The 50 Best Shoegaze Albums of All Time

Every music genre has two things in common: 1) No two people agree on its precise boundaries; 2) Artists dislike being labeled as such.

Shoegaze is no different. It’s a particularly unusual genre in that its name describes neither a sound nor a connection to music history. This music is, above all else, a place to explore the outer limits of guitar texture. And emotionally, shoegaze turns its focus inward. The extreme noise eliminates the possibility of socializing while the music is playing, leaving each member of the audience alone with their thoughts. It’s music for dreaming.

For our purposes, we chose as a starting point for shoegaze the years following the release of the Jesus and Mary Chain’s landmark Psychocandy, when the many bands influenced by their approach to guitar integrated the noise into new pop contexts. From there, our story of shoegaze expands outward, stretching beyond its initial explosion in the early ’90s and incorporating more instrumental contexts and approaches to the style along the way.

Offering another perspective on what it all means is Pete Kember/Sonic Boom, whose early band Spacemen 3 wielded a great deal of influence on the records that follow.

Where Were You in ’91?

If you had told me in 1991 that, 25 years later, I would be prefacing a list on shoegaze, I would probably have told you it would never happen. Few of these bands paid even the slightest, fleeting lip service to commerciality. I couldn’t see it.

But things change; even by 1993, I was redressing my views. I played a show that year in L.A. at Johnny Depp’s Viper Room. The support band, to my complete amazement, was a shoegaze band—a Mexican shoegaze band. The thought that this music might cut through cultures with such broad swathes had never occurred to me before, but now I could see this genre might have long legs, in between that gaze and those shoes.

Drifting back further, my memory of the British hack who first coined the term “shoegaze” was that he was being derogatory. It was a put-down, no question. And when the shoegazer moniker didn’t seem to irritate enough, the same wags started referring to these bands as “the scene that celebrates itself,” based apparently on the fact that these bands dug each others' music. Dear oh dear.

The funny thing is, like most of these genre tag inventions of the media, such as “punk” or “grunge,” the term “shoegaze” stuck—and apparently, it stuck hard.

So who put the sole in shoegaze? Were the shoegaze bands solely looking to their suede for inspiration? I think not. The long bangs and fuzz pedal fever of the time made any downward-looking aim nigh impossible to pinpoint, and whilst I'm not saying these bands did not have the hippest footwear, I think it was what was underneath them that was key: the pedals. It's a lot about the pedals. Effects that could take the meekest guitar and make it roar like a doorman on steroids, or soar like jet planes in an aerobatics display. Creating sounds you could actually taste and smell.

So while we’re looking down, let’s discuss the roots. Spacemen 3 have sometimes been referred to as “godfathers of shoegaze,” and that may be true in some small part; I may not be the best judge of that. But, for my coin, it was My Bloody Valentine that held the alpha DNA.

Spacemen 3 had been asked to support the Pixies on their first big UK tour in the fall of 1988. We didn’t want to. MBV, however, did, and I went to see their show and offer solidarity at one of the local black holes, the strangely named Roadmenders Centre in Northampton. Sure, I’d seen them before at shows we’d played together, but something had changed. The whole set was epic, faultless, but one song stood out in particular: a warped, staggering guitar voyage that seemed to encompass the quintessence of psychedelia. Pulsing waves. Building elliptical loops. A reverbed synchromesh of vocals, bass, drums, and guitar. Looming to unholy crescendos, then, devastatingly, snatching them away. Evaporating into a silken heat haze to rematerialize again out of the effervescence, stronger and more entrancing each time.

That song was “You Made Me Realise.” And so a genre was born.

So, we’ve mused the spark, we’ve considered the slights. What else are the keys? Culture in the early ’90s went into the sort of elastic overdrive it tends to do once every couple of decades. Special periods of super-stimulated energies and interests, and the role of the newly emergent drug ecstasy, should not be underestimated.

But time is perception, and perception was key to these times and this music. In reality, what begat shoegaze doesn't matter a fraction as much as the records made in that period. Some of these bands went on to considerable success—the Mercury Revs, My Bloody Valentines, and Brian Jonestowns—whilst others disappeared in a cosmic flash, but left behind stellar recordings that'll be enjoyed for eons. Bands who made records people have never stopped pulling from the racks, a few of them on this list.

I think it’s fair to say the early ’90s fluoresced like neon. And at times, so did shoegaze.

Pete Kember is a musician, producer, and founding member of Spacemen 3.

Xinlisupreme: Tomorrow Never Comes

Of all the bands on this list, Xinlisupreme, the Japanese duo of Yasumi Okano and Takayuki Shouji, are perhaps the furthest from shoegaze in the purest sense of the term. They move between a few different sounds on their 2002 debut Tomorrow Never Comes, from industrial clang to dark-leather, Suicide-style rhythmic relentlessness. But the heart of their approach is abrasive guitar noise speckled with melodic glitter, a blast of sound that owes everything to what makes shoegaze special. Xinlisupreme’s secret is found in excess; there are many moments here where the noise saturation seems as dense as it could possibly be, and then an extra crank on the distortion knob sends it into the stratosphere. It’s music of extremes, exploring what lurks behind the wall of static. Shoegaze’s influence in metal has been well documented, but its intersection with noise music is just as significant. Tomorrow Never Comes sits squarely at that meeting point. –Mark Richardson

Listen: Xinlisupreme: “You Died in the Sea”

All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavors: Turning Into Small

Toward the end of the ’90s, shoegaze was in a lull. The majority of the original wave of bands had either broken up or morphed into something more streamlined; meanwhile, only a handful of new bands had popped up to supplant them. All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavors were a bright spot in that relative emptiness; hailing from New Jersey, the outfit released its second album, Turning Into Small, in 1998. Steeped in oceanic pressures as well as stratospheric swirl, it serve as a celebration of all things My Bloody Valentine-like.

But the album is no mere act of revivalism. Amid all the traditional shoegaze signposts—cosmically blissful riffage, demure vocals, disorienting undertow—were ambitious, dynamic arrangements and studio wizardry that sat somewhere between post-rock and Radiohead. Before shoegaze came back into vogue in the 21st century, Turning Into Small not only kept the flame alive, it humbly upped the genre’s game. –Jason Heller

Listen: All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavors: “Your Imagination”

Nothing: Tired of Tomorrow

In the grand turmoil of shoegaze, vocals are stretched into abstract bellows and moans, processed into strips and steam. They’re mixed to become modest conduits for the whole. Which makes the carnage of Nothing’s lyrics all the more striking, and the more insidious. The Philly band is “The Walking Dead” of gorgeous guitar rock, a troupe of former hardcore punks with a troubled, ex-con frontman whose sunny, psychedelic gloss yields to a decaying core. On the group’s second album, Tired of Tomorrow, singer Domenic Palermo’s wordplay is inversely blunt and graphic; on the sprawling “A.C.D. (Abcessive Compulsive Disorder),” his pleading to his lost love includes shuddering imagery like, “Swallow corrosive confection/Decay, rotting in your womb/I can wallow in your filth.”

