technical, like a sleep-deprived Berklee student on a bender.
When a simplistic song, “life imitates life,” blew up on TikTok in 2023, they responded with a complex album, that year’s Stepdream,…
Wet glass is a slippery substance, and so, too, is this second album from North Carolina’s verity den. This home-recorded follow-up to the 2024 debut sidles fluidly between dark, muscular shoegaze, pristine and delicate dream pop and fuzz-hazed space rock. A nod to Yo La Tengo’s slowest, most ambient soundscapes leads into Sonic Youth-style guitar ruckus; the haze of prime Loveless effects storms makes way for 1990s 4AD dream-state reveries.
It’s all denser, better thought-out and more impressive that that strong first album, pieced together as it was out of demos. This one brings touring drummer Reed Benjamin on as a full-time member, giving the songs an increased heft and power. It’s too soon to call Wet Glass…
Delivering their debut album soon after forming, Sister Ray Davies is the duo of guitarist Adam Morrow and engineer Jamie Sego, who runs Alabama’s Portside Sound, a studio housed in the former Muscle Shoals Sound Studio. They became fast friends when Morrow played sessions there for John Paul White, Donnie Fritts, and others, but anyone expecting music from them in the territory of rhythm & blues or country is going to be very, very surprised. An outlet for their shared love of shoegaze acts such as Slowdive and Ride as well as related sounds like late-’60s fuzz and the noise pop of Yo La Tengo, Sister Ray Davies (a fusion of the Velvet Underground song and the Kinks’ singer) was chosen off an old list of Sego’s, in part because they thought it captured…
…2025 Kevin Vanbergen remaster.
Serving as an introduction to the U.S. market, Gala compiles the band’s first three EPs and adds a couple outtakes. One thing that went overlooked about Lush was their ability to veer from violent and edgy noise breaks to pop effervescence. They were always capable of spewing out Saturday morning glow and Sunday evening doom from song to song. Their early reliance on sheets of distortion, buried vocals, and production issues didn’t help this situation. As a result, their out-the-gate raw talent went rather unnoticed, evidenced on their earliest works. Scar demonstrated their under-appreciated diversity immediately. “Thoughtforms” is an example of their heavenly pop greatness, with the vocals sweeter and…
Missionary Girls have been gaining traction in the local Portland scene, described as a promising new band that is “doing something off the wall and unique”.
The debut album “Bleeding Out” by the Portland, Oregon-based post-punk band Missionary Girls was released on September, 2025. As the album is very recent, extensive reviews in major music publications are limited at this time; however, snippets from local Portland sources and specialized music sites offer an initial impression of the album’s sound and style.
The album is firmly rooted in the post-punk genre, incorporating elements of dark pop. The sound is characterized by a “gritty, high-energy” feel and “raw hooks”.
“I don’t wanna go where I can’t feel a thing,” pines Just Mustard frontwoman Katie Ball on ‘Dreamer’, the intricate and skittering track at the heart of the forever-rising Irish indie kids’ third album. “I just wanna make it feel good.”
From their shoegaze-leaning lowkey 2018 debut ‘Wednesday’ to the more industrial yet kaleidoscopic breakthrough-threatening 2022 follow-up ‘Heart Under’, the Dundalk five-piece have traded in a genre haze that lands somewhere around ‘noise rock’ but always dabbles in darkness. This time, they’re looking for something more.
Always a gut-punch hidden in an enigma, they’ve found fans in and support slots with their globe-conquering countrymen Fontaines D.C. and gothfathers themselves The Cure…
They Are Gutting a Body of Water originally began as the solo project of Doug Dulgarian, who established a digitally enhanced version of shoegaze which frequently detoured into electronic noise interludes and drum’n’bass breakbeats. Eventually, he embraced a full-band format, and became known for shows where the musicians face each other on the floor instead of playing on-stage. LOTTO is the group’s attempt to create a raw, live-to-tape album rather than something engineered and assembled on a computer. The record’s dark, crushing shoegaze songs feature cryptic, fragmented lyrics which offer perspectives on an uncertain life that feels like it’s on the brink of disaster. Many of the songs seem to address drug addiction and other coping…
While Living Hour have always operated at a stylistic crossroads, mixing dream pop with psychedelia and shoegaze with angular indie rock, they expand their boundaries even further on Internal Drone Infinity, the Winnipeg group’s fourth album. It ventures into straight-up noise on the brief first track, “Stainless Steel Dream,” whose electro-staticky opening transforms into a languid lo-fi alt-rock before finally cranking up the amps and stomping on the distortion pedals — a little appetizer of the broad indie spectrum to come. It’s an unexpected crash-boom-bang introduction to their Keeled Scales label debut, an imprint known at this point for its artful indie folk clientele. Having said that, one of the highlights here is the ambling, nearly six-minute “Texting,” a drawling,…
Yes, yes, yes to guitar tones bent by volume, to tone-altered screech with dream-soft vocals flowing over, to pedal boards that look like good-sized train sets, yes to all of it.
There’s a tsunami of latter day shoegaze thundering towards the shore these days, some even would say a surplus. Others might argue that “surplus” is a strong term, a little judgy in fact, and wouldn’t you rather have too much of this than anything else? But regardless, the good stuff in this vein is very, very good, and Shaki Tavi is undeniably on the positive end of the spectrum.
Given the glistening, multilayered drifts of sound, you might expect Shaki Tavi to manifest itself as a band, perhaps a couple of guitar players, definitely a bass player, clearly at least…
NewDad’s debut album Madra, released only 20 months ago, made the Galway dream-pop band’s dreams come true. In the time since that record’s release, the former NME Cover stars have toured the world and gained acclaim from across the music world – including from their hero, The Cure’s Robert Smith. So, their second album should be a pretty cheery listen… right?
Largely written before Madra was released, Altar isn’t quite bursting with joy. Instead, it finds singer and guitarist Julie Dawson deep in homesickness and trying to figure out if the band’s move to London to give them better access to opportunities to help them grow was all worth it. Here, Galway is the altar at which she’s worshipping, and the thing she’s had to sacrifice…
After their excellent reissue that centered on non-LP and unreleased songs recorded between 1988 and 1990 at Noise New York studio, the Silver Current label has unearthed another excellent treasure from Galaxie 500. This time it’s a live set recorded in December of 1988 at CBGB where the band was appearing on the bill with Sonic Youth, B.A.L.L., and Unsane. Taken from mixing desk recordings helmed by their long-time producer Kramer and remixed for release, the set captures the band in stunning form that goes a fair way in belying their image as slowcore somnambulists. Ripping through an eight song set made up of tracks from their first album Today, Dean Wareham‘s guitars cut through the mix like jangling bells in the verses and rip…
Samira Winter has made nothing but first-class shoegaze spiked with dream pop since she started making records. Everything her project Winter has created has been a shining example of how the age-old genre could evolve and grow stronger given the proper care and feeding. Things like hooky songs, very dynamic arrangements, and lyrics that peek through the wall of sound to lasso the listener’s heart. The cool thing about Winter’s 2025 album Adult Romantix is that she does all those things but then adds more. Tighter arrangements that make more room for tonal shifts and space, vocals that ooze melancholy and sadness, melodies that sound timeless and immediate at once, and best of all, it sounds like she and co-producer Joojoo Ashworth…