Circle pits form. A body floats atop hands. Someone holds a Nintendo DS up high to capture the hype. All night long, dim red light settles on the audience huddled in the dungeon-like space at Pilllar Forum as Tarkovsky’s eerie, arty sci-fi puzzler Stalker screens behind the bands onstage, each group offering its own take on a once-niche indie rock style that, nearly four decades since it emerged, is now heard everywhere: shoegaze.

With cool detachment, Linus face the back of the stage as they warp their abrasive guitar strokes. The pulsing distortion of 12th House Sun swallows up all of lead singer Kyle Schultz’s words. Alana Christen of Lana Leone sways with her guitar in the hazy ambiance. 

But this ear-ringing night, a release show for Lana Leone’s sophomore EP, Spirea, only offers a glimpse of a broad shoegaze revival now taking over the Twin Cities. Locally, shoegaze also looks like Another Heaven’s vocalist/guitarist Ali Jaafar clenching his eyes shut while a bandmate clashes cymbals at Cloudland, like Prize Horse’s Jake Beitel asking the sound tech to turn the volume as loud as possible at Mortimer’s, like she’s green’s guitarists crouching down to scramble their pedal boards at First Avenue.

Shoegaze—the cacophonous yet fragile guitar rock style forged in the U.K. in the’90s—has struck an emotional chord with a new generation of musicians and fans. But while this may be a revival, it’s no mere recreation. 

“The first wave of shoegaze was a lot more defined by a specific sound, but now there's so much more overlap between different genres working their way in: more emo influence and hardcore influence and goth influence,” Christen says. “The revival is a cool opportunity for bands that identify as shoegaze to be able to explore and create different kinds of music.”

Back In the Day

In the late ’80s, a new style emerged from London, as bands like My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, and Ride buried fragile vocals beneath tense basslines, clamoring guitar, and pillows of distortion. These bands flaunted generous feedback and blissed-out vocals, concealing beneath its lush sheen the desire to make something ethereal out of noise. The ever-snide U.K. music press, noting that bands spent more time staring down at their guitar pedals than making eye contact with an audience, dubbed this style “shoegaze,” and the name stuck. 

The sound soon spread across the Atlantic, with anglophile bands in the U.S. like Drop Nineteens, Swirlies, and Medicine perhaps, if anything, a little too faithful to the foundational conventions of the U.K. architects. And Minnesota would feel the influence of shoegaze as well. 

At the time, says local music scene veteran Chris Strouth, the Replacements, Soul Asylum, and grunge still dominated the attention of Twin Cities music fans. “Most of the people who were really into shoegaze were really heavy music heads and big record collectors,” Strouth says. “Everybody hung out together. It was pretty tight.”

You can hear what they were up to on Southeast of Saturn, Vol. 2 (2022), the ’90s Midwest space-rock/shoegaze/dream-pop scene compilation that Jack White’s Third Man Records released in 2022. And years earlier, in 2006, Strouth put together his own compilation: Redeyed: Minneapolis Shoegaze and Dreampop 1992-1998.

Strouth was music curator of the Red Eye Theater in the ’90s, where musicians like the late Ed Ackerson, a producer, engineer, and member of shoegaze bands the 27 Various and Polara, would try out new music. Strouth also featured the 27 Various, along with other local shoegaze bands like Colfax Abbey, Shapeshifter, Fauna, February, and Ousia on What, a music show he produced and hosted for the St. Paul Neighborhood Network from 1993 to 1995, which was rebroadcast on Twin Cities Public Television and cable access channels in the Midwest.

But the ’90s were a long time ago. We can’t jump directly from the first wave to the current revival without a short trip to Philadelphia, explains Pittsburgh-based music writer Eli Enis, who has covered the genre extensively for Stereogum. He says the new wave of shoegaze bands’ most radical elements can be attributed to groups that came out of Philly in the past few decades like Nothing and Blue Smiley. 

