Off the top of your head, can you name a popular shoegaze album that dropped during the Bush administration? Despite its spike in popularity at the tail end of the 1980s alongside grunge (and, in very different circles, the first President Bush), the two alt-rock subgenres couldn’t have had more dissimilar trajectories. Grunge, forged from the theatrics of heavy metal to suit the disaffection of ’90s youths, became so popular that it inspired a bastardized offshoot that seemed to engulf all of the airplay for mainstream rock in the early 2000s. On the other hand, shoegaze, forged from the celestial aestheticism of dream pop to suit the disaffection of ’90s youths, was so critically maligned after the release of Loveless that it barely lasted more than a few years as its adherents either broke up or went Britpop.
There were a handful of American bands—Failure, Hum, Far, Shiner—who sourced shoegaze for one last chest-compression on grunge in the mid- to late-’90s, but it seemed that you simply weren’t supposed to make shoegaze by the year 2000. While the post-punk revival playing out in NYC cosplayed Downtown ’81, it supplemented that influence with the irony and nu-alienation of slacker rock and other quintessential ’90s alt-rock subgenres—with the lone exception seemingly being shoegaze, which was the most aggressive embodiment of the ideology that infused all of these strands of music. It seems like the consensus was that canonizing bands like My Bloody Valentine could signal the critical legitimization of a heavier, more formless sound, a musical take on abstract expressionism which had become less politically serviceable in the wake of the Cold War era. I don’t think the US and its allies were still looking toward art to prove our freedom by the time our national war machine’s Eye of Sauron shifted its focus to the Middle East.
From the perspective of 2026, most individuals who could reasonably define the term “shoegaze” would likely point to Deftones’ White Pony as the defining genre statement of the decade. But what they may not realize is that that term never materialized in any of the writeups published about the record upon its June 2000 release. Instead, its positive reviews seemed to exclusively approach it within the context of nu-metal as an opportunity to deride the then-subsiding movement much in the same way shoegaze—essentially a term of derision—had been trashed less than a decade prior (“a sweeter Korn and a more user-friendly Tool,” Entertainment Weekly wrote), or they described it in terms that seemed hostile to the then-predominant nu-metal faction of their fanbase (Rolling Stone cited “the head-and-booty-banging pimp-rock style they helped to invent,” and I would love it if they could elaborate).
Granted the term does get used much more loosely in the 2020s, but Deftones’ recent critical revival seems to be tied to the changing attitudes around shoegaze. The genre didn’t seem to be on anyone’s mind when White Pony dropped a few months before Bush 2 took office, whereas recently I’ve begun to notice press materials from major labels embracing the term as a word of praise—something to aspire to—for artists that might not fit under the genre’s original definition, much in the same way “alt-rock” continued to be used to promote artists infiltrating the mainstream in the ’90s, “indie rock” was used to describe major-label musicians in the ’00s, and “bedroom pop” frequently referred to sounds recorded in a studio in the 2010s. Then again, if we’re taking genre tags literally, I guess anything could be shoegaze as long as it can be proven that the guitarists were staring at their feet when it was made.
The other record that stands out to me from this decade clings to a much softer side of the aughts’ alt-rock divide: Silversun Pickups released their debut album a few months before Deftones leaned harder into shoegaze’s dense textures with Saturday Night Wrist, and, perhaps more relevantly, a full year before The Smashing Pumpkins re-entered the zeitgeist. Propelled by its lead single “Lazy Eye”—an alt-rock radio smash hit that dominated film and TV soundtracks, late-night talk show stages, and sports video game soundtracks (it even appeared on both Guitar Hero and Rock Band)—Carnavas scaled shoegaze down to the size of indie rock clubs rather than attempting to reach the stadium capacity Deftones played to. The album opener “Melatonin” feels like an apt introduction to their sedated take on the genre: less erratic and unpredictable, cleaner and better suited to pop music’s structures (well, ironically, with the exception of their breakout single’s raging climax). Speaking of sleeping, the album was out for over a year before anyone seemed to take notice.
But as with White Pony, the reviews upon Carnavas’s July 2006 release (as well as those that ran closer to the release of the “Lazy Eye” single in September 2007) mostly overlooked the influence of shoegaze to overwhelmingly focus on low-hanging fruit—which, in the case of Silversun Pickups, was the band’s striking similarities to Smashing Pumpkins. NME wrote them off as “melancholic drone-rock” before comparing them to the Pumpkins mostly just due to their having a female bass player, while Pitchfork showed them unchecked disdain for their grunge revivalism and emo vocal and lyrical tendencies before offering the lone compliment that their bass player is “way cute.” Rolling Stone and The Guardian, on the other hand, bravely classified them as revivalists of “the oft-derided shoegazing era” before astutely contrasting Silversun Pickups with Billy Corgan’s band by noting their capacity to have fun. As much as they insist on defying their categorization as a serious band these days, I can’t quite see Smashing Pumpkins covering “Party in My Tummy.”
This seems like an important detail to me: Whereas Deftones presented shoegaze as the sound of angst, aggression, and male longing (the phrase “Saturday night wrist” has always sounded euphemistic to me), Silversun Pickups were fairly pleasant when they weren’t screaming about being lost and loaded, with Brian Aubert’s androgynous vocals seeming geared toward indie-rock listeners who were in the midst of being swept up by the dance-punk movement, as well as punk kids embracing the equally upbeat mall-emo scene. Fusion records like White Pony and Carnavas were like ruptured piñatas revealing a slew of avenues for the previously limited scope of shoegaze to traverse in their wake, with Nothing soon adopting shreds of these sounds for hardcore, Title Fight for post-hardcore, Alcest and Deafheaven for black metal, Jesu for drone, Ovlov for grunge, Candy Claws for neo-psych rock, The Horrors for gothic post-punk, Alvvays for indie rock, No Joy for noise pop, The Depreciation Guild for chiptune, Psychedelic Horseshit for the genre’s pseudo revival, and on and on.
Which isn’t to say that these were the only bands leading the charge: M83, The Besnard Lakes, Asobi Seksu, and Blonde Redhead were all experimenting with these sounds from within the indie-rock scene around this time, while much purer genre adherents—new bands like A Place to Bury Strangers, Airiel, and Astrobrite, stalwarts from the ’90s such as loveliescrushing and Swirlies—seemed to be content with the low ceiling for exposure shoegaze provided. Together they created an odd sort of patchwork to bridge the gap between the genre’s initial peak and its second wave, when groups like MBV, Slowdive, and Ride—as well as smaller names like Alison’s Halo and Drop Nineteens, and even figures who were totally unknown at the time of their original run like Panchiko—would also reconvene after the post-internet era’s reassessment of their music.
When it comes to the absence of shoegaze in the 2000s, there are surely plenty of other factors at play. The new millennium seemed to signal a shift from a linear culture to something more cyclical, with bygone eras of music in particular becoming popular again every 20 years (hence the fact that even nu-metal is now having a moment). The birth of mainstream internet culture and music-centric social media sites also laid the groundwork for communities to form around niche movements like shoegaze, likely attracting new listeners and ensuring budding musicians that there is, in fact, a future in reverb. I’m sure this current wave of buzz bands like Wisp and julie who embrace a broader Y2K aesthetic will die down eventually or get swallowed up by newer avenues of sound that have even less to do with shoegaze’s roots in the UK, but it’ll be interesting to see whether it recedes entirely from above-ground music circles. It’s funny to imagine a future where shoegaze has staying power, leaving a single decade notably barren of its influence. FL