Still, Tired of Tomorrow rings dreamily throughout, from insistent, anthemic guitar crescendos to Palermo’s sweeping, rasping moans that nod to Kurt Cobain. The heavy guitar squall of the title track opens with him mewling, “The train moves east/Where the mouths of Heaven/Devour me” from a graveyard. It’s as close as Nothing get to bliss, though their guitars have already offered it. –Stacey Anderson

Listen: Nothing: “A.C.D. (Abcessive Compulsive Disorder)”

The Telescopes: Taste

The function of telescopes is to help people see more clearly—but in the group named after them, things get more nebulous. The band has tread between shoegaze, psychedelic noise, and shimmering pop since they formed in Burton upon Trent, England, in the late ’80s, and they’ve remained opaque throughout; the founding singer/guitarist Stephen Lawrie is either charming or maddeningly cryptic in interviews, depending on who’s telling the story. When asked by the blog When the Sun Hits what his life philosophy is, he replied simply with, “#”.

Luckily, the Telescopes’ debut album, Taste, is a sumptuous example of how music can communicate what language can’t. It was released in 1989, when shoegaze was still fledgling, and it’s a varied sampler of the eventual staples of shoegaze: zonked-out space rock, drone-laced rhythms, gossamer guitars. The divergence from the eventual genre lies in Lawrie’s vocals, which don’t so much swoon as sock you in the stomach, especially on the lysergic “Threadbare.” On Taste, that shock to the senses proves enlightening. –Paula Mejia

Listen: The Telescopes: “Threadbare”

lovesliescrushing: Bloweyelashwish

Shoegaze records can initially sound off, imbalanced; the guitars are so centered and swollen and the drums are buried so deep in the mix, the result can feel more like a manufacturing error than an intentional design. Bloweyelashwish, the debut album by Scott Cortez and Melissa Arpin-Duimstra of Lovesliescrushing, is so extreme with these elements, it almost feels like something committed to tape that was corrosive or half-melted. (Fittingly, it was initially released on cassette, and took two more years to come out on CD.) There are no drums, just loops and implied pulses, and the guitars are occasionally so processed that they escape traditional effects—the Michigan duo approach the sound of the ocean (“Dizzy”), the creak of a door in a haunted house (“Fur”), or a jet engine that is producing, deep within its frequency, an angelic tone cluster (“Halo”). Like its title, the album is a compression; Bloweyelashwish can function as shoegaze, ambient, and harsh noise. It’s a Brutalist column of prettiness. –Brad Nelson

Listen: Loveliescrushing: “Halo”

Drop Nineteens: Delaware

In many ways, shoegaze can be considered a quintessentially British genre. Not only was its name coined by the notoriously fickle UK press, but the majority of shoegaze bands share a common geography that informs their sound—not just a cohesive physical scene, but a working-class Englishman ethos. However, in the early 1990s, a small handful of contemporary U.S. bands were melding American college rock with the main characteristics of shoegaze, taking cues from bands like Galaxie 500 and Dinosaur Jr. and marrying their fuzzed-out guitars and introspective lyrics with the more sonically expansive, atmospheric production of Kevin Shields and company.

Delaware, the debut album by Boston’s Drop Nineteens, has a confessional and poetic aura that’s completely in line with the alt-rock of the era. Singers/guitarists Greg Ackell and Paula Kelley’s assertive-yet-sweet vocals intertwine seamlessly around lyrics of mournful youths and angelic first loves. But there’s an undercutting edginess to Delaware that distances itself further from typical shoegaze dreaminess; “Reberrymemberer” spews a grunginess reminiscent of Pixies’ more experimental moments. Operating under and isolated from the shoegaze umbrella simultaneously, Delaware sets Drop Nineteens squarely in a league of their own. –Cameron Cook

Listen: Drop Nineteens: “Reberrymemberer”

Autolux: Future Perfect

If Elliott Smith had channeled his bruised musings into shoegaze, he might have sounded a bit like Autolux. On the group’s debut, Future Perfect, co-vocalists Eugene Goreshter and Carla Azar share his talent for spinning angular, affecting imagery; on the saccharine “Sugarless,” the two sing, “Leave your mask inside its box/Smile cold anatomy/Teeth like stars you start to freeze” behind steady guitar groans and Azar’s brawny drums. The album is a muscled display of songs that invert common tropes; in “Great Days for the Passenger Element,” Autolux twist a common shoegazing theme, dreaming, into more sinister territory. “We don’t know what side we’re on/Dreaming with our heads cut off,” they wail. If nightmares always sounded this pretty, we’d welcome them every time. –Paula Mejia

Listen: Autolux: “Great Days for the Passenger Element”

The Veldt: Afrodisiac

Centered around the North Carolina twins Danny and Daniel Chavis (on guitar and vocals, respectively), the Veldt could never be pigeonholed, no matter how hard the world tried to put the African-American brothers and their bandmates into a box. Their full-length debut, Afrodisiac, is the great lost American shoegaze classic, with influences from Prince to Cocteau Twins to A.R. Kane to the Jesus and Mary Chain (who contributed a remix) fused into something beautiful and unique. Daniel’s sweet, beautiful singing and Danny’s shimmer and crunch just keep clicking with the help of bassist David Burris and drummer Marvin Levi. Whether it’s the lead single “Soul in a Jar,” the slow swoon of “Heather,” or the exultant skyscraping “Until You’re Forever,” Afrodisiac is packed with songs that should have been massive hits. The one-two punch of “You Take the World” and “Revolutionary Sister”—dual acknowledgements of power, struggle, and love—are anthems that demand to be heard. –Ned Raggett

Listen: The Veldt: “Soul in a Jar”

Adorable: Against Perfection

The rise and fall of Adorable mirrors that of shoegaze itself. The band played their first gig in January 1991, right at the start of shoegaze’s imperial phase, and released their debut album Against Perfection in March 1993, when Suede were the new media darlings. Between these two points, Adorable released a run of singles strong enough to cement their place in shoegaze lore, including the epic hubris of “I’ll Be Your Saint” and the sky-scraping bounce of “Sistine Chapel Ceiling.” “Sunshine Smile,” in particular, exemplifies all that is stellar about Adorable: a spidery guitar riff that explodes into beatific distortion, singer Pete Fijalkowski’s languid, Ian McCulloch-esque croon, and a rhythm section that burns with the nervous energy of young love. –Ben Cardew

Listen: Adorable: “Sunshine Smile”

Starflyer 59: Gold

Jason Martin, the principal songwriter and sole lifelong member behind Starflyer 59, was raised in a strictly Christian household that banned secular music. Sometime in his early teens, as he snuck through his school buddies’ record collections, he discovered the explosion of British indie music that had recently washed ashore onto U.S. college radio: the Smiths, New Order, the Cure, and, most importantly, My Bloody Valentine—the band that most clearly influenced his future act.

Gold, Starflyer 59’s second LP, is their most indebted to shoegaze but it also harbors post-grunge heaviness and gritty, feedback-laden riffs. Nonetheless, Martin’s vocals-as-instrument approach to singing and his layers upon layers of gigantic, sludgy guitars cement Gold as an essential entry in the small-but-powerful pantheon of American shoegaze, a stellar interpretation of the genre through the lens of Californian noise-pop. –Cameron Cook

Listen: Starflyer 59: “When You Feel Miserable”

Curve: Doppelgänger

Curve’s great innovation was marrying densely cloistered electronic rhythms with the approaching onslaught of noise-pop. Prior to their 1992 debut Doppelgänger, such a blend didn't exist, but Curve pioneered the sound that eventually became widespread; their own doppelgänger, Garbage, made a mint with this fusion just a few years later. Curve have stronger ties to shoegaze than Garbage, however, not just because of their timing but also their articulation: Vocalist Toni Halliday and multi-instrumentalist Dean Garcia favor fuzziness in sound and style, letting aesthetics bleed together, preferring sensation over sculpted song. On Doppelgänger, the duo demonstrates a strong melodic sense that’s as apparent in the riffs and rhythms as the verses themselves. Halliday also remains unique in shoegaze: She’s a singer who pushes herself to the forefront, stealing attention from the tidal waves of noise and distortion that surround her. –Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Listen: Curve: “Horror Head”

Windy & Carl: Antarctica (The Bliss Out, Vol. 2)

Windy & Carl keep their feet in the clouds and stare downwards on Antarctica, three extended instrumental tracks that detail icy patterns so vivid, they seem to transform into language. Similar to their fellow husband/wife noisemakers in Yo La Tengo, Windy Weber and Carl Hultgren find ways to be quiet and loud at the same time, their overtones and oscillations creating secret melodies well suited for closed-eye contemplation.

