Best Shoegaze Albums 2023 (2024)

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Best Shoegaze Albums 2023? ›

Finally, you might consider The Cure as the putative father of shoegaze. With their post-punk roots, intricate textures and melancholic soundscapes, they influenced not only the mood, but also the aesthetic of shoegaze.

Finally, you might consider The Cure as the putative father of shoegaze. With their post-punk roots, intricate textures and melancholic soundscapes, they influenced not only the mood, but also the aesthetic of shoegaze.

The first taste of real shoegaze music came in 1988 from an Irish band called My Bloody Valentine, who are recognized today as pioneers of the genre.

Loveless by My Bloody Valentine is commonly discussed as the greatest shoegaze and indie album of all time and one of the best albums to come out of the 90s. Loveless was My Bloody Valentine second studio album straight out of the UK.

My Bloody Valentine are regarded by some as the pioneers of the alternative rock subgenre known as shoegaze, a term coined by Sounds journalists in the 1990s to describe certain bands' "motionless performing style, where they stood on stage and stared at the floor".

The coining of the term "The Scene That Celebrates Itself" was in many ways the beginning of the end for the first wave of shoegazers. The bands became perceived by critics as over-privileged, self-indulgent, and middle-class.

To be clear, neither Duster, Beach House, nor Deftones are explicitly shoegaze — the genre typified by smeary guitar squalls and celestial vocals bathed in reverb, as pioneered by My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, and Ride in the early '90s, and mutated by several generations of indie bands in the decades since.

Tame Impala live drummer Jay Watson has described Parker's music as incorporating a "shoegaze-y guitar sound, but not played in a shoegazey manner". Electronic music is another significant influence on Tame Impala's music.

The band has a diverse, densely layered sound, which evolved throughout their career and has contained elements of gothic rock, heavy metal, grunge, psychedelic rock, progressive rock, shoegaze, dream pop, and electronica overall, with Corgan as the group's primary songwriter.

What aesthetic is shoegaze? ›

One of indie-rock's finest subgenres. With warm waves of distortion, limitless guitar texture and the most ethereal vocals - shoegaze is music for dreamers. After first emerging in the early 1980s, shoegaze was the antithesis of big arena rock, or any kind of rockstar behaviour for that matter.

Once Britpop outsiders, Slowdive have emerged 30 years later as something akin to goth rock titans.

The film is pretty intense in its use of violence, gore, scares. It contains several chase scenes as well as a large body count.

Cocteau Twins are sometimes also considered shoegaze but they fall predominately into the dream pop category. Starting out as a predominately post-punk group they became more rooted in beautiful guitar sounddscapes.

“Shoegaze” is related to grunge in that it's a descendent of 80s independent and alternative rock music. Otherwise shoegaze is usually far softer (in guitar/vocal tone/texture) and less rhythmically aggressive.