Shoegaze was once dismissed as a Nineties fad — but it’s exploding these days. Pioneers like My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, and Ride are far more beloved and influential now than they were in their original lifetimes. The shoegaze sound keeps evolving,
as young artists keep hearing themselves in those mega-distorted waves of guitar fuzz. The Gen Z fans and bands have entered the mix, creating a boom of new zoomergaze styles. Something about this bone-shaking noise keeps hitting us right in the darkest places of the soul.
The word “shoegaze,” like “goth” or “Trekkie,” was originally coined as an insult, before getting adopted as a badge of honor by true believers. One of the eternally weird things about the genre is how the first-wave British legends still despise the term and refuse to be associated with it, even though it’s been decades since anyone used it as a pejorative. (Witness the irony of the superb shoegaze documentary Beautiful Noise, where the word “shoegaze” is never mentioned because it was the only way Kevin Shields would agree to talk.) But like drum-and-bass, it’s a Nineties sound that’s found a second life in the 2020s, as a rich musical language loaded with emotional possibilities.
This type of music attracts gearheads who fetishize their boutique distortion pedals, but nowadays it’s also accessible to any upstart kid with an imagination. Wisp made one of last year’s most stellar shoegaze albums with If Not Winter, but she got her start without even leaving her dorm room. As an 18-year-old college student, she devised “Your Face” by singing into her phone over a shoegaze track she found online — then watched it blow up into a viral TikTok sensation. Like fellow zoomers such as Quannnic or Flyingfish, she shows why the current boom can’t even be called a “revival.”
There have never been so many inventive shoegaze bands out there, experimenting wildly, especially on the underground level. Philadelphia has been a real motherlode, with the Julia’s War label and a DIY scene full of bands like Full Body 2, Bleary Eyed, and Knifeplay. Local mainstays They Are Gutting a Body of Water made one of 2025’s most powerful albums with LOTTO, a harrowing account of pain and addiction. The Nashville group Total Wife go off the deep end with mutant hyperpop fantasies on their delightful Come Back Down, while Phoenix’s Glixen get romantic on Quiet Pleasures. Kansas City, Missouri’s Forever Star work in drum-and-bass breakbeats, getting them tagged as “junglegaze.” The sound keeps getting reshaped by bands like Pittsburgh’s Feeble Little Horse, New Jersey’s High., and L.A.’s Julie. Great indie bands like Wednesday and Hotline TNT began on shoegaze ground before taking off in their own different directions.
The OGs are riding high, too: Swervedriver and Slowdive did acclaimed tours last year, as did Ride the year before. Even My Bloody Valentine came out of the smudged-magenta shadows last fall for a string of massive U.K. live shows. Their self-titled 2013 comeback record now sounds less like a Nineties flashback than a prescient flash-forward to where we are right now, especially the way it used those banging beats — so baffling to listeners back then, but so prophetic of the 2020s. Shoegaze and drum-and-bass are both amazingly TikTok-friendly, perfect for quick-hit social-media impact. That’s a big reason why both genres are booming right now, long after they were pronounced dead by the experts.
There’s no end to the constant stream of offshoots, including doomgaze, grunge-gaze, twang-gaze, and surf-gaze. (For a while there in the 2000s, people were trying to make “shoetronica” happen. We dodged a bullet there.) But the shoegaze explosion appeals to a new generation of fans, even ones who don’t collect old Pale Saints records. It’s all in that vibe of pure sensory overload, the tremble of panic you’d get at an MBV gig when they’d blast “You Made Me Realize” into double-digit minutes, until you felt your pancreas melt into your kidneys. Now more than ever, it’s the right time to let a screaming distorted Jazzmaster invade your soul and make you realize.
This story is part of our Reasons to Love Rock series, with all the sounds, trends, scenes, and artists that have us excited about rock music in 2026.
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