(Credits: Far Out)
Mon 6 April 2026 17:30, UK
On March 15th, 1991, Andy Ross, a British music executive and part-time journalist for Sounds magazine, attended a Lush show in New Cross. The openers, alongside Blur, were the indie rock band Moose, whom Ross, in jest, referred to as “shoegazers”, named for the singer, Russell Yates’ habit of looking down at his shoes during the set.
According to guitarist Kevin McKillop, Yates actually could not remember his song lyrics and therefore, was reading lyric sheets on the floor, but the moniker lingered as a descriptor for the unique brand of atmospheric pop. Numerous musicians and journalists, in turn, criticised the term “shoegaze”: music writer Paul Lester said that there was a “sense of derision” within the name, while fellow writer Chris Roberts cast “shoegazers” aside as “a throwaway comment in the pub” (both quoted in Ryan Pinkard’s 2024 book Shoegaze). Bands ranging from Pink Floyd to the Velvet Underground were referenced as examples of musicians remaining stoic on-stage, no different than the likes of Moose.
Still, “shoegazers” stuck and was later attached to Slowdive in the earliest confirmed print use of the descriptor, written by Steve Lamacq for NME two months later, describing the band and their third EP, Holding Our Breath. While Moose’s presence spawned the term itself, the sound of shoegaze traces back to the 1980s, heard in The Jesus & Mary Chain’s noise-pop renditions and Cocteau Twins’ dream-pop. Both originating in the Thames Valley region, shoegaze travelled across London, Oxford and Reading, with bands including Ride, Chapterhouse and Swervedriver, as well as the aforementioned Lush and Slowdive, following in its wake.
Arguably the genre’s most defining band, My Bloody Valentine, formed in Dublin, Ireland, in 1983. Eight years later, they would release 1991’s Loveless, their pink-hued sophomore album that is heralded as shoegaze’s North Star: a radicalisation of guitar distortion and melancholy introspection communicated in Kevin Shields’ guitars, and his and Bilinda Butcher’s vocals.
(Credits: My Bloody Valentine)
If shoegaze’s sound can trace its roots in Phil Spector’s ‘Wall of Sound’ technique from the early 1960s – a production style that utilised the literal studio space as a tool to enhance a song’s composition – then such was taken and placed within a context of an onslaught of noise. Shoegaze took melodies from psychedelia, pop, goth rock and punk to find beauty within aggression. The genre’s sound resonates as though you can reach out and touch it through your speakers, engulfing you in its magnetic spectrum of reverb and distorted notes.
The electric guitar becomes a dominant force in various iterations of shoegaze, as its prospects for reinvention through different manipulations of its chords make it most essential for crafting the sonic world, and vocals, too, become an instrument for centring the genre’s tone. Listen to a band like Cocteau Twins, for instance, where the vocal stylings of Elizabeth Fraser may be difficult to decipher, but remain ethereal, nonetheless.
The curious thing about shoegaze is that it is not forceful, but it will compel you to listen – each instrument layers on top of the other to form a texture unlike any other, forming a distinct haze that is both dream-like and electrifying, which is why the listener feels the need to dissect the noise, deciphering which guitar chords and drum beats are grounding the song’s texture, or which vocals communicate the most emotion. Where lyrics may fade into the noise, a song’s atmosphere takes precedent, and it is in such an environment that shoegaze finds its appeal.
As the genre continued its expansion of sounds and techniques, reaching its pinnacle in the 1990s, the term “shoegaze” retained a somewhat negative connotation. That is, until the new millennium, when the genre was reevaluated upon its revival, thanks to the internet, and the first wave of shoegaze’s second life came as the internet’s overwhelming proliferation of music saw younger generations rediscovering the genre’s discography.
Shoegaze was also revived through film, as auteurs Gregg Araki and Sofia Coppola incorporated its sound into their soundtracks: Coppola had Shields compose original music for her 2003 film Lost in Translation, while Araki enlisted Cocteau Twins’ co-founder Robin Guthrie to compose the score for his 2004 film Mysterious Skin – here, the emotive qualities behind shoegaze were heightened, as filmmakers made references to shoegaze’s visual connotations in their works and amplified their sentiment in shoegaze’s sound.
In turn, “nu gaze” came to define the next generation of shoegaze bands that began to surface internationally, including France’s M83, England’s My Vitriol and Sweden’s the Radio Dept. “Shoegaze” began to be loosely attached to up-and-coming bands who cited its founders as inspiration, a practice that persists today as newer bands across rock, metal, indie and pop enter the fold. Reunions began to take shape, as a result, with My Bloody Valentine being the first to return with their third album, 2013’s m b v, and Chapterhouse, Swervedriver, Ride, Lush and Slowdive all following suit.
(Credits: Far Out)
In the path of “nu gaze” came a shoegaze revival in the hardcore scene, as bands including Whirr, Nothing and Deafheaven – the latter of whom’s 2013 album Sunbather, established the subgenre of “blackgaze”, black metal and shoegaze – reimagined shoegaze’s experimental nature by rooting it within punk and metal’s structures, creating an atmosphere that grounded the sound in its chords but allowed for expansiveness, too. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, (where Nothing formed) became the unofficial home of “post-shoegaze”, as bands like Knifeplay and They Are Gutting a Body of Water became associated with shoegaze’s sonic influence, while paving the way for their own brands of experimental sound.
Then, shoegaze coincided with yet another wave: this time, within the virality of TikTok fame. Love or hate the platform, the ability to utilise the app’s music feature to soundtrack fleeting moments of fandom, memory, hilarity and more meant that shoegaze could be revived in short-form content. Gen Z latched on to the genre’s blend of whimsy and sorrow, using the likes of Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine to set music to documentations of their day-to-day. In the early 2020s, shoegaze seemed the perfect companion to the strange, unknown futures that everyone was confronting, particularly the younger generations that found solace in its emotional undertones.
Surely, young fans’ fixation with seemingly everything that the 1990s produced, as the last truly analogue decade, assisted in the growing fascination with shoegaze, once again. Some called this next wave “zoomergaze” – first written by Harvey Solomon-Brady for WhyNow – heard in bands like Wisp and Jane Remover, representing shoegaze’s return in a consumptive digital age. This persists today, as bands including Fleshwater, Turnstile and Glare continue to imagine shoegaze’s merging with niches of rock and metal, remaining faithful to shoegaze’s insistence on expanding the wavelengths of the electric guitar.
“Shoegaze” may have begun as a divisive label, but it has since come to define one of music’s most compelling subgenres that surely has shifted musicians’ approaches to craft.