Where 1996’s Drawing of Sound submerged Windy’s vocals and shimmering songforms in great, open spaces sans percussion, Antarctica lives entirely in the space between Weber and Hultgren’s guitars. Three albums into a discography that would influence bands like Deerhunter, the shapes of “Sunrise” suggest ambient music as much as hidden beach-pop hymns. Without the distraction of lyrics, Windy & Carl, two Michigan record store owners, answer the central question of shoegaze: What’s down there? As drone musicians, throat singers, and overtone-lovers around the world know: everything. On Antarctica, the duo stakes a claim for the only continent without a musical tradition of its own. –Jesse Jarnow

Listen: Windy & Carl: “Sunrise”

A Place to Bury Strangers: A Place to Bury Strangers

The Jesus and Mary Chain’s position as a proto-shoegaze band had long been cemented by 2007—and yet, few young shoegaze bands were drawing direct inspiration from them. In that sense, A Place to Bury Strangers got back to basics with their self-titled debut of that year. Armed with deafening waves of Psychocandy-esque noise and pounding, elemental beats, singer/guitarist Oliver Ackermann and crew unleashed a razor-sharp cacophony that slashed away shoegaze’s gauzier tendencies. In their place, Ackermann mixed sugary melodies with the harshest output of his formidable, home-built effects pedals. Accordingly, songs like “To Fix the Gash in Your Head” revel in ultraviolence, sadomasochistic perversity, and a machinelike edge that borders on the industrial. Shoegaze may be stereotyped as pretty and sad, but A Place to Bury Strangers reassert that the genre has always cleared a little space for the twisted and transgressive. –Jason Heller

Listen: A Place to Bury Strangers: “To Fix the Gash in Your Head”

Asobi Seksu: Citrus

Shoegaze prompts staring down at the ground in a noise-induced stupor, but on Citrus, Asobi Seksu soar towards the heavens. The Brooklyn band’s second record pulls its influence from the luscious and bright fruit of its title; singing in both Japanese and English, Yuki Chikudate’s soprano vocals skyrocket joyfully across James Hanna’s careful guitar washes. Chikudate’s voice has received comparisons to Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins, and James’ guitar textures have reaped the inevitable My Bloody Valentine association, but Asobi Seksu create their own distinct sound by focusing on a poppier side of shoegaze—there’s even a sample of “And Then He Kissed Me” in Citrus. “Thursday” drives itself into a fuzzy frenzy while “New Years” sounds downright indie-pop with its perky drums, dreamy vocals, and psychedelic swirl. Years before the wider nü-gaze revival that begat DIIV and Ringo Deathstarr, Asobi Seksu loaned some sunshine to shoegaze. –Quinn Moreland

Listen: Asobi Seksu: “Thursday”

Bowery Electric: Bowery Electric

Shoegaze balances control and chaos; the noise of an electric guitar feeding back always feels like it could explode at any moment and in a fit of atonal noise, but the right performer knows how to steer the din where the music needs it to go. Bowery Electric, a New York City-based rock band formed by Lawrence Chandler and Martha Schwendener, favored a kind of steely precision. Though the guitars on their 1995 self-titled debut are plenty loud and heavy, the music also has a cool distance to it, a tension that is always bubbling under but never fully explodes. This design-heavy approach meant that they’d later be quite comfortable in the world of head-nodding trip-hop. Their 1996 album, Beat, is almost as good as their debut, incorporating then-trendy breakbeats in an organic way, while their 2000 swan song Lushlife finds them trying too hard to be fashionable, sounding like a demo reel for commercial synch opportunities. The debut was the perfect realization of their aesthetic, each word and chord tuned and focused for maximum impact. –Mark Richardson

Listen: Bowery Electric: “Next to Nothing”

A Sunny Day in Glasgow: Ashes Grammar

For a genre that obsesses over studio trickery and pedalboard setups, shoegaze still puts a premium on being able to pull it off live—and A Sunny Day in Glasgow certainly try, anyway, but what they’re attempting is often too complex. Most of the time, they’re less a rock band than a think tank, an oft-rotating cast of six or seven musicians with equally great ideas trying to get their point across at the same time. Ashes Grammar takes a break from their usual mashup approach for something more reminiscent of a DJ mix. It covers a lot of ground in its hour, but whether it’s a 10-second madrigal, two-minute drone interlude or the inexhaustible trance-pop of “Close Chorus,” every one of Ashes Grammar’s 22 tracks sprawls out until realization, given as much time as it needs to play out. Can the band recreate any of this onstage? No more than you can recall any of your dreams exactly as they happened. –Ian Cohen

Listen: A Sunny Day in Glasgow: “Close Chorus”

Pale Saints: In Ribbons

Pale Saints had already released their debut, The Comforts of Madness, when Lush’s former singer Meriel Barham joined the lineup in late 1990. By the time they recorded their final LP, 1994’s Slow Buildings, the founding frontman and bassist Ian Masters had left. The brief overlap in their tenures was a golden age for the band, culminating with In Ribbons, an album of such sulky charisma that Option magazine crowned the co-vocalists “the Glimmer Twins minus the heroin.”

Instead of chasing shoegaze oblivion, Pale Saints usually wallowed in melancholy; their music might’ve earned a different genre descriptor if they hadn’t formed in Leeds during the late ’80s. The word “pain” comes up over and over on In Ribbons, and its effects can be unsettling: There’s a ferocity to Chris Cooper’s hard, fast drumming on “Ordeal” that borders on industrial, while “Hair Shoes” quavers with anxiety. “Shell” is practically slowcore, its somber strings, glockenspiel, and Masters’ Nico-thick vocals radiating depressive lethargy. But with Barham’s breathiness balancing out Masters’ ponderous, androgynous voice and producer Hugh Jones limiting the deployment of feedback squalls, In Ribbons is a less chaotic revision of Madness. It preserves the brooding core of Pale Saints’ music without letting that darkness devour every glimpse of light. –Judy Berman

Listen: Pale Saints: “Ordeal”

The Brian Jonestown Massacre: Methodrone

Like the mid-’60s British Invasion, the late-’80s shoegaze explosion in the UK yielded a crop of mop-topped disciples stateside, albeit on a much smaller scale. But for Anton Newcombe, these two moments in rock history were equally significant. On the Brian Jonestown Massacre’s 1995 debut, he effectively folds the two eras into one another, spiking his Stones with Spacemen 3 drone and introducing an uncommon sneer and swagger to a genre synonymous with wallflowery anti-pop introverts.

