Pitchfork has teamed with record club Vinyl Me, Please to curate and repress four special-edition albums over the next year. The first, with 2,000 pressings arriving in December, is Slowdive’s 1995 album Pygmalion. The UK shoegaze legends were already critically drubbed in their own time—a Melody Maker reviewer infamously wrote “would rather drown choking in a bath full of porridge than ever listen to [their 1993 album Souvlaki] again”—but rather than capitulate to Britpop’s fake Beatlemania, Slowdive went further out to sea on Pygmalion.
This majestic record became a cult touchstone for its ambient detours and post-rock experiments. Nothing else sounds quite like it, and Slowdive themselves fell silent for years afterward, save for side projects, only to finally reemerge with 2017’s triumphant, self-titled reunion album. Here are insights on Slowdive and Pygmalion from other current artists they’ve inspired.
Alan Sparhawk (Low)
They were part of a group of bands in the really early ’90s—My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, Ride, Moose—and those first Slowdive records were right in the wheelhouse. Reverbed-out, cascading guitars and distant, female-male voices, in kinship with what My Bloody Valentine were doing. Even though it was airy and ethereal, it was also still very loud. In England, Slowdive were successful somewhat, but in America they started gaining cult status even through the late ’90s. There was definitely a time when this stuff was happening, but they transcended that.
Pygmalion was this attempt to break free from some of what they had already been doing. Some of the mystique of course is that they disappeared a little bit after that. They had this weird mythical life where, OK, they had this thing, and they tried to shift, and the sheer process of trying to find new ground buried them. How noble, you know? We identified early on with their story of having this very distinct thing—just who they were, the setup, the tone—and then with Pygmalion the fact that they were trying to push forward is, at least in our book, pretty cool. We’ve toured with them a few times since they got back together, and there were a couple shows where they just blew the ceiling off. It was exhilarating.
James Graham (The Twilight Sad)
There was something about their music that struck a bigger chord with me than some of the other bands from around that time. Something about the way Neil and Rachel’s vocals blended that drew me in more, something more personal about the songwriting and singing that made them my favourite noisy guitar band around that time. The vocals didn’t feel as distant to me and felt closer as I could hear the story of the song.
They were a little more cinematic as well, their guitars were loud but it felt different. Finding out that they were dropped a week after Pygmalion was released broke my heart a wee bit. To me it was such a brave record to release, sparse/beautiful/forward-thinking but weird and dark in all the best ways. Everything you would want one of your favorite bands to do, to take their music somewhere new and even challenging at times but still be the band you fell in love with. I finally got to see them play last year for the first time and even though sciatica in my lower back tried to keep me away the one time I’ve been in town when they have, I stood up the back of the room hanging on to a barrier with a big smile on my miserable face even though I was in agony.
George Clarke (Deafheaven)
By the time I was 21 and we were putting Deafheaven together, Slowdive were still in heavy rotation and from them, we just combined the two words. I just thought that it looked cool. We used to present our logo as one word in all lowercase, and that served as a small homage to them.
What I like to think about with Pygmalion is them kind of being fed up in a way. They had this explosion with their last record, and that can be very tiring. I think that answering that by completely deconstructing your sound is a really cool thing to do. You would expect artists typically to go in a more accessible direction, and they absolutely didn’t. I can very easily envision going into a studio and being like, “I just want to tear all this apart and focus on atmosphere and focus on electronic percussion and just get as far away from what we were doing as possible because you know, I’m tired of being mixed up in it all.” And then to disband right afterwards, it’s a very bold statement.
A few years back we had a chance to do a festival circuit with them and we were able to become friends. I’ve spilled my heart to them once or twice about what they mean to me, and they’ve always taken it with a lot of grace. So for that, I’m very appreciative. Not only are they a special band, but they’re one that is very self-aware and understands the permanence of this whole thing and are very consistent with what they do. I think it’s admirable.
Örvar Þóreyjarson Smárason (múm)
I first heard Souvlaki and Pygmalion when I was in high school. The school I went to was so full of jangly guitars that it was hard to tell one guitar from another. People had cool hair down to their eyes, but I would have mine straight up in the air. It wasn’t until later that Slowdive actually pierced through my ears. All that delay takes time.
A few years after we started múm Thomas Morr asked us to record a Slowdive cover and I went through their catalog again and it all sounded different, deliberate and spacious. We recorded a bedroom version of “Machine Gun” the way we heard it, though the result may sound hesitant and claustrophobic.
For some reason Slowdive surpasses music for me and has become an idea at the back of my mind. I guess it has something to do with the combination of the band name and the atmosphere. Pygmalion is at the center of this idea or notion, so slow, mystical and drowning. Some days I like living my life like I don’t know if I’m half awake or half asleep and it’s that kind of an album.
Stuart Braithwaite (Mogwai)
Pygmalion came out the same year that we started Mogwai. They were out of vogue at that point. It was the birth of Britpop here, and at that point, the fashion was like a tidal wave. There wasn’t space for everything. Something was either in or it was out and I think Slowdive really felt the brunt of that.. I mean, some of those bands were good, but a lot of them were really, really, really bad and certainly not even in the same league as My Bloody Valentine or Codeine or any of these bands that we really felt that we wanted to do something of a similar weight. There is a lovely moral in the fact that Melody Maker’s crumbled but Slowdive are playing to thousands of people a night. I think that’s the good guys winning for once.
