The record’s soft passages draw blood, while the loud ones cushion the blow.
The thundering drums and swirling guitars on songs like “Cherry” make it hard to get your bearings. But once you give up trying, you can float away.
By contrast, the scratchy guitar at the beginning of “Covet” and the gentle, reverb-drenched opening bars of the final track “Hlýtt” feel painful, making the squall of noise that follows a welcome relief.
This superficially paradoxical quality testifies to the band’s fealty to Shoegaze.
After listening to the album until it became second nature, I decided to go for a drive and compare it with the work of Slow Crush’s most obvious forebear, My Bloody Valentine. And I took along a passenger who had never heard of either band but seeks out music in conceptually adjacent subgenres like Dream Pop and Slow Wave.
Although she seemed to like the music, I worried that it wasn’t settling into the kind of groove she prefers. At first, I was self-conscious, constantly fiddling with the volume knob, trying to temper the abrupt shifts that might turn her off. But then I gave up.
If you focus hard on the music, it keeps slipping away from you. And if you try to consign it to the background, it keeps coming forward.
To my mind, this is the most salient feature of Shoegaze, what sets it apart from those other subgenres. But there has been enough slippage in the category that younger people may struggle to perceive its significance.
I told my passenger about a social media post I’d seen from a professor from my generation, someone who had been into bands like My Bloody Valentine and Ride in the late 1980s.
A student approached them after class and struck up a conversation about music. The professor asked her what she liked. Surprised when she answered “Shoegaze,” he asked her for names. “Mazzy Star,” she replied.
The way this professor told the story made it clear that he found this answer depressingly wrong. Other people his age piled on in the comments to his post. It turned into the sort of spectacle that used to drive members of Generation X mad when Baby Boomers did it to them. My passenger, only a few years older than this student, found this infuriating.
“That professor should be glad that the student even knows who Mazzy Star is,” she began. “Maybe they don’t count as Shoegaze for him. But that kind of gatekeeping makes the world worse. Besides, it’s not the student’s fault if they thought Mazzy Star could be classified as Shoegaze. I guarantee that you can find music that sounds like them on Shoegaze playlists, just like you can find it on my Dream Pop and Slow Wave playlists.”
I explained that I had responded to the professor’s post in a similar vein. Classifying culture according to genre is never neat and tidy. If you devote serious thinking to the task, you invariably end up with a complex Venn diagram.
But that brought me back to my original thought, when I couldn’t stop fiddling with the volume knob on the car stereo.
Although many of the traits identified with Shoegaze also apply to other subgenres—meandering song structures, repetitive grooves, distortion softened into texture—the difficulty of finding a proper volume setting seems like its sine qua non.
When a style of music-making is associated with a specific place and time, figuring out what it communicates outside of that context is hard.
How does Rockabilly made by European artists today relate to the American music from the 1950s that inspired it? What should we make of contemporary bands from the former Eastern Bloc that create records that sound exactly like an obscure post-punk release from the early 1980s?
Despite the persistence of Shoegaze as a category, not enough attention has been paid to the significance of its original historical context.
The subgenre emerged alongside a massive commercial breakthrough for rap and EDM, then was partially absorbed by the mainstreaming of alternative rock. It was a boom time in the music industry, characterised by a profligacy that now seems hard to believe.
But no Shoegaze bands made it big the way Nirvana did. There was something too reticent about them, perverse even.
For all the musical pleasure that My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, and Swervedriver gave to their fans, they refused to deliver the pop hooks necessary for crossover success. Even Ride found a way to make their most accessible songs seem remote, as if being heard through a filter.
Coming at the end of the Cold War, when new ways of making money from culture were proliferating, this failure to achieve a broader appeal could be interpreted as a political act.
Despite their music seeming outwardly disengaged, with lyrics that typically failed to make an impression, Shoegaze bands were implicitly commenting on the demands of a consumer society in which sheer volume had lost its countercultural force.
Instead of kicking out the jams, they drew attention to the hollowness of such outwardly liberatory actions.
While Kevin Shields surely didn’t intend to bankrupt his record label when making My Bloody Valentine’s masterpiece Loveless, the fact that he made them spend so much money on an album that was too dense and self-involved to reach a large audience conveys the essence of first-generation Shoegaze.
This brings us back to Slow Crush.
Thirst will undoubtedly please people who revere Loveless or Slowdive’s Souvlaki. Indeed, despite over three decades of technological progress, the album sounds like it could have been made when they were.
But does the appearance of a great Shoegaze album in 2025 indicate something more than the surprising durability of a subgenre that never went mainstream?
Although younger listeners would struggle to make the connection, when I listen to Thirst I can’t help thinking of the era its sound recalls, that heady time when the world suddenly turned upside down.
For people living in the West, the end of the Cold War was a time pregnant with possibility, when longstanding concerns no longer seemed pertinent.
It is now painfully obvious that the excitement we felt blinded us to the persistence of those problems and how they might resurface to confound a world no longer prepared to meet them.
As we struggle to make sense of a global realignment just as consequential as the one that began in 1989, perhaps the apolitical sounds of Shoegaze have something to teach us that self-consciously engaged music does not.
Like its illustrious forebears, Slow Crush’s Thirst is an album that makes you think even as it invites you to drift away on waves of sound.
Finding the right level in an era when the quiet part is not just being said out loud but screamed in your face is a massive challenge. But practising with music could make it easier.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