Methodrone opened the floodgates to a furiously active period in which the BJM released seven albums in three years, with Newcombe dabbling in everything from Indian psychedelia to mod-punk rave-ups to Dylan-esque folk rambles, but it wouldn’t be long before the band’s unruly reputation for onstage fisticuffs and sitar-toppling arguments started to overshadow their prolific output. In hindsight, Methodrone represents the calm-before-the-storm moment of sustained bliss and holistic consistency for the band, where even the jangle pop gems (“That Girl Suicide”) and bad-trip jams (“Hyperventilation”) feel connected to the same fuzzy frequency. –Stuart Berman

Listen: The Brian Jonestown Massacre: “That Girl Suicide”

Alcest: Souvenirs D'un Autre Monde

The blur of black metal and the blur of shoegaze: When both genres began flourishing in the early 1990s, the similarities weren’t readily apparent. But by the early 2000s, their convergence seemed inevitable. The French musician Neige drifted away from the black metal scene in 2005 with the debut EP from his melodic, melancholic band Amesoeurs, but it took the first full-length by his next project—Souvenirs D’un Autre Monde by Alcest—to consummate his dual passions for black metal and shoegaze. The 2007 album’s title translates as “memories from another world”—accordingly, Neige imbued its six tracks with translucent acoustic guitars, sky-shaking thunderheads of distortion, and tender, wispy harmonies. The songwriting reaches for the cosmos, even as the record’s propulsive intensity is a constant reminder of Alcest’s metal ancestry. At the same time, it reinvented shoegaze for a new century, proving just how renewable a sonic resource it could be. –Jason Heller

Listen: Alcest: “Les Iris”

Ulrich Schnauss: A Strangely Isolated Place

Ulrich Schnauss wasn’t the first electronic musician to be inspired by the blissed-out and dreaming side of shoegaze; the genre had already embraced ambient and techno. But Schnauss’ second album under his own name, A Strangely Isolated Place, became a 21st century standout in what was sometimes, in unwieldy fashion, called “electrogaze.”

A Strangely Isolated Place isn’t simply a revamp of the early ’90s; the longer reach of ’70s synth/space acts and ambient pioneers filtered down as well, and little surprise Schnauss is now a member of Tangerine Dream. Yet from the start, with the tones of “Gone Forever” often suggesting an early Slowdive guitar flow, Schnauss shows his teenage years spent listening to all kinds of first-wave acts from the UK and beyond. Suggesting the aesthetic of a full band at points, with a coolly bubbling rigor—especially the shuffling breakbeats and ringing tones of “A Letter From Home”—Schnauss further combines that with elegant, often surprisingly spare arrangements that entice rather than crush. Meanwhile, vocal parts arc gently through the songs, half-heard calls that hover, beautifully, on the edge of comprehension. –Ned Raggett

Listen: Ulrich Schnauss: “A Letter From Home”

Blonde Redhead: 23

By 2007, the New York trio Blonde Redhead had been celebrated for over a decade as cerebral art-rockers, cult favorites of their lane; the upending of their tight, neurotic structures on 23 was a release of reigns. The group’s seventh (and first self-produced) album, it’s a thrilling spread that feels spontaneous and vigorous. Simone and Amedeo Pace offer a deep gravity in sprawling, warm guitars than pulse and blush, piano lines that puncture, and tinny hi-hat percussion that conveys only a mote of passing time. Singer Kazu Makino channels the glum wonderment of classic shoegaze in the title track, sighing with featherweight elegance, “23 seconds, all things we love will die/23 magic, if you can change your life,” while Amedeo Pace’s distorted vocals on “Publisher” edge ever-closer to bluesy yelps over draping, mathy guitars and subtle electronic fuzz. It’s artful in its lack of borders. –Stacey Anderson

Listen: Blonde Redhead: “23”

Medicine: Shot Forth Self Living

Medicine hail from sunny Los Angeles, not exactly a hub for shoegazers. But what makes this trio an indelible part of “the scene that celebrates itself,” across a pond and then a continent, is the roaring, fuzz-laden music of their debut, Shot Forth Self Living. The album’s resonant centerpiece, a chugging dirge cheekily named “A Short Happy Life,” features vocalist Beth Thompson crooning, “If you smile now, I just might melt” and evoking images of “honey sliding across the floor.” Beneath the tinnitus-inducing feedback, Medicine often fixate on love’s slow fade, that familiar theme of many shoegazing songs, balancing it with less likely doses of off-kilter instrumentation and effects (banjo, a ham radio, the hurdy-gurdy). Rick Rubin’s label released it in America, and it was a heady, if under-embraced, boost to the standard shoegaze formula. –Paula Mejia

Listen: Medicine: “A Short Happy Life”

Bardo Pond: Amanita

On Amanita—named for the bright red, white-speckled mushrooms that look like they’d provide great trips—Bardo Pond find the heart in fuzz. Guitarists and brothers Michael and John Gibbons uncoil blasted-out lines that instinctively channel what the 1960s psychedelic godfathers 13th Floor Elevators called “the third voice.” Here, Bardo Pond find their power in churning jam structures, the kind that suggest someone left Neil Young and Crazy Horse in a barn and returned a few days later to find them still going, their jangle pleasantly warped.

Bardo Pond’s third album and debut on Matador Records, *Amanita *provides a (relatively) hi-fi entry point for the band's massive and continuous output. The third voice emerges almost literally throughout in a mixed-for-mindblows swirl of near-pop anthems (“Sometimes Words”) and silver, flute-lined zone portals (“The High Frequency”). Shoegazers, perhaps, by a dint of looking for the nearest local hallucination, not all of the Philadelphia band’s psychedelic advice is necessarily good wisdom for trippers. And don’t eat the red, speckled mushrooms. –Jesse Jarnow

Listen: Bardo Pond: “The High Frequency”

Lush: Spooky

Shortly after the release of their debut album, Spooky, Lush were invited to play Lollapalooza’s mainstage by Perry Farrell himself. It helped the London quartet break through stateside, but was still a less-than-likely festival booking—because, unlike other rock records of the early 1990s, Spooky doesn’t rely on blistering noise to make its points. Its brilliant intricacies remain best appreciated alone, through headphones, and preferably in a room where long shadows creep onto the walls. Each element in the mix—from the caffeinated basslines in “For Love” to the reverbed guitars in “Fantasy”—is layered on thickly yet proportionately. Its lyrical themes, which range from hazy dreams to long-lost friends, are helmed adroitly by co-vocalists and guitarists Emma Anderson and Miki Berenyi—together, they set a template for the kind of wistful musings that shoegaze became known for. Their incantations are only frightening in how wonderful they are. –Paula Mejia

Listen: Lush: “For Love”

Flying Saucer Attack: Further

In the early ’90s, the Bristol, England shop Revolver Records served as an informal hub for bands who were picking up where Loveless left off. Foremost in this loose scene were Flying Saucer Attack; on their early 7'' singles, the duo of Dave Pearce and Rachel Brook explored a sound that broadened the immersive guitar whorls of traditional shoegaze to encompass elements of krautrock and British folk. It was a style neatly summed up by the alternate title listed on FSA’s 1993 self-titled album: “rural psychedelia.”