That summer when they came back, I remember asking Rachel about what other festivals they’d done and they actually played like one festival ever. The band had put out a handful of albums where suddenly no one wanted to book them. It’s nice to see people that made music from the heart find a new generation of fans and get an unlikely status that they probably weren’t expecting. I’m sure they've been a little bit surprised about how warmly people have taken to them.
Sophie Allison (Soccer Mommy)
When I was in high school they were definitely the first shoegaze band I got into. They just have this way to encapsulate these ambient sounds into their songs that just are really calming, and feel like they kind of blend into one noise. And then just having beautiful, soft, airy melodies kind of cutting through them. That’s something that I just immediately loved, and then I fell in love with the underlying songs too.
Pygmalion isn’t the most well-known one. But it’s also a pretty ambitious next step from the previous album. Especially at its time. It was a little bit weirder and not something people were doing as much then. There were some drum machines and stuff on it that weren’t exactly like what they had done before. It’s something that I respect a lot, and it’s a cool part of their career. They’re legends. And bands coming back 20 years later is usually not great, but the new album is pretty fucking good.
Oliver Ackermann (A Place to Bury Strangers)
Listening to all sorts of music and then finally discovering Slowdive was like you stepped into this other world. The music was just so intense, and beautiful, and otherworldly. When we would be driving around smoking weed or hanging out and walking around the forest, It was just the perfect soundtrack. You feel like you’re in space hurtling through the universe. That’s what Slowdive’s music even sort of sounds like. I was totally hooked.
They would create these really huge stereo spaces. It would even be scary at times, where there’d be these pounding drum sounds like they’re coming from miles away then slowly getting closer and closer. I love music where you’re not even quite exactly sure what’s going on. It sounds like it’s being played by people from another dimension or something. That’s what Slowdive did so well.
What people always want to do sort of as an artist is take things to some other place, and that’s I think what Slowdive was doing with Pygmalion. They were young kids at the time before that, figuring out even how to create music. I think some of that earlier music was hiding behind some of the effects. Pygmalion finally homed in on the sounds they had been striving for at times, and through the feeling of it and not just some crazy effect. I really loved that record.
Adam Jones (S U R V I V E)
I was totally, deeply enveloped by Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and Tortoise, and bands like Stars of the Lid, or Labradford. So I fell into Slowdive, and Pygmalion felt a lot more like the ambient, post rock that I identified most with. Slowdive, in particular Pygmalion, was a big influence on me. I was still a little bit further off from appreciating a lot of classic pop music, and Brian Eno’s production brilliance, and stuff like that. So out of all their catalog, Pygmalion was the one that spoke to me, because it was the least pop.
I know that this is probably something that people say all the time, but I used to throw on Pygmalion when I was going to sleep, you know? And it took me a while to actually be pretty familiar with all the songs on it, because I would always pass out before it would finish. I thought that was really great about it. It just sort of became the quintessential Slowdive album for me, personally. I love how it starts off with a 10-minute song. “Rutti” sets the pace right away. I love their self-titled album, too; they’ve been able to more truly capture their essence as a band with their newest album. But Pygmalion still has a more personal attachment with me.
Harmony Tividad (Girlpool)
So much music I like is often lyrically or melodically focused, and their songs are great at both. But what I mainly turn to Slowdive for is a change of mindset. I love the atmosphere their songs create. The writing and the production create a universe to check out to. It feels otherworldly in some ways, like it’s super visceral and imaginative and kind of spacey in a way that’s rare.
I think I subconsciously incorporate their music into my world. I like that it’s so feeling-based, that’s really special. Sometimes when you’re writing a song, it’s less about thinking “Where should this go now?” than “Where does it feel like it needs to go?” There’s an element of intuition that their music masters. There’s this book about how our body is mostly water and music affects us because of all this water in our bodies and when they do science experiments, water reacts differently. So to me it’s like that. I feel like Slowdive is intuitively interacting with my body in way that’s otherworldly.
Pygmalion is a beautiful record. The fact that it was polarizing can sometimes be the most powerful thing. What’s interesting about today’s pop culture is that now, the most polarizing things sometimes become the most sensationalized and popular, but historically things that are different are considered freaky or off-base. Today it’s not consistently always different, but I feel like more often than not, when people take a strong change of direction, they’re rewarded and congratulated for it. Maybe people just failed to have perspective on the scope of what Slowdive were trying to make.
Michelle Zauner (Japanese Breakfast)
That was the greatest tour I’ve ever been on. Neil and Christian are just such phenomenal guitar players and their tones are so amazing. But they’re also the most humble people. They were so welcoming and so warm to us. I remember the first day, we played this beautiful theater in Minneapolis-St. Paul, and we had never played over a thousand-capacity venue. It was this really intense moment to go in and watch them soundcheck. They went 10 to 20 minutes over, which is so standard, and for every single one of them to come up and introduce themselves and apologize to me is such a rare thing. They had no pretentiousness at all. All of them would watch our shows from side stage. They bought us a bottle of champagne on our last night together. We hung out and all went to karaoke afterwards. It was just so wonderful to see that you can have that long of a career and make such legendary music and still just be a really good person. It’s so easy to get jaded in this industry and it really gave me so much hope for having a long-lasting career. If there’s any model for a band, I definitely want to have that kind of attitude of just like, “If Slowdive can be that kind to you and generous to you, that’s how you treat an opening band.”
I love Rachel’s voice so much. I feel lame because I’m not really talking about their music very much, which means a lot to me. They have the most beautiful, lush, ethereal songs. I could just die in any of them. But I really want to stress how wonderful they are to tour with and I just learned so much from them as people.