“Nothing completely reoriented what was a very much a British-sounding genre that had roots in jangle pop or goth in some ways, and made it much more of an Americanized genre that was more influenced by ’90s rock bands, certainly grunge in particular,” Enis says. Meanwhile Blue Smiley incorporated lo-fi recording quality and chorus, reverb, tingy/pangy guitar effects.

“I think the best bands are not ripping off Nothing and Blue Smiley, but sort of building on the new sonic palette that they introduced to shoegaze,” Enis says. 

And just as shoegaze’s sound has evolved, so have fan—and musician—perspectives on the genre tag. “Shoegaze was something that bands didn't like to identify with during the first wave… It was kind of a derogatory thing,” Enis says. 

Just look at Shapeshifter’s response to Strouth’s question, “So does it bug you when people call you shoegaze?” on an episode of What. After a pause, the lead singer says, “People are going to call it what they want to. I don’t think we’re too comfortable with that term.” Another band member adds, “It's a term that’s been used to describe something indescribable so far… and if they want to use it to describe us, that’s fine.” 

Fast forward to the aughts, and people began to embrace the shoegaze label more earnestly. Now, it’s fully accepted—even by bands who might not have been considered shoegaze 30 years ago. 

Gazing In a New Direction

Recently signed to Photo Finish Records, and currently on tour with the Phoenix band Glixen, she’s green appears to be the Minneapolis shoegaze-adjacent group most likely to build a fanbase outside of town.

When Racket caught up with she’s green by phone on their way to Amoeba Music in San Francisco, band members were happy to share their broad range of influences. The group draws musically from genres like folk rock and visually from the natural world—their Spotify bio is “moss music from Minneapolis”—and admires MJ Lenderman, Wednesday, and Slow Pulp. Bassist Teddy Nordvold points specifically to Mitchell Seymour from the defunct, indie-prog/punkish Twin Cities band the Happy Children for melodic and rhythmic inspiration.

Nordvold draws songwriting insight from ’90s jangle and dream pop like the Cranberries, while singer Zofia Smith puts intention behind poetic and thoughtful lyrics like Beach House and the Sundays. Melody inspiration comes from the Cocteau Twins. “You can't tell what they're saying,” Smith laughs. “It's just like random melodies that really serve the instrumental.” 

And that’s exactly the way she’s green like it. Still, Noldvold can’t deny the impact the first-wave shoegaze bands have on the group. 

“I specifically sought out one of the weird Yamaha effect units that got used on Souvlaki by Slowdive,” he says. “We take the gear and the sounds and we try to morph them, figure something out that we like, instead of just going straight to the setting that someone in an article in a magazine said they used on production on a legendary record like Souvlaki or Ride’s Nowhere.”

Hints of Slowdive peek out of the early moments of she’s green’s bright, dreamy new single, “Graze.” But tension builds, and midway through a full-fledged rock instrumental crashes through at an almost danceable tempo, and suddenly we’re far from ’90s London as Smith’s words—“Forest lights/Cling to me/Followed by/The ghosts that haunt”—melt into celestial noise. 

And she’s green are just one of the bands pushing shoegaze beyond its sonic stereotypes. My Bloody Valentine’s music resonates with Lana Leone’s Alana Christen because of the dreamy dissonance she can feel in her body; the Cocteau Twins’ angelic vocals remind her of “butterflies dancing around in the wind.” And she enjoys Ringo Deathstarr and Starflyer 59’s thick instrumentals. 

When performing live, Lana Leone place vocals beneath heavy synths, immersing the audience in the volume of the music to communicate yearning. In contrast to the darker moods of her influences, Christen aims for a more innocent sound with airy vocals. “Although I love having a more heavy distorted instrumental base, I try to keep the melody more light,” she says. 

Her new single, “Hide and Seek,” for instance, is full of fuzzy synths, and Christen’s verses drift smoothly until arriving atop gritty drum beats in the chorus, then a wall of sound comes rumbling in unexpectedly after a few gentle verses. 