Further, FSA’s 1995 Domino debut, best encapsulates their approach, with feedback squalls, fingerpicked lullabies, and throbbing low-end falling equally into place in a gorgeous, heavily textured expanse. It isn’t hard to hear links to Further in an impressively varied array of acts, from the misty electronics of Boards of Canada to the avant-folk of Richard Youngs, from the skyscraping interludes of early Deerhunter to the abstracted intimacy of Grouper. FSA continued to refine their sound on later albums, despite Brook’s mid-’90s departure, and last year, Pearce returned with the first FSA album in 15 years, Instrumentals 2015. Still, Further remains their apex. –Marc Hogan

Listen: Flying Saucer Attack: “Still Point”

The Boo Radleys: Giant Steps

The Boo Radleys’ songwriter/guitarist, Martin Carr, named his band’s 1993 album after John Coltrane’s 1959 LP, but Giant Steps also is a winking acknowledgment of another kind: He's the first to know that the Liverpool quartet has taken a huge leap forward. Although they hardly renounce the thunderous swirl and delicate suspension of 1992’s Everything's Alright Forever, the Boo Radleys treat that candied rush as an absorbed language, with Carr choosing to pursue a grand vision that unifies psychedelia, British guitar-pop, jazz, and dub. Part of the appeal of Giant Steps is that the Boo Radleys’ enthusiasm leads them to attempt fusions that would scare away other bands: Witness “Lazarus,” which begins with an elastic reggae beat before becoming consumed by sheets of guitars, wispy harmonies, and stabs of brass. “Lazarus” is essentially Giant Steps in microcosm, but the album gains strength through its own untrammeled ambition. At the dawn of britpop, the Boo Radleys chose expanding consciousness over provincial patriotism, and the results are still majestic. –Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Listen: The Boo Radleys: “Lazarus”

Lilys: In the Presence of Nothing

In their earliest years, the Lilys never could disguise their debt to My Bloody Valentine. In the Presence of Nothing—a stellar shoegaze title that conveys a giant, shimmering abyss but was intended as a jab at Velvet Crush’s debut In the Presence of Greatness—opens with “There’s No Such Thing as Black Orchids,” five minutes of oceanic waves of drone that consciously conjure memories of Loveless.

Though the Lilys never quite managed to mimic the crushing volume of Kevin Shields and co., that subtlety was to their benefit. Kurt Heasley and Archie Moore’s guitars intertwine, the punchy rhythms fighting with the fuzz, all providing a muscular bed for the band’s whispered, circular melodies. Sometimes, the Lilys descend into moments of stillness, but they’re never dull: They provides a necessary contrast to the thick, urgent beauty that drives this debut. Ultimately, it’s not the similarities to My Bloody Valentine that are the great takeaway from In the Presence of Nothing: It’s the sense of tarnished sweetness that lingers. –Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Listen: The Lilys: “There’s No Such Thing as Black Orchids”

Catherine Wheel: Ferment

Catherine Wheel were the black sheep of the shoegaze family. They came from Great Yarmouth, a depressed and depressing town on the English coast with little in the way of musical heritage; their lead singer, Rob Dickinson, was a cousin to Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson; and their four members seemed slightly older than their peers, with drummer Neil Sims having worked on an oil rig before the band took off. Musically, too, Catherine Wheel were different: While they embraced the swirling, distorted guitars and muttered vocals of shoegaze, their sound edged towards straight-up riff-rock at times, with nothing of My Bloody Valentine’s deviant experimentalism or Slowdive’s feathery beauty. What Catherine Wheel did have in abundance were goosebump-raising, brilliant songs that piled earworm choruses upon nagging guitar lines and lyrics that spoke to a generation of awkward adolescents (“I Want to Touch You,” “She’s My Friend,” “Shallow”). A good half of the songs on Ferment, their debut, are enduring shoegaze-disco classics, while “Black Metallic,” in its full seven-minute glory, makes a strong claim to being the genre’s “Stairway to Heaven.” –Ben Cardew

Listen: Catherine Wheel: “Black Metallic”

M83: Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts

Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts was M83’s first international success, but certainly not the last. Yet many of the new listeners gained from the later releases Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming and Before the Dawn Heals Us would probably find M83 unrecognizable here. On Dead Cities, Anthony Gonzalez and the since-departed member Nicolas Fromageau manage the most original take on shoegaze in years: It rings like the result of a year spent playing Nintendo while listening to Creation Records’ catalog, maintaining the overwhelming grandeur while ditching the guitars for 8-bit effects, sawtooth synths, and ringtone drum rolls.

Dead Cities has an awkward place in M83’s lineage now; it’s been absent from their live sets for years, where even their pedestrian self-titled debut gets its due. Still, present-day M83 can be heard in it. The same emotional components of Dead Cities that made it so confounding to shoegaze purists—that earnest optimism bundled with a deep respect for kitschy childhood nostalgia—make the band’s through line abundantly clear. –Ian Cohen

Listen: M83: “Unrecorded”

Pale Saints: The Comforts of Madness

Caught between the full torrent of noise that followed Loveless and the earliest glimmers of dream-pop, Pale Saints never achieved the fame accorded to some of their peers. But the abundant idiosyncrasies on their debut, The Comforts of Madness, only sound better with age. It trades upon the hazy harmonies of Cocteau Twins—not for nothing was this the first album 4AD released in the ’90s—while also suggesting the perpetual swirl of shoegaze and adhering to the indie-pop pioneered by graduates of C-86.

A few of the songs on The Comforts of Madness could be placed comfortably alongside those from the La’s, another 1990 debut of note, but Pale Saints never cast their gaze back. There’s a restless urgency here, particularly when the volume swells and the rhythms intensify. That energy not only keeps The Comforts of Madness vital, it emphasizes Pale Saints’ inventiveness, how they channeled softness and rage into something distinctive. –Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Listen: Pale Saints: “Sea of Sound”

Jesu: Jesu

When Justin Broadrick’s longstanding industrial metal outfit Godflesh called it quits in 2002, it seemed uncertain which direction he’d take next. But he’d already planted its seeds in “Jesu,” the final song on Godflesh’s 2001 album Hymns, which contained a hushed, prettily sung coda that couldn’t have been further from Broadrick’s usual aggression. In 2004, under the name Jesu, he released a self-titled album that proved the song wasn’t an ending but a beginning. Slow, sad, beautiful, and impossibly heavy, the record mixes shoegaze with hints of slowcore, industrial, and post-metal. Yet it feels nothing like a hybrid: It’s a work of whole cloth, its harsh edges and echoing melodies dissolving into a foreboding psychic expedition—not to mention a haunting vein of spiritual awe (“Your Path to Divinity,” “Guardian Angel,” “Walk on Water”). And in the 10-minute “Sun Day,” Broadrick crafts a song that’s as breathlessly enormous and blissfully bittersweet as any of shoegaze’s seminal classics. –Jason Heller

Listen: Jesu: “Sun Day”

Curve: Pubic Fruit

When Curve first emerged in 1991, on Eurythmics member Dave Stewart’s Anxious Records, some corners of the UK press snarked at them. The core members, vocalist Toni Halliday and instrumentalist Dean Garcia, had been in a failed ’80s band called State of Play, and there was a supposition that the two were scene-chasing shoegaze’s initial popularity. But then people heard their first EPs and saw their expanded live lineup and realized something: They weren’t just good, they were phenomenal.

