Cartwheel, the excellent new album from New York band Hotline TNT, begins with the sort of dreamy, pitch-bent chords that will be instantly familiar to anyone partial to Ride, Slowdive or My Bloody Valentine. Familiar too, 30 seconds later, is the sudden squall of feedback that disrupts that moment of peacefulness, not to mention the wave of huge, distorted guitar that crashes in straight after. Yes, we’re in shoegaze territory here, and it’s a joyful racket.
Which isn’t to say that Hotline TNT, the project of New York-based musician Will Anderson (also responsible for the similarly fuzzy, similarly good 2010s band Weed), is some sort of nostalgia act. On Cartwheel, surprises are around every corner: strange patches of ambient wash, an occasional burst of drum’n’bass. It’s that enticing mix of old and new that has earned the album a mountain of praise since it was released last week, including Pitchfork’s much-coveted Best New Music tag.
Cartwheel comes as a capper to a period of real resurgence for the shoegaze genre in recent years, as a new generation of bands on both sides of the Atlantic discover the appeal of extremely complicated pedal set-ups. Shoegaze, of course, has had a lot of these resurgences: here’s a Guardian piece declaring its return 10 years ago. But while that most recent revival largely featured bands – Diiv (below), Cheatahs, Wild Nothing – who were largely loyal to the tried and true sound of shoegaze’s first wave, this latest revival is notable for its expansive horizons. In 2023 shoegaze can be pretty much whatever you want it to be.
Take another of this year’s shoegaze success stories, the Philadelphia band Feeble Little Horse: their 2023 album Girl With Fish might nod to those first-wave big beasts, but it seems as equally inspired by the alt-pop of Spirit of the Beehive or Alex G. Feeble Little Horse is, along with the likes of A Country Western and They Are Gutting a Body of Water (bizarre monikers seems to be a recurring theme of this latest wave), part of a Philadelphia shoegaze scene that trades out the po-facedness often associated with the genre for something more playful and arty. (For anyone wanting to go really deep into this Philadelphia scene, this Stereogum primer is a very good place to start.)
Meanwhile, the genre seems to be ever splintering into more hyper-specific subgenres, all of which, of course, end in shoegaze. The most familiar of these is blackgaze, the bleary-eyed black metal-shoegaze hybrid popularised by bands like Deafheaven (pictured top), but on bandcamp you’ll also find plenty of releases tagged with emogaze (a fuzzier form of the Midwestern emo of bands like American Football) or countrygaze (adding a pedal steel twang to those giant soundscapes).
And that’s not even factoring in the many bands and artists that, while not strictly shoegaze, share the same fondness for a sound that’s grand and blown-out. You can hear the slightest hint of shoegaze in the giant, crackling electronica of someone like Dan Deacon, or even – and, yes, I might be stretching a bit here – the pulsating, distortion-heavy beats on a lot of trap music. There’s a shared rejection of polish and sheen, and a desire to make something appealing out of pure, harsh noise. Gaze long enough and everything starts to look a bit shoegaze-y.
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