#shoegaze

#shoegaze

For 18 years, Ben Cook has been making head-over-heels pop songs under a handful of similar names: Young Governor, Young Guv and the Scuzz, Young Guv. The project, recently rechristened as GUV, has outlasted Cook's time playing guitar on Fucked Up's punk operas and his stint as the frontman of Toronto hardcore band No Warning. But where other pop formalists write from a narrow frame of reference-'60s sunshine pop, , "Ticket to Ride"-Cook is a sonic mercenary, arriving at whatever genre he's into.

While shoegaze bands are often known for their wall-of-sound volume tactics, there's a clever amount of distance employed in Softcult's style. When a Flower Doesn't Grow, the duo's long-awaited debut album, relishes in the contrast between delivering harsh truths about trauma, oppression, and growth and cloaking those ideas in a pillowy-soft exterior; throughout its 11 tracks, the album channels windswept beauty and fierce intensity, containing Mercedes and Phoenix's most illuminating meditations on personal and systemic injustice yet.

Dream Fatigue is a new-ish Massachusetts band launched by former Fleshwater/Vein drummer Matt Wood and fronted by Jonali McFadden, and they make shoegazy alt-rock that's not too different from what Matt was doing in Fleshwater. They released their debut LP The Lady In The Sky in 2024, and now they announced a new seven-song EP, No Requiem, due February 13 via DAZE ( pre-order).

We had fun you can hear humour a bit on the album and we went through some tough times, existential crisis, and you can hear that too, says Theusen over a video call from her home in Copenhagen. Goodbyehouse became one of 2025's runaway underground successes thanks to that emotional openness as well as the duo's canny blend of Dido-esque balladry, shoegaze haze and minimalist pop.

Nick Quan's song " Heavensafe," which runs big feelings through a bigger pedalboard, features a funny declaration: "I've turned to slop again." This past August, when the extraordinary guitarist released Warbrained, shoegaze might have been saying so, too. By then, its latest-and most puzzling-progeny was " cloud rock," a budding vanguard that subverted its central extremes: numbness first, and noise, if at all, second.

"When the song came to me it presented nearly fully formed: a pedaling bass line, a four part vocal harmony, an expansive soundscape," Kelley said in a press release. "Sometimes songs sound great in your head but then don't translate well into reality.

The legendary Talking Heads frontman finally returns with a new full-length studio album, which is his first since 2018's American Utopia and his ninth overall. Byrne, who collaborated on the album with New York City-based musical ensemble Ghost Train Orchestra, will likely showcase some new songs during a tour that includes three dates (Nov. 16-18) at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco (apeconcerts.com).

"It does freak me out when I sit back and, in retrospect, think about it," Chino Moreno says of Deftones' longevity.