Pubic Fruit collects the group’s first three EPs and a track from their fourth for handy listening, and it’s a murderer’s row of killer songs. On display are Halliday’s coolly powerful singing and frequently take-no-prisoners lyrics (“Die Like a Dog” trumps XTC’s “Dear God” any day as an atheist anthem), Garcia’s walls of feedback, and riffs that sound like a series of explosions in a guitar factory. The sense of rigor and density in the arrangements suggests contemporary industrial acts, laden with punching bass and pounding drum machines. Songs like “Ten Little Girls,” “No Escape From Heaven,” “Clipped,” and “Frozen” underscore Curve’s secret weapon time and again: a sublime, angry focus lurking alongside the scene’s general bliss. –Ned Raggett

Listen: Curve: “Die Like a Dog”

Kitchens of Distinction: Strange Free World

Kitchens of Distinction didn’t fit easily into the shoegaze scene but, much like the Chameleons were claimed by goths worldwide, Kitchens were widely embraced by the pedal brigade. Patrick Fitzgerald’s warm delivery and forthright depictions of gay and straight life, love, and loss were anything but dreamy sighs, Dan Goodwin’s drumming was both precise and a frenetic rush, and Julian Swales’ guitar heroics suggested a fusion of Neil Young in excelsis and Will Sergeant’s dramatic thrills for Echo and the Bunnymen. Strange Free World works as both a scene outlier and an encapsulation of shoegaze’s overwhelming power—the band’s second album, it matches the might of the famed Under the Wave Off Kanagawa painting on its cover. “Gorgeous Love” nearly shouts pride from mountaintops, “Polaroids” bitterly considers the impact of AIDS via memories and artifacts, “Quick as Rainbows” is a vivid relationship collapse, and all are shaped by Swales’ ear for thrilling performances. “Drive That Fast” might be the keeper, an album single that feels like a burst of unceasing energy, where burning out was never an actual option. –Ned Raggett

Listen: Kitchens of Distinction: “Drive That Fast”

Chapterhouse: Whirlpool

Though originally from Reading, England, Chapterhouse rose to indie acclaim in the ultra-insular, early-1990s London scene that begat Lush and Moose. What set Chapterhouse apart, specifically with the release of their debut full-length Whirlpool, was their ability to cross-reference all the elements of the budding shoegaze genre at once, and gel them cohesively into nine near-perfect tracks. Whirlpool gracefully bears the torch lit by its sonic forefathers only a few years before, marrying the jangly, acidic indie-pop aspects of very early My Bloody Valentine and the Jesus and Mary Chain with the ear-crunching blasts of distorted guitar and sustained vocal harmonies that came to represent shoegaze as a whole. Delving even deeper into the past, Chapterhouse also helped solidify the presence of ’60s psychedelia in shoegaze, nodding to wah-wah guitars and the Beatles circa “Tomorrow Never Knows.” Whirlpool remains an essential building block in the foundation of a genre that Chapterhouse helped perfect. –Cameron Cook

Listen: Chapterhouse: “Pearl”

Mercury Rev: Yerself Is Steam

Yerself Is Steam is the only album on this list to feature flutes, trumpets, and a percolating coffee machine used as a rhythm track. And in sharp contrast to shoegaze’s smeared, feminizing effects on male singing, Mercury Rev’s resident crackpot poet David Baker sounds like he’s curled up in your inner ear, an unshakeable voice in your head instructing you to commit terrible acts. But once guitarists Jonathan Donahue and Sean “Grasshopper” Mackowiack unleash that earth-quaking rupture of feedback at the 3:05 mark of “Chasing a Bee,” Mercury Rev’s place in the shoegaze canon is assured. In their primordial state, this band had the power to not just blow out your ears, but rearrange your guts, too.

And yet, even at their most anarchic, Mercury Rev rarely resort to noise for noise’s sake. Building on their formative experiences improvising art-film soundtracks at SUNY Buffalo, they sculpt their squall with a Cecil B. DeMille-esque flair for epically scaled drama, from the awesome, cardiac-arresting descent of “Sweet Oddysee of a Cancer Cell t’ th’ Center of Yer Heart” to the cosmic Crazy Horse churn of “Frittering” (which provided the first hint of the wounded, melancholic melodicism that would flourish on 1998’s Deserter’s Songs). Though the record was blistering enough to score Mercury Rev tours with My Bloody Valentine and Ride, Yerself Is Steam is really a shoegaze album in the inverse: Where their fuzz-pedaling peers obliterated the human presence in rock music through a cloud of distortion, Mercury Rev foregrounded the claustrophobic, panicky unease of being trapped inside it. –Stuart Berman

Listen: Mercury Rev: “Chasing a Bee”

Swervedriver: Raise

Loveless wasn’t the only great shoegaze album that Creation Records released in the fall of 1991. But where My Bloody Valentine dissolved their rock in aquatic textures, Swervedriver solidified miasma into muscle. On their debut full-length, Raise, the Oxford quartet refashion shoegaze into modern hot-rod music, harnessing its gliding momentum, fuzzbox fury, and Adam Franklin’s auto-erotic fixation (“Son of a Mustang Ford,” “Deep Seat”) into heart-racing, horizon-bound psych-punk. The guardrail-scraping acceleration of tracks like “Sci-Flyer” and “Pile-Up” is answered by the open-sunroof sway of “Rave Down” and “Sandblasted,” songs that serve as the connective tissue between UK shoegaze and American alt-rock after grunge. After all, Swervedriver may have been one of many flanger fetishists on the early ’90s Creation roster, but they were the only ones who could hold their own on tour with Soundgarden. –Stuart Berman

Listen: Swervedriver: “Sci-Flyer”

My Bloody Valentine: m b v

In February 2013, the most anyone could ask of My Bloody Valentine’s third album was that it exist. So when m b v was announced and rushed out on their comically overtaxed website the next day, no one seemed to mind that Kevin Shields hadn’t altered the trajectory of indie rock a second time. Whatever his intentions to modernize the band’s sound, inspiration cuts off sometime around the peak of drum'n'bass.

Still, the long-rumored m b v delivered: Beginning with the lingering, sooty exhaust of “she found now” and closing with a deafening, six-minute jet roar, it's the band at their grimiest (“who sees you”), glammiest (“new you”) and most disorienting (“nothing is”). It stands apart from their previous two classics, remaining distinct even after two decades of being arguably the most ripped-off band in existence. There’s a tendency for these long-gestating projects to draw raves, be shelved shortly thereafter, and be seen ultimately as an asterisk: m b v hasn’t entirely escaped this fate. And so m b v, the follow-up to Loveless, rests in history as the inconceivable: a My Bloody Valentine album that’s underappreciated. –Ian Cohen

Listen: My Bloody Valentine: “nothing is”

Seefeel: Quique

Seefeel straddled the line between shoegaze and electronic music, never quite sure if they were a rock band with a fondness for sequencers or an ambient-minded collective who used guitars. Given their bent toward cutting-edge electronics, it made perfect sense that they would later be Warp labelmates with Richard James, who remixed Seefeel on their 1993 EP Pure, Impure.

