Journalists, brows furrowed, hunched over their Macbook Airs, “is it shoegaze revival, zoomergaze, nugaze? ... millennial men looking on in horror as they scrolls esoteric TikToks soundtracked to Duster B-sides… that’s not real shoegaze!!!!: The Greatest Thread in the History of Forums, Locked by a Moderator After 12,239 Pages of Heated Debate.
Holy shit who even cares. The kids probably actually don’t – that’s why they feel so free to borrow so heavily, so obviously sometimes, from decades past. A single guitar sound that took Kevin Shields years of sleepless nights to perfect is now made at the click of a free plugin shared on Discord. And that’s fine! Sure, it makes sense to be sceptical, seeing a genre with a strong DIY and independent tradition now a tasty treat for eager Major Label A&Rs. But some of it, quite a bit of it actually, is still pretty good!
Really good even. Los Angeles band julie, viewed perhaps unfairly by some as the standard for this generation of ‘shoegaze,’ are actually still fairly new in their career. my anti-aircraft friend is their debut record, and it borrows not just from the aforementioned canon, but from a range of 90s guitar how-to-get-into ___ charts. It has loud-quiet-loud shifts impressive enough to make even Pixies proud, and its rhythmically astute too; drummer Dillon Lee has a loose intricacy that recalls the great Sarah Lund of Unwound.
The band’s other big genre touchpoint is grunge (grungegaze being another made up genre word associated with the band (it does kind of fit though)). When julie’s soft, sweet, monotone harmonies dip towards explosivity, as they often do, it’s not the loveless doona cover of warm, beautiful noise that shoegaze often offers, but more a dangerous, dark pit, created by Alex Brady’s front and centre bass and Keyan Zand’s Drop-D adorned, sludgy guitar.
It’s a pit that julie constantly circles, teetering on the edge and sometimes kicking pebbles to test its depth. In the middle of the chorus of ‘thread, stitch’, they repeatedly take a beat, a pause interrupting the song’s rhythm, literally steadying themselves before delivering a powerful blow. The record is full of emotional, tender melodies, constantly pummelled by equally emotional, crushing waves of sound.
“I don't feel anything now… “It's so cold…” “Muted/Calm, malaise…” the choruses on my anti-aircraft friend are pained, beckoning towards a constant emotional numbness. The shoegaze and associated emo/noise rock tree of bands of the 80s and 90s were born of a similar stasis; the rebellious spirit of punk defeated by the dawning End of History, when all there was left to do was either be swallowed in walls of noise, or look inward and interrogate personal feelings. So maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that this new generation of guitar bands, living in an era of complete political collapse, an End of History beyond the End of History, want to be engulfed into that noise again. The kids aren’t ripping you off – they’re trying to tell you something.