Ali Jaafar from Another Heaven embraces the shoegaze label even though, in the last year, shoegaze fans have approached the band with arguments like, “You guys aren’t shoegaze. You suck.” The band members have also previously played in metal bands, and metal fans tell them that they’re not metal. That’s why Jaafar likes to use a made-up genre for their music: sludge-gaze.

Another Heaven describe their 2024 EP, See You Later, as “songs (and two bonus tracks) about death, political instability, the internet being a black hole, depression, substance abuse, and modern life circling the drain.” Lyrics on the song “Big Misery” back that up: “No hope, no light, no trace, no sign of you,” and the accompanying drums are just as filled with doom. 

When sweetening mixes, Jaafar will play a single note through a fuzz pedal and bend the whammy bar in an interesting way to get the desired effect. The result just so happens to sound like shoegaze.

“I just want to do something that sounds current, that sounds like now, and that sounds like us, you know,” Jaafar says. “So as long as you can hear our voice and you can hear that we made this, then I'm happy.” 

Kyle Schultz from 12th House Sun comfortably uses the term shoegaze to describe the band’s music, but there are undeniable emo undertones as well, especially in his vocals, which he belts and occasionally screams. Schultz takes inspiration from Title Fight, Citizen, and Turnover’s reverb soundscapes in the 2010s, and in typical shoegaze fashion, he intentionally places vocals lower in the mix. 

“People who are looking for that dreamy sound are definitely gonna find it with us and other bands being labeled as ‘shoegaze,’” Schultz says. Just don’t expect the classic, mellower first wave melodies from 12th House Sun. Songs like “Anxious” from their debut album, Behind The Glass, released last year, come at you fast and demand attention. “Quietly bleeding, but I won’t say a thing,” Schultz sings. “Because if I do then I’m denying your feelings/I tell myself it’s not that bad.”

Why Shoegaze? Why Now?

Why are younger listeners just now tapping into shoegaze? Schultz, Jaafar, and Nordvold all cite TikTok as a gateway, while Nordvold references music review websites like Rate Your Music and Album of The Year as internet spaces where people have dug up ’90s gems, especially during the early pandemic when people were stuck at home. But don’t rule out physical media: Christen, who’s in her early 20s, found a CD of Lush’s Split in a thrift store and fell in love with “Desire Lines,” which changed what she sought out in music.

Enis, the Pennsylvania-based rock writer, says that though we can’t discount the impact of Spotify and TikTok—the platform where the #shoegaze tag has over 300,000 posts—he theorizes the appetite didn’t originate digitally. “There was just sort of a cultural shift towards people wanting to listen to this music that had been kind of underground or off to the side for a couple of decades and kind of came back into favor,” he says. 

Jaafar speculates that shoegaze reflects people’s feelings about the overall state of the world. “The pandemic and just the world being fucking horrible also kind of created a space where people were like, ‘I'm just in my head all the time, and I'm horrified by everything, and I'm just depressed,’ and it's like, ‘What's the soundtrack to that?’” he says. His answer? “Shoegaze.” 

Christen sees Jaafar’s point, and at the same time appreciates the “dreamy, hopeful side” of the genre. This duality—that shoegaze can be fitting for a depressing or hopeful soundtrack—is part of what makes shoegaze an enduring style. Christen thinks the music offers people a primal connection that helps release pent up emotions generated by the political climate.

Similarly, she’s green’s Smith considers the genre’s aura a coping mechanism for existential discomfort. “If I'm going through something, or if I'm overwhelmed by what's on the news, shoegaze has always kind of been a safe place for me,” she says. On stage, she feels free and senses a connection with the audience that releases tension.

Strouth says the first wave shoegaze helped people imagine a “kind of psychedelic reality that's bigger than where you are.” When there is a desire to withdraw from the world in the midst of nihilism, he thinks the genre’s sounds allow listeners to access optimism and ask, “How do we push forward to the next thing?” 

“I mean, now that we're all extremely interconnected, and especially with the pandemic and everyone being bombarded by bad news constantly,” Norvold says, “I think genres like shoegaze—because they're so atmospheric and they're cathartic and emotional—they provide a bit of escapism.”