If those remixes showed how Seefeel’s music could easily be integrated into the angular world of IDM beats, their debut album from the same year, Quique, was a study in drifting beauty. Mostly instrumental, it finds Seefeel exploring the outer limits of drone and ambience, with rippling waves of sound that are hard to place precisely. Indeed, there’s barely a guitar strum on the record, as Mark Clifford uses the instrument as a tool for sound sculpture rather than a device for marking rhythm or melody. Gently undulating bass and drums undergird drones that seem to come from nowhere in particular and then, after radiating for seven or eight minutes, move back into the silence. Quique showed how the oceanic end of shoegaze could be found in a purely electronic world, opening up the music to bedroom producers in the coming decades. –Mark Richardson

Listen: Seefeel: “Polyfusion”

Slowdive: Pygmalion

If Slowdive’s Souvlaki is one of the albums that established shoegaze as a genre, then the band’s follow-up, Pygmalion, is its inverse. Shoegaze fills and warps space until it begins to resemble something else: a bruise, a rose, an abyss. Pygmalion is anti-shoegaze in how it prioritizes space: The instruments bend and shiver around emptiness instead of totally annihilating it. The chords in the 10-minute opener “Rutti” unfold from, then fold back into, an established silence. “Trellisaze” is built off a single chord drone that advances and recedes over distracted metallic percussion. The religious devotion to absence, to what isn’t there, draws the listener’s focus to what is present in abundance: Pygmalion’s mostly cellular changes in texture, the microscopic movements and evolutions. “Crazy for You” sounds like a captured and dissected shimmer; “Blue Skied An’ Clear” is an object that shifts from haunted to beautiful, depending on how the light hits it. –Brad Nelson

Listen: Slowdive: “Rutti”

Swirlies: Blonder Tongue Audio Baton

At the outset, shoegaze was a primarily British phenomenon, but a few American indie bands attempted the sound alongside. Chief among these were the Swirlies, a Boston quartet that originally surfaced in 1990. Blonder Tongue Audio Baton, their debut, appeared three years later, right as shoegaze was entering its decline in the UK and lo-fi was ascending in the U.S. The Swirlies existed in the center of these two scenes, their waves of distortion feeling tinny instead of full, their wistful harmonies seeming woozy instead of ethereal.

By blurring such distinctions and threading pulsating, semi-electronic collages throughout Blonder Tongue Audio Baton, the Swirlies were somewhat out of step with indie-rock in the ’90s. But their debut now seems prescient, particularly in the tussles of gnarled noise on “Pancake” or the precisely rendered pop of “Bell,” which floats upward on conjoining harmonies and insistent strums—sounds that remain part of the indie-pop firmament. Blonder Tongue Audio Baton thrives on this mixture of beauty, brawn, and brains, pointing directly toward what indie became in the new millennium. –Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Listen: The Swirlies: “Pancake”

Swervedriver: Mezcal Head

For all its trademark wistfulness and ethereality, shoegaze can rock, too. Swervedriver’s sophomore album, Mezcal Head, stands as a testament to the genre’s occasional bursts of hell-raising extroversion. Released in 1993, the record builds on the dynamism and forcefulness of 1991’s Raise; frontman Adam Franklin keeps all the velocity and volume, only he spikes things with even greater pop hooks and a more dexterous sense of songwriting. “Duel” flirts with the alt-rock bounce of Sugar even as it recalls the gargantuan riffage of Isn’t Anything-era My Bloody Valentine. “Last Train to Satansville” even sports a touch of surf. That’s not to say the album isn’t capable of dreaminess, as in the delicate touch of “Duress.” Even then, though, Franklin’s vocals stalk the foreground, smooth and clear, with an edge of menace. With Mezcal Head, Swervedriver brilliantly make the point that shoegaze, despite its name and reputation, doesn’t have to be bashful. –Jason Heller

Listen: Swervedriver: “Duel”

Catherine Wheel: Chrome

For their second album, Catherine Wheel hired the Pixies’ and Throwing Muses’ mastermind, Gil Norton, as a producer. It’s a considerably more focused record, both in songwriting and the visibility of its instrumentation; Norton sharpens what Ferment intentionally blurred, dragging a whirling shoegaze design around cleaner guitar tones and Rob Dickinson’s honeyed vocals. Every chord on Chrome is a crisp, metallic clang trapped in a halo of hazy and seductive noise, a membrane through which the individual notes branch like nerves.

Few rock records sound like this; there are only a few songs on Teenage Fanclub’s Bandwagonesque and Sugar’s Copper Blue that resemble Chrome’s gentle, blushing form of aggression, which generates songs as harsh and menacing as the title track and songs as celestial and full of dread as “Fripp.” Where many shoegaze bands would resign themselves to 2-3 monochromatic notes, Dickinson’s vocal melodies are dynamic, vivid, and exhibit an astral quality; they burn, shimmer, and glow against these songs. It’s as if Chrome were imported from another history of alt-rock, one more textured and romantic, where it sits deservedly atop the pile. –Brad Nelson

Listen: Catherine Wheel: “Fripp”

Lush: Gala

As foundational documents of shoegaze, the songs on Gala are pretty key, but they cede to a larger point: Lush were a great band from the start. Singer/guitarists Miki Berenyi and Emma Anderson were longtime friends who formed the group after meeting drummer Chris Acland at North London Polytechnic, then added Steve Rippon on bass. 4AD’s Ivo Watts-Russell took a shine to them and, over the course of 1989 and 1990, the band released three individual EPs, collected after as this record.

Lush were spiky, snarky, and not apt to suffer fools gladly, as Gala songs like “Bitter” and “Leaves Me Cold” underscore on matters personal and passionate. That Berenyi and Anderson sung these with sweet individual and harmony performances, adding in odd time signatures and eccentric flourishes, was even better: The two versions of “Thoughtforms” alone, from two consecutive EPs, demonstrate how quickly they learned to make their work even more distinct. From the early standout “Sweetness and Light” to the swooping beauty of “De-Luxe” to the enjoyable romp through Abba’s “Hey Hey Helen,” Gala is one continued win. –Ned Raggett

Listen: Lush: “Sweetness and Light”

Slowdive: Just for a Day

At the time of its release, Slowdive’s full-length debut was seen almost as a comedown by some after their string of raucous earlier EPs. But time has not only vindicated Just for a Day, it’s revealed it to be a crucial shoegaze template—something easily heard in electrogaze performers, post-rock bands, black metal acts, and anyone with a taste for majestic, stately, and moody-as-hell compositions.

The young UK quintet’s love for the gothier side of things was clearly evident in their Siouxsie and the Banshees-inspired name, and their sonic echoes of early ’80s Cure and New Order. But the genteel, sighing flow of Neil Halstead and Rachel Goswell’s vocals, the slow burn combination of their guitars meeting Christian Savill’s, and the rolling punch of the Nick Chaplin/Simon Scott rhythm section were its own beguiling beast. Starting with the cello-touched “Spanish Air” and finishing on the dramatic “Primal,” and with stellar numbers like “Waves” and “Ballad of Sister Sue” along the way, they create music that constantly flows over a cliff into a deep, distant ocean. As for “Catch the Breeze,” especially with its rising chorus and massive coda, almost no other song so perfectly sums up what shoegaze is at its core. –Ned Raggett

Listen: Slowdive: “Catch the Breeze”

The Verve: A Storm in Heaven

Verve frontman Richard Ashcroft never really fit the wallflower-of-sound shoegaze mold. He was too brash, too pretty, too magnetizing. Even when his band started out in the early ’90s, years before the Rolling Stones-pilfering “Bitter Sweet Symphony” made them an international concern, he was peacocking like a cosmic Mick Jagger onstage, barefoot and blaring. But back then, his psychedelic philosophies were perfectly counteracted by Nick McCabe’s six-string impressionism; McCabe gave Ashcroft’s ambitions a soul to search for.

