Shoegaze Roundup with Julie, Wisp, Ride, Samlrc, & A Place To Bury Strangers: Rapid Fire Reviews

I love shoegaze and that's no secret. So in addition to some of the shoegaze records I've already covered from 2024, I wanted to hone in and catch up with a few I missed. 

my anti-aircraft friend - julie

LA-based shoegaze outfit julie didn't start out 2024 as one of my most anticipated new bands. But after a few singles where they seemed to drown themselves even more in vintage shoegaze and noise pop styles that I've long found irresistible, I started to look forward to their debut album my anti-aircraft friend more and more. While a song like last year's "catalogue" surely helped, it was their best song to date "clairbourne practice" that really sold me on the band. Even as parts of it feel like classic shoegaze worship it's one spoonful of Slowdive and one spoonful of My Bloody Valentine. Splitting that difference perfectly is what brings the band to their most interesting points. 

That contrast pops on deep cuts like "tenebrist" early on the record. The track also digs into the self-deprecation and outright detachment that last throughout the entire album. The final single "very little effort" also leans into this detachment, as you'd expect. But unlike it's title suggests the band actually do seem to have put quite a bit of effort into how the song unfolds compositionally keeping it fresh and setting up for interesting moments. "feminine adornments" is another huge highlight among the deep cuts. Not only is it one of the most sonically exciting cuts here but it also allows the band to lean into a personality that feels less defensive and ironic than much of the rest of the record. 

The album isn't exactly zipped up tight though. It's longest track "knob" falls victim to a familiar issue of shoegaze bands failing to sound as interesting without their layers. But even once the song does hit its peak intensity the snail's pace it deploys makes for less than stellar results. It's unfortunate because later on the record they slow it down again to much better success on "ill cook my own meals." It's also unfortunate that "knob" comes back to back with another one of the record's weaker cuts "thread, stitch" whose compositional dynamism actually does it a disservice as it moves on from its most interesting points far too quickly. 

While the influences behind my anti-aircraft friend may be both common and obvious, the band doesn't let that hamstring them. Where the attitude of shoegaze often seemed disconnected in an accidental way, impossible to make out through the haze, julie are more than comfortable to let you know how disaffected they feel through irony and absolutely ripping noisy passages sewed into almost every song here. What results is an album with a youthful spin on familiar sounds that feels refreshing even as it reminds me of genre classics throughout? As julie stretch their legs and settle into a sound all their own, the songwriting and attitude they're already developing should help make them one of the genre's most interesting artists. 7/10

Pandora EP - Wisp

Wisp is another up-and-coming shoegaze upstart, this time one whose dreamy soundscapes were hitting TikTok before 2023 even became 2024. Her first EP Pandora contains her breakthrough debut single "Your Face" and my personal favorite of her tracks "See you soon" which arrived as a single earlier this year. Across 6 songs and 23 minutes, it's an introduction to her gentle and chilling style of shoegaze that does a great job of showing you who Wisp is as an artist, but not a whole ton else. 

That's a bit of an obtuse start, so let me clarify. Trying to define the sound Wisp is delivering is very easy now that this EP is out. The quiet intimate whispered vocals and bouncy occasionally surprisingly heavy shoegaze arrangements settle somewhere in between Alvvays and Nicole Dollanganger. And in her defense, it's a style that worked on me earlier this year when she dropped my favorite song of her's to date "See you soon." I also don't mind "Enough for you," the single that followed it. They're very similar songs in terms of thematic approach but I think Wisp pull it off both times. 

But take a song like the opener "Pandora" for an example of my issues with her approach. The song does manage to pull one big punch, erupting into its shoegaze wails following a quite whispered introduction. But then you're just left with the rest of a song that really isn't all that compelling sonically or compositionally. "Luna" is an attempt by Wisp to get into her most wiry and tangibly electric sound. That comes in the form of these grinding guitars that cut into the verses and absolutely wail away in the background throughout the entire hook. They're interesting within the sound palette of the record but don't make up for how dry the song itself is. 

I don't think Pandora is a bad project or even necessarily a bad start for Wisp. While it's range is extremely limited, Wisp is early in her career with plenty of room to grow. She manages to show off some solid fundamentals and if her journey outside the bounds of the precise icy shoegaze landscapes she's made her home in so far are successful, I won't be surprised. But Pandora works as any great table-setter does, better as a piece of a greater story than a project being entirely consumed on its own. 5.5/10

Interplay - Ride

Ride are one of the big three shoegaze bands of the genre's breakthrough in the early 90s. In fact, their debut album arrived before classics from their peers like Souvlaki and Loveless. But of the three their comeback has been the least impactful by far, though I'm not entirely sure why. Both of their albums since reforming have been solid, good even, especially 2017's Weather Diaries. That's the main reason I was keeping my ear to the ground for their new singles and looking forward to Interplay, what is (debatably) their 7th studio album. There's a full hour of new material here split across 12 tracks, but while what they deliver occasionally mirrors the dreamy bliss of their past, I think it's the weakest of their three recent records. 

The issues started with the lead single and opening track "Peace Sign" a song that is just too punchless and forgettable to occupy such an important position on both the album itself and in the rollout. Thankfully "Last Frontier" is better with dreamy, blissful chord progressions and a simple but very elegant chorus that I found stuck in my head for months. But my favorite of the bunch by far was "Monaco" which sports a tense but totally irresistible guitar riff and was on my rotation all summer. 

