Lush: Track by Track

Shoegaze bands are reforming left, right and fuzzy, reverb-soaked centre.

It’s becoming increasingly hard to skirt around the fact the every year we’re faced with a seemingly unstoppable avalanche of headlines about pedal-worshipping 90s philosophy students getting the ol’ band back together. It’s also becoming increasingly hard to care. But we should care, because basically all these bands are trying to do is claim a bit of credit for the sound they created. It’s a sound that’s been endlessly mimicked – often carelessly – by record-collecting millennial philosophy students putting a new band together. It’s a sound that’s variously called dream pop, shoegaze and noise pop, and i’s a sound that bands like Lush and their contemporaries Slowdive, Ride and My Bloody Valentine pioneered.

Influenced by – and briefly coexisting with – the jangly, cloud-watching pop of Stone Roses and Cocteau Twins, many of the bands enjoyed peripheral mainstream success and have since gone on to influence a generation of bands to create bulky, dense, washed-out indie pop fed through sequential circuits of modulators and all manner of strange, often Japanese, effects pedals. By the end of the 90s, shoegaze was mostly a dim and distant memory pushed behind the cheeky Britpop charm of Blur and the loutish Beatles impersonations of the Gallagher brothers.