The guitarist’s work on the Verve’s perfectly titled debut album A Storm in Heaven offers color and clarity to Ashcroft’s grand pronouncements, his tone—gentle as a butterfly one minute, squalling like the sea the next—providing the sort of nuance his singer could never quite pull off. Produced by UK vet John Leckie, whose credits include engineering for Pink Floyd in the ’70s and steering Radiohead toward The Bends, the album lives in that liminal state between jam and song, spontaneity and structure. It’s not calculating, but it never veers into sheer indulgence, either. It breathes beauty. The Verve would go onto make anthems for millions, but they never again sounded this whole. –Ryan Dombal

Listen: The Verve: “Slide Away”

Ride: Going Blank Again

Ride’s second studio album represents the commercial peak of shoegaze, a glorious explosion of populist noise that proves how utterly satisfying distorted guitars can be when allied with Byrds-ian harmonies, a drummer at the top of his Keith Moon-goes-indie game, and bass lines you can hum in the shower. Going Blank Again sounds like someone has taken the wistful charm of Ride’s debut album Nowhere, fed it three solid meals, and packed it off to finishing school to be sharpened within an inch of its life. It’s tight, audacious, and supremely confident.

The album went Top Five in the UK, driven by the singles “Leave Them All Behind”—a monstrously intrepid, eight-minute slice of thrilling guitars—and the hook-filled “Twisterella.” Crucially, Going Blank Again manages all this without losing any of Ride’s innate charm; nothing here sounds stretched in the pursuit of commercialism, though Ride would plumb those depths on their next two albums. Instead, Going Blank Again feels like the logical destination of the band, the peak of noise and melody they had been moving towards since their first hazy demos. –Ben Cardew

Listen: Ride: “Leave Them All Behind”

My Bloody Valentine: Isn’t Anything

Isn’t Anything was the moment everything changed, the moment a jangly, C86-ish guitar act from Ireland went into the studio and birthed shoegaze out of their languorous, sleep-deprived minds. My Bloody Valentine’s You Made Me Realise EP, released three months before Isn’t Anything, may have hinted at the departure that the band was about to take, but on their debut full-length, you can actually hear the sands shift beneath their feet, as largely straightforward noise-rock numbers like “Sueisfine” or “(When You Wake) You’re Still in a Dream” give way to the transcendent, hallucinatory pieces “All I Need” and “Several Girls Galore.” The former is a warm, comforting smudge of a song that seems to recreate the sound of a rock concert from within a mother’s womb; the latter is a nightmarish, stop-start drone that suggests music itself is dying a painful death.

Songs like these helped Isn’t Anything change the idea of how a guitar could sound, but the album offers more than that. Buried beneath the guitar soup are troves of mournful melodies, as well as drums that—on “Soft as Snow (But Warm Inside)”—reflect Kevin Shields’ love of hip-hop. Even today, it resembles little else in the guitar-rock canon. –Ben Cardew

Listen: My Bloody Valentine: “Several Girls Galore”

Ride: Nowhere

Ride were barely out of their teens when, in the summer of 1990, they finished recording their debut album. Accordingly, Nowhere reflects much of the indie environment that reverberated around them, including Sonic Youth’s distorted meltdowns, the Stone Roses’ jangly psychedelia, and the chiming nightscapes of the Cure’s Disintegration—not to mention a huge dose of inspiration from Ride’s Creation Records labelmates My Bloody Valentine. But unlike MBV, who were in the midst of resequencing the DNA of guitar-centric indie rock, Nowhere harbors a deep strain of classic-rock reverence, from the Paul McCartney-esque bassline of “Seagull” to the “When the Levee Breaks”-like stomp of “Dreams Burn Down.” Mix in “Vapour Trail,” the disc’s melancholy, violin- and cello-laced anthem to post-adolescent romanticism, and Nowhere stands elegantly poised between pop traditionalism, gently devastating songwriting, choirboy harmonies, and the most harrowing sonic overdoses in shoegaze. –Jason Heller

Listen: Ride: “Seagull”

Slowdive: Souvlaki

Slowdive’s second album was marked by more than its share of misfortune, both in creation and reception. The band ditched their original batch of sessions to start over again, and the album debuted in mid-1993, the exact moment of the UK press’ firm backlash against anything shoegaze. On top of that, there was comically bad handling on the part of the group’s American label, including a heavily delayed release. But from a distance, Souvlaki can be seen and heard clearly for what it is: the rare sophomore effort that not only maintains the quality of a great debut but also avoids simply repeating its sound. The evanescent vocals of Just for a Day give way to new clarity in Neil Halstead and Rachel Goswell’s singing and lyrics (the trading of sections in “Machine Gun” being one highlight of many). Similarly, their striking blend of feedback and texture serves more straightforward arrangements on songs like “40 Days” and the majestic “When the Sun Hits.” “Souvlaki Space Station” finds a way to bring in the clatter and wooze of dub, while “Dagger” concludes the album on a Lee Hazlewood-like hushed intensity. All this plus not one, but two, collaborations with Brian Eno. –Ned Raggett

Listen: Slowdive: “When the Sun Hits”

My Bloody Valentine: Loveless

Sometime last year, the legally hazy industry of fan-made merchandise paid tribute to Loveless with a product that captured its essence: a duvet cover printed with its artwork. It was a perfect (and perhaps accidental) union, this prospect of physically curling up inside the album’s magenta-tinted blanket of noise.

Not that we haven’t already spent years talking up Loveless and its comforts. Hyperbolic discussions of the album predated its release, even, as the recording process stretched out over two years’ worth of sessions at 19 studios, ultimately involving something like 45 engineers. During that time, bands inspired by Isn’t Anything started putting out their first albums, so the pressure was on for My Bloody Valentine to prove they couldn’t be replicated. But the real miracle of Loveless has always been how its excruciating birth resulted in music with such visceral impact. Fixating on Kevin Shields’ tremolo-reliant, feedback-sampling technical prowess is a proud tradition, but it can undersell the sensory swaddling of listening to these songs.

Loveless is a guided meditation on love and its absence that conjures an emotional reality instead of merely depicting one. At the album’s core is a succession of super-sweet melodies filtered through the softly psychedelic subjectivity of a mind engulfed by thirst. Shields’ bent notes are that introspection made sonic, their familiar guitar sounds so dramatically distorted, you might start to suspect that it’s your ears twisting them. The glide guitar on opening track “Only Shallow” contains the same creeping violence as the onset of passion; “Loomer,”which comes next, speeds into the childhood origins of longing.

The album isn’t just romantic, though. It’s also Romantic in the 19th century sense, a work so grand that it connects us to the limitless universe and reminds us how small we are as individuals within it. Coleridge and Turner used nature to access the infinite, but the internal landscape Shields locates is just as expansive. The radical inclusiveness of these songs even evades the specificity of gender by mixing Shields’ and Bilinda Butcher’s vocals into androgynous foam on soaring monuments to the lover's gaze like “When You Sleep.” Just audible beneath the halo of fuzz that surrounds “Sometimes” are lyrics that express a frustration we’ve all felt: “I don’t know how you could not love me now.” Loveless is the defining statement of shoegaze because it discovered, in layered guitar sounds and submerged singing, a language that serenely overwhelms as it distills the universal human experience. –Judy Berman

Listen: My Bloody Valentine: “Sometimes”

Contributors: Stacey Anderson, Judy Berman, Stuart Berman, Ben Cardew, Ian Cohen, Cameron Cook, Ryan Dombal, Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Jason Heller, Jesse Jarnow, Paula Mejia, Quinn Moreland, Brad Nelson, Ned Raggett, Mark Richardson, Ryan Schreiber