Unfortunately, though, the deep cuts here are consistently far less interesting. The singles are broken up by the 6-minute "Light In A Quite Room." The track is just a flat-out snooze to the point that even its rush of soaring noisy guitars doesn't leave much of an impact on me. And across the rest of the album that's the standard for the most part. The instrumentals on the deep cuts are even more tepid than the singles and I can't name more than a few instances where the lyrics helped a song rather than hurt it. 

Interplay isn't a bad record, just an astoundingly boring one. While some of the lyrics on tracks like "Stay Free" may border on outright cringe, for the most part this is just a bit of a disappointment from a band that sounded so vibrant in their heyday. 4.5/10 

A Lonely Sinner - samlrc

This is probably the album for which the label of "shoegaze" covers the least among the five I've chosen to cover here. Not because the album doesn't have shoegaze passages, which is undoubtedly does, but because it also contains so much more. Long instrumental stretches of the record featuring sampled spoken passages are much more reminiscent of post-rock. But the shoegaze label has seemingly stuck to the record because of its primary point of comparison, Parannoul. Much like Parannoul's breakthrough album To See The Next Part Of The Dream in 2024, A Lonely Sinner has taken off on Rate Your Music and spread rapidly around online music circles. Given how often I love records that follow this path to success, I can't believe it took me so long to finally give Sinner a chance. 

Let's tackle the album's two monster tracks right away, the first of which is called "Philautia" and it hits you right out of the gate following a short intro track with a bulky 21 minutes. It begins with a long instrumental introduction highlighted by its beautiful sauntering naturalistic string sections. Those play into the eventual breakdown of all the instrumentation in the song as the vocals kick in amid acoustic guitar and yes, sheep sounds. The song's two short verses do flirt with animalistic themes but in a very imprecise and clearly very metaphor-heavy way. But they give way to a spectacular crescendo immediately following. What begins rather innocuously eventually turns into layers of gritty lo-fi guitars building up over these drums that sounds so thundering at first but are slowly reduced to a footnote in all the noise. It's quite a remarkable start to the record. 

The other huge song "Storge" is somehow even more breathtaking. It begins with these chopped-up vocal samples of a sheep wishing that it could be a scary wolf amid these cinematic synth drones that all come together in such an ominous way. And what can I say about the post-rock passage that follows other than that it's spectacular. It rises with a grandeur that feels like it's teetering on the edge of apocalyptic and matches it with low points that truly feel like they soak and wallow in the intimacy and quiet. This will almost certainly go down as one of my favorite songs of the year. 

The record's title track "Sinner" is less about being a sinner and more about living in a world that makes you feel like one. While the specific sources of this anxiety Samantha cites are God and her immediate family, they hardly feel like the extent of the pressure. After its intimate beginnings, the song eventually bursts into one of the more conventionally rocking passages in the tracklist. The initial slow pacing of the booming drums which eventually transitions into the anthemic guitar noodling is a pretty strong touch. 

Among the shorter tracks there's "Flowerfields" which features listening chimes surrounding shockingly loud piano keys. The song itself is all about sacrificing yourself but hoping that something better can grow in your place, through the metaphor of your blood watering the flowers below you. There's also "Sheep Theme" which is probably the most straightforward shoegaze cut on the record. The DIY mixing style doesn't quite help this song soar in the same way the more epic moments do but after such an epic listen in "Storge" it feels nice to just let loose and erupt for a few minutes. 

To conclude that A Lonely Sinner "needs" epic swaths of instrumentation and huge compositions to be at its best would be a silly conclusion to reach. It's most like the album earns those astonishing high points through careful consideration of the music emotionally. Through that lens it's hard to say that every song here should be as epic as "Storge" even if it is the standout moment. There's beauty throughout Sinner, it's merely a discussion of volume. More importantly, at a relatively young age Samantha has managed to display an extremely impressive ability to conjure feeling through both the music itself and the production and mixing used to assemble it. What results is an album that absolutely lives up to the promise of its appeal and one I HIGHLY recommend. 8/10

Synthesizer - A Place To Bury Strangers

Brooklyn noise rock and shoegaze outfit A Place To Bury Strangers are a group I like to check in on every once in a while for a few reasons. Some of their early work was pretty influential to me when I was first getting into music, in particular their 2009 effort Exploding Head and every once in a while they're still prone to dropping something impressive. I covered their 6th record in a rapid fire review segment a few years ago and though I wasn't crazy about it, the singles from Synthesizer did quite a bit to convince me I may like this one more. 

Those singles include the opener "Disgust" whose sour guitar leads and pummeling pace make for a fiery introduction to the record. I also like "Fear Of Transformation" which also has a thumping intensity and up-tempo drums that feel like they're constantly putting the pressure on you. In the second half of the record, it starts to embrace some pretty heavy 80s throwback vibes. That begins with the stuttering drum machine intro on "It's Too Much" before getting even better as it becomes a full on trend with the vintage post-punk of "Plastic Future."

But occasionally the record's own noise seems to work as self-sabotage. One such case "Have You Every Been In Love" which interrupts the flow of the second half of the album with a frenetic wiry eruption. Elsewhere tracks like "Join The Crowd" and "Don't Be Sorry" seem more interested in piling confrontational sounds on top of each other than ever fully assembling them into completed songs. Ultimately, Synthesizer is a pretty inconsistent record but one that delivers from tense noise cuts in the first half and some satisfying post-punk throwbacks in the second half. They aren't rewriting the book on anything, but the power that made them such an interesting band at their peak still shines through. 6/10