Guitars like walls: Shoegaze: melancholy and euphoria

Pop is primarily associated with expressivity and going outside yourself. Playing with the signs, dancing, putting yourself in the spotlight. People sometimes overlook or ignore how large the areas are in which usually quiet people, introverts and couch potatoes, write songs and create sounds.

From the mid-80s of the last century, introspection became the genre name that was intended to describe a segment of British pop: shoegaze. This was a collective term for bands that played dreamy, floating, otherworldly guitar music. Because the musicians on stage were too shy to look at the audience, they stared at their shoes. Play as if the audience and therefore the world around you were no longer there.

This attitude had a counterpart in the sound: guitars whose sounds, sometimes as walls, sometimes as repetitive melodic patterns, suggested and promoted alienation from the world. All sorts of scurrying, floating sounds in the background, a very present Joy Division bass and stoic drums that hold the whole mess together as a framework.

Shoegaze was never completely gone and always experienced manageable hype, which was mostly associated with surprising comebacks by style-defining bands such as My Bloody Valentine in 2013. Last year there was even a massive comeback: streamed and bought and, above all, on Tiktok This time the music was spread not by people who have known all this for 30 years and are happy about the return of old heroes, but by 20-year-olds. A sound snippet by the British band Duster from the 1997 song “Stars Will Fall” was among the most used Tiktok clip music in 2023; The hashtag #dusterband now has over 20 million views.

Beyond social media, the unexpected renaissance of shoegaze resulted in 20- and 40-year-olds standing together in a ratio of about two-thirds to one-third in Berlin’s sold-out Columbiahalle at the end of January, listening to the seemingly veiled, disembodied songs of the British band Slowdive Since their reunion in 2017, they have been much more commercially successful than in the band’s first phase in the 90s.

The hype has not only resulted in the renaissance of music that was created 30 years ago, but also the formation of a lot of new young shoegaze bands that are drawing on the history of the genre and using it to create beautiful music. A similar picture to that at Slowdive was seen last Friday at the Berlin concert of the British band bdrmm, albeit on a smaller scale, in the “Hole” on Hermannstrasse: a sold-out room, with older people in the audience with beer glasses in their hands , next to her is a 20-year-old in black.

The paradox that separates shoegaze in its most beautiful, successful passages and moments (and beautiful and successful things are very common in this genre) from irrelevant euphony can also be found in bdrmm’s music, and even more so live than on the two albums so far , “Bedroom” (2020) and “I Don’t Know” (2023): On the one hand, the music is introverted, but on the other hand, it always longs to go somewhere far away, carefree, and liberated. Ideally, you can hear this simultaneity in the Slowdive song “When the Sun Hits”, but also in almost all songs, especially on the first bdrmm album.

Live, bdrmm combine shimmering, enveloping guitar walls with ethereal, mixed-back vocals and sweet melodies that are typically overlaid with distortion and noise. Transferred to the atmosphere: music that incorporates melancholy as an attitude to the world into its sound and at the same time repeatedly veers into euphoria. The latter, however, is not associated with going crazy and with power and sovereignty, but on the contrary with self-sacrifice and being absorbed in the sound.

As a category, shoegaze is even more open-ended than other genre terms because it refers to a specific atmosphere and does not offer a clear definition. Also more open because, despite all the habitual shyness, the sound aesthetic is present in a transformed form in other corners of the pop scene: wherever the music communicates and promotes aloofness from the world, ideas and sounds that the early Jesus & Mary Chain, as central ones, are often used Forerunners in the 80s, and then developed My Bloody Valentine or Ride. Shoegaze had a significant influence on the post-rock of the 90s and 2000s (Mogwai and all Mogwai epigones would not have existed without all of that) and on dream pop, which emerged more or less in parallel in the 80s, as well as slowcore.

A genre that, apart from distortion guitars, has few clearly defined characteristics (and even these are not a necessary condition) can expand in all directions. Bdrmm demonstrate this openness less on stage than in the studio. On the second album “I Don’t Know” loops and electronica are dominant and the classic loud-soft dynamics are no longer so dominant. What remains is the floating in the music, the promise of using sound pressure to take away all weight and pressure from the listener.

This structural openness can also be found in many of the more recent shoegaze-related projects. The US singer Jane Remover, for example, mixes shimmering, melody-drunk guitar noise created in her bedroom with vocal distorters and electronica on her recently released album “Census Designated”. And the solipsistic and fractured, unsettled lo-fi pop on “kenopsia”, the album by the 17-year-old musician Quannic from Florida, released in 2023, combines crap midi sounds, chopped ambient and fragile loops to form a completely idiosyncratic version of shoegaze.

Why is this music making such a strong comeback right now? The kitchen-sociological and obvious explanation seems all too simple: times of crisis favor the success of escapist music. In any case, it’s hard to imagine a more escapist pop than the dream-like sound aesthetic of the genre. At least when it comes to quiet escapism that combines escape with drifting away, and not loud escapism.

Maybe it’s less about the economy and more about consistency. The desire to disappear from the world and be left in peace by it is as much a part of pop as crazy and excess. In shoegaze, this desire has only become dominant. Which is why this music will remain in one mutation or another and regardless of the economic situation.