Shoegaze
Sung. Melodic singing throughout.
In short
Walls of cascading guitar effects with the vocals buried in the mix. Named after the habit of staring at the pedalboard on stage.
How it sounds
- Dozens of stacked guitar tracks through long chains of pedals.
- Kevin Shields' 'glide guitar' — the tremolo arm used continuously, so the tuning never settles.
- Vocals mixed level with the instruments, as another texture.
Hear what that means
- The glide guitar
My Bloody Valentine - Loveless
A chord is strummed and the tremolo arm is moved while it rings, so the pitch never settles anywhere. Nothing in the recording is in tune with itself for more than a moment, and that seasick quality is the entire sound.
Open on YouTube - A voice mixed as a texture
The vocal is set at the level of a guitar rather than above it, so you register the tone and lose most of the words. That is an arrangement decision, made on purpose, and it is what people mean when they call the genre dreamlike.
Open on YouTube - The bass carrying the tune
Once the guitars have become weather, the bass is the only instrument left with an unambiguous pitch - so it takes the melody. Follow it and the song has a shape the top half of the mix is hiding.
Open on YouTube
Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. Each opens at the start of the recording.
The specifics
- Tempo
- 100-140 bpm
- Song length
- 4-7 min
- Tuning
- Standard, often with a capo, and frequently in an altered tuning arrived at by ear and never named.
- Production
- The guitars are the reverb. Layer on layer of tracked takes through delay, and on the defining records a whammy pedal rocked while a chord rings, so the pitch never quite settles. Nothing is picked out in the mix — including the voice.
- Written about
- Desire, Dissociation, Weather, Words you cannot make out, which is the arrangement's decision rather than an accident
What each part is doing
- Guitar The pedals are the instrument. A chord is strummed and then transformed on the way to the amp, so what arrives is a texture that no longer has an attack in it.
- Bass Playing an actual melody, because it is the only thing left in the mix with an unambiguous pitch. On most of these records the bass is the tune.
- Drums Simple, steady and dry — a fixed shape underneath something that has none. Remove it and the wall stops being music.
- Vocals Sung softly and mixed level with the guitars, deliberately, so that the voice is one more texture rather than a narrator standing in front of the band.
What it isn't
That the name describes introversion. It was an insult in the British music press about the pedalboards: these bands stood still and looked down because they were operating eight effects with their feet, and a journalist made it a slur about a scene too shy to perform. It stuck, then got adopted, and it still misleads — the records are extremely loud, and the live shows were reputedly among the loudest anyone played.
Told apart from
- Dream pop Dream pop is this with the volume and the distortion down: the same reverb and the same buried voice, without the wall. If it is beautiful and quiet, it is dream pop.
- Noise rock The same volume for the opposite purpose. Noise rock uses it to abrade; shoegaze uses it to envelop, and never lets a sound have a sharp edge.
- Post-rock Post-rock builds and releases across eight minutes. Shoegaze arrives already at full volume and stays there — there is no crescendo, because there is nowhere to climb from.
- Blackgaze / post-black Blackgaze puts a black metal shriek and a blast beat inside this exact guitar sound, which works because both genres already wanted a wall and a buried voice.
The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.
History
My Bloody Valentine spent two years and an enormous budget on Loveless, nearly bankrupting their label. The British press named the genre dismissively, after the bands' habit of staring at their pedals instead of the crowd. Britpop buried it in 1994, but it came back strongly after 2005 and now feeds metal too, through blackgaze.
Descended from
Branches into
On the timeline
Siblings on this branch
Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree
- Gothic rock identical ratings · meets it at Rock
- Neo-psychedelia 1.0 apart by rating · meets it at Rock
- Desert rock 1.4 apart by rating · meets it at Rock
Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim.