expect delay
Catherine Wheel had established their shoegaze bonafides (not that they knew that’s what they were doing) with their first two albums Ferment and Chrome, but made a conscious pivot towards the mainstream with album number three, 1995’s Happy Days. Now keep in mind that in the mid-90s the mainstream was a wide, chaotic landscape but […]
The legacy of For Tracy Hyde is pretty set – they were one of the premiere Japanese indie bands, fusing shoegaze, jangle, indie, and J-pop influences into a template for a generation of bands to follow, and broke up in 2023 immediately after releasing their finest album and on the cusp (maybe) of breaking out […]
Sometimes I think about the shoegaze bands of the early aughts who carried the torch for a genre at a time when it was pretty deeply unfashionable. One of those was Los Angeles’ The Meeting Places, who released a couple records in 2003 and 2006 that jangled and reverberated in all those old familiar ways. […]
If we measure things by full-lengths, it’s been a long time since we’ve heard from Taiwan’s Manic Sheep – their last album Brooklyn came out way back in 2017 – but but they’ve not been idle. New EPs have been released in the interim – Deep Dusk in 2019, Morning Fragment in 2023, and Invisible […]
I’ve mentioned that I’ve been increasingly fascinated with Japanese group RAY, who are both shockingly prolific and utterly committed to the concept of shoegaze idol bands. If you browse some of their live footage, you’d think it’s mainly the five girls singing and performing over canned backing tracks and it often is, but some of […]
Favourites hereabouts since the Fall of 2024, Thai-gazers Slowwves came really close to taking the final spot on last year’s best-of list with their debut album. Perfect Evasion just missed the cut despite being an excellent collection of ’90s-slathered melancholy that inches pretty close to but stays on the right side of my grunge-gaze red […]
After three years with tireless shoegaze champions Sonic Cathedral, London trio deary have announced they are leaving the label. In an Instagram post, they thanked Slabel head Nathaniel Cramp for everything he’d done for them and enumerated all their releases under the marque, including two proper EPs – 2023’s deary and 2024’s Aurelia – and […]
Minneapolis’ She’s Green had themselves quite a 2025, going from secret darlings of /r/shoegaze to international touring concern – they just landed in China today – but surely the highlight of the year was landing themselves on my year-end list with their slightly confusing but undisputedly wonderful releases, the physical issue of Wisteria and new […]
Happy New Year, not only from me, but also from Parannoul who rang in 2026 with a new single. “연말 다짐” – which translates to “Year-end Resolutions” – showed up online on New Year’s Day via an Instagram story with the caption, “Happy 2026 – I Hope To Achieve Something This Year”. To imply that […]
For most of the world, December – particularly the end of December – is a dead zone for releasing new music but in Japan, it’s business as usual. Hence after a 2025 that was already busy enough with a new EP Seasons in March and album number four – White – coming out in September, […]
