Not because I feel like I made a mistake, necessarily, or because I feel like their absence was an oversight that discredited what I had to say. For what it’s worth, I also mentioned Deafheaven, a band who Bassett played in for a couple years prior to their 2013 blackgaze breakout, Sunbather.īut I didn’t mention the name Whirr once in my article, and it’s been eating at me ever since. I also named the band Cloakroom, another one of the quintessential heavy shoegaze bands of the 2010s, whose landmark 2017 album, Time Well, also gives Bassett piano and composition credits. I mentioned their peers (and one-time split-mates) in Nothing, whose last three albums contain playing and/or creative input from founding Whirr guitarist Nick Bassett. As it got shared around on social media, there was a vocal caderie of readers who were aghast that the semi-active, semi-canceled Bay Area ‘gazers weren’t heralded - or at the very least named - for their contributions to the American shoegaze renaissance that sprang up in the first half of the 2010s. What I didn’t anticipate was how many people would be fucking irate that I didn’t mention the band Whirr in my article. Either because some people wouldn’t consider the bands I presented as shoegaze’s new vanguard to be “shoegaze enough,” or for only focusing on American bands, given there’s such a wide breadth of shoegaze makers operating all over the world. Given that the genre is supported by an intensely passionate and scrupulously nerdy fanbase, and many lifers only recognize music that falls into a certain subset of hyper-specific parameters to even count as shoegaze, I prepared to catch some flack for what I wrote.
It was my attempt at an extensive (thought certainly not exhaustive) scene report documenting several flourishing developments in American shoegaze music. What do we do with socially discarded bands when they're still materially present? And other thoughts.Ī couple months ago I wrote a 4,200-word dissertation for Stereogum about what I call the New Wave of American Shoegaze. On Whirr and Navigating Canceled Bands in Canon
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