It’s been a strong year for shoegaze. The genre rediscovery via TikTok during the first stages of the pandemic has been going on long enough that we might consider it a Shoegaze Revival Revival. All over the world, teens and 20-somethings are rediscovering the revolutionary power and possibilities of picking up a guitar, bass, or drums and screaming their emotions to the heavens for the first time. This is excellent news for those of us who still believe in amplified instruments’ liberatory and emancipatory powers.
This surge in popularity has seen an explosion of outstanding new bands. We’ve even got a debut album on our list of Best Shoegaze albums, with the blissfully heavy howl of New York City’s Velvet. This year saw high-profile releases from classic shoegazers, too, though. DIIV’s Frog in Boiling Water captures the malaise of modern living, and Starflyer 59’s 17th album is one of the strongest in their long, under-appreciated career.
Without further ado, here are the ten best shoegaze albums of 2024.
10. Blushing – Sugarcoat (Kanine)
Austin’s Blushing resurrects an under-appreciated 1990s shoegaze/dream pop/alt-rock sound on Sugarcoat, channeling shimmering Cocteau Twins vocals and funky breakbeats over a firewall of ferocious guitars and throbbing basslines, dispelling the myth that each style was its own distinct genre. Sugarcoat spells out an occult history connecting The Sugarcubes to Garbage to Adorable while still managing to sound fresh and original in the process. Sugarcoat is an outstanding achievement from a band to watch.
9. Newmoon – Temporary Light (Futureless)
Temporary Light, the first album from Antwerp’s Newmoon in five years, is a gorgeously gossamer confection, guitars and reverbed vocals beckoning like fairy lights in a cloudbank. It perfectly captures shoegaze’s ethereal emotionality, refracting heart, heat, desire, grief, and loss through a rain-spattered stained glass window. Temporary Light is music for the romantic and the heartbroken.
8. Joyer – Night Songs (Hit the North)
Joyer’s third record captures the distance and disconnection of shoegaze through the metaphor of the tour bus window, collecting the whirlwind experiences and brief connections of being on tour. While its subject may be as disassociated as a Lost in Translation cab ride, the music is full of surprises, swapping out shoegaze’s usual jet engine guitar thrum for a more spartan slowcore/post-hardcore sound with lo-fi indie vocals, like Lou Barlow and Stephen Malkmus jamming with Codeine. Night Songs has something for everybody.
7. Belong – Realistic IX (kranky)
Belong returned with their first album in over a decade with a dreamlike ode to shoegaze and dream pop, replacing the steely post-industrial post-punk with propulsive Swiss-machined motorik beats, as streamlined as a V-2 rocket while still managing to sound as ragged and phantasmagoric as their iconic earlier records. Driving yet ethereal, emotional, and conceptual, Realistic IX is an alchemical triumph of technique and imagination.
6. Ride – Interplay (Wichita)
The shoegaze revival of the last 15 years has given many first-wave shoegazers a much-needed burst of rocket fuel, delivering vindication and much-needed appreciation they were denied by a smug and sanctimonious music press of the early 1990s. The democratization and accessibility of the internet rekindled interest in everyone from Swervedriver to Life Without Buildings, in many cases resulting in the original bands getting back together and releasing some of the best music of their career.
Although less known by those getting their music news off of the cover of Spin, Ride were part of the original Holy Trinity of shoegaze among fans thanks to albums like Nowhere and Carnival of Light. Despite holding up to their early classics, Interplay is anything but a nostalgia act. You never get the feeling they’re playing their greatest hits or cosplaying as themselves. Instead, Ride present their unique charms – sharp songwriting paired with atmospheric production – in a new and novel way.
5. Velvet – Romance (Candlepin)
The glory of Romance, the debut album from New York City’s Velvet, is in the details. While the dreamy vocals and drifting guitars don’t reinvent the Catherine Wheel, the leaden bass and heavy halftime drums hit like a lead curtain, like an Isis/Crowbar mindmeld, while still sounding as lovely as fairy lights. Romance is the perfect word for it, with the distance necessary to deliver the soft-focus sheen required by new love. Fans of early M83 are likely to flip out for this one!
4. Trentemøller – Dreamweaver (hfn music)
Danish producer/multi-instrumentalist Trentemøller‘s seventh album is his most ambitious to date, but you wouldn’t know it simply by listening. It’s as shadowed, shrouded, and mysterious as you could hope for in a shoegaze record, obscuring big feelings in a fogbank of crystalline reverb and deep delays with a distinctive blend of folk, dream pop, and electronica. Mesmerizing as a bank of embers, soft and ethereal as peach and lavender mist, Dreamweaver is a record you’ll want to return to repeatedly.
3. Parannoul – Sky Hundred (Independent)
South Korea’s Parannoul are like the anti-My Bloody Valentine. Rather than taking decades between releases, the anonymous singer/songwriter/producer seems intent on cranking out high-quality shoegaze/dream pop blasts every year. He’s like the Taylor Swift of shoegaze. Like Ms. Swift, his prolific output and stunning consistency is earning Parannoul unexpected crossover success, with each new release earning rave reviews from indie rags, forum denizens, social media, and any other watercooler where people gather to talk about atmospheric rock ‘n roll. If you’re looking for a soundtrack for your atmospheric TikToks, drop Parannoul onto your playlist.
2. DIIV – Frog in Boiling Water (Fantasy)
How did we get here? We’ve got a Reality TV star about to take his second term in office. We’ve got robotic trucks bursting into flames. We’ve got eggs that cost as much as champagne did a few years ago. What is going on?
It’s a question that seems extra-pertinent to Brooklyn’s DIIV, who have been plagued by drama, bad decisions, and probably some plain ol’ bad luck. On Frog in Boiling Water, DIIV’s first album in five years, DIIV channel their inner tension and drama to deliver a spiky, poisonous reflection of life under late-stage capitalism. Anxiety and dread have rarely sounded so nice.
1. Starflyer 59 – Lust For Gold (Velvet Blue Music)
Speaking of bands that never got their just desserts during shoegaze’s first decade, Starflyer 59 dropped one of their best releases 30 years into their career. Unlike many Shoegaze 1.0 bands, Jason Martin has been releasing solid shoegaze albums the entire time, hopping from indie label to indie label and weathering several deaths in the music industry. It’s given Starflyer 59 a stable base of tuned-in shoegaze fans, but the mainstream recognition of major festival bookings and viral fascination has alluded the group.
Nostalgia is a significant theme throughout Lust for Gold – a perennial favorite topic of the shoegaze genre. Tracks like “1995” reflect on the freedom and possibility of youth, riding dirt bikes with no responsibilities, while the title track finds Martin reflecting on his dreams of musical glory. He concludes that although life hasn’t shaped up the way he thought it would, he wouldn’t have it any other way, singing, “In my lust for gold, I feel like I’ve gotten nowhere,” before reconciling with the belief that “All roads point this way.” People who are born to make music will make music, regardless of the roses. Starflyer 59 absolutely deserve the gold for this one.