The 20 Best Shoegaze Albums

Related: The Best Songs of 2014 (So Far)

Related: The Best Albums of 2014 (So Far)

On its release, Slowdive's Souvlaki wasn't given the sort of praise that it is today. But it's unassuming, a slow grower full of depressant, dulled emotions and pleas to come back out of the stoned bliss that surrounds it. Give it time and its alien nature will start to unfold into a warm opiated embrace.

The 21 years since the album's release have been far kinder to it than most, and it's for that reason that the band is being met with such a hero's welcome for these upcoming tour dates. Souvlaki is a labyrinthine wonderland of dense guitar driven tunes and once you finally get lost in it you're not getting yourself back out.

Jim and William Reid's beloved noise rock quintet predates the existence of the term shoegaze by a couple of years, and to be sure, despite their home on Creation Records, they were not in any appreciable way embroiled in any bubbling shoegaze scene at the time.

That being said, their 1985 record Psychocandy embodies everything that would come to define the shoegaze sound, although with rougher edges and visible seams. A little bit more of the spirit of American rock and roll lives in tracks like "The Hardest Walk" or "Just Like Honey" than in the work of bands that followed, but the fizzy guitar work and dead eyed vocal delivery contained on the record seem in many way the platonic ideal of the shoegaze sound.

What really is there to say about Loveless that hasn't already been said? For many, the interplay between Kevin Shields and Belinda Butchers' distinctive, airy vocalizations defined the genre. The push and pull between Shields' experimentation and the immediately memorable melodies creates an intense yet immensely rewarding listen, but there's something a little alien and a little off about Loveless that keeps it from defining the genre.

Though so many bands were taking cues from the Dublin quartet's style and modes of composition, they still remain an outlier in a now crowded scene. So many have tried, but nobody sounds quite like them.

The Oxford, UK quartet that makes up Ride came out of the gate fully formed. Recorded while guitarist Andy Bell was still a teenager, the band's self-titled debut EP contains a few of their most beloved songs to date. Capitalizing on that EP and a couple of others that followed in rapid succession, the band recorded and released their debut album Nowhere just nine months later.

Like the other scene godheads, Ride tread a careful balance between beauty and noise, but Bell and Mark Gardener's guitar work seems to sidle further on the side of beauty than most. Leads ping and arc across the often unrelenting rhythm work. Ride was lucky to have two great songwriters, but it's the interplay of their guitar work that makes Nowhere as compelling as it is.

For most of their early singles up to and including their debut Lesser Matters, the Swedish trio that makes up the Radio Dept. traded in small, scrappy tracks that dealt with longing, loss, and nostalgia.

Though they've operated for most of the intervening period sans drummer (and consequently in a less grounded compositional mode) Lesser Matters is a triumph of the bedroom recorded shoegaze-y aesthetic. Drum machines come and go throughout the album's thirteen tracks, but Lesser Matters is alternately weighty and weightless, disorienting in its structure and intimately personal in its lyricism.

Generally speaking, J Mascis' guitar maelstrom seems to have had a big part in shaping the work of many of the great guitarists of the era, but Bug's blown out sonics seem especially to run especially parallel to The Scene That Celebrates Itself. From "Freak Scene" onward, even in moments that emphasize Mascis' distinct melodic sense, Bug offers a high pitched, high gain squall, unrelenting in its breadth and magnitude. Though My Bloody Valentine's lineup was already cemented by the time Bug came out, for its torched and tortured aesthetic it's hard not to read some of Mascis' idiosyncrasies in Kevin Shields' early work.

As half of Godflesh, Justin Broadrick has always made music that's alien and loud, but his Jesu side project has always dealt with those two characteristics with a lighter hand. The Silver EP in particular relies on dirging guitars and vocal whispers to conjure the sort of all encompassing foreignness that Broadrick always seeks to conjure.

Though some will point to Alcest or Deafheaven as the apogee of shoegaze-flecked metal recordings, Silver more adeptly blends the two disparate styles. Like Smashing Pumpkins' "Mayonaise" on steroids, these tracks dial up the distortion and emotion of shoegaze to the Nth degree to make something that's as crushing as it is beautiful.

Swervedriver's 1991 debut LP Raise demonstrated a darker, heavier side of shoegaze. Though My Bloody Valentine always lead with roughness, their songs were warm inside. On Raise, Swervedriver takes the opposite route. Though singer/guitarist Adam Franklin still flirts with the same even-tempered vocal style that marks out the genre, his band's psychedelic take on the scene thrashes and heaves—recalling scene progenitors Dinosaur Jr. rather than any of their more obvious peers.

It's an edge that suits the sound well, and one that they're surprisingly able to sustain over the course of a full-length. It never really fully wanes, and only takes a step back (as on "Rave Down") to pounce even harder with the following track.

Very few of the multitude of records that Lilys have released since the early '90s could be described as shoegaze, but that's just because main man Kurt Heasley can't sit still. He's done krautrock, Kinks-indebted garage pop, and a whole host of other styles, but he was at his best back in 1992, when he released the aqueous In The Presence of Nothing.

Though maligned by some for hewing to closely to the template that My Bloody Valentine created with Loveless, Heasley makes up for any perceived similarities by absolutely baring his soul. "Elizabeth Color Wheel" is seven minutes of pure ache. Heasley's singing about loss, and when the guitar maelstrom hits, it's an incredibly potent matching of form and content. That last bit is something he remains good at to this day, but it's never more striking than on In The Presence of Nothing.

Bradford Cox and Lockett Pundt, the two main songwriters for Deerhunter, have each done their fair share of shoegaze-indebted material, but it's 2008's Cryptograms that remains the most influential in the canon of reverb-drenched rock music. From the title track's pummeling basslines to the teardrop instrumental "Heatherwood," Deerhunter's second LP runs the whole spectrum of shoegaze-y sounds, recalling the Cocteaus and Swervedriver, but somehow remaining distinct.

Credit Cox's omnivorousness. He's more likely to attribute the music that he makes to something krauty and cosmic or to something as simple as a Bo Diddley song, but what's here is just the latest transformation of an upward-straining sort of indie rock. At the very least, it's the most recent indie rock album that seems to embody shoegaze's balance of accessible pop songs and effect-laden experimentation.

Chapterhouse famously workshopped the songs that makeup their first record Whirlpool for over a year before they even laid down demos. Early gigs came in support of their trippy countrymen in the Spacemen 3, but their version of that cosmic aesthetic ended up manifesting itself in watery vocals and impellent guitar work, which led them to being lumped in with bands like Ride and Slowdive.

Whirlpool stands out in a crowd of similarly positioned British records of the era for how buoyant it remains despite copping an often melancholic aesthetic. It's tough to make out what vocalists Andrew Sherriff and Stephen Patman are saying at any given time, but their gaze seems far more upward cast than many gave them credit for. At times, it's downright happy sounding, uplifting in a genre that usually seeks ascension through catharsis. Pair that with their bright pinging guitar leads, and you're off on one of the sunnier trips that Reading, England is likely to offer you.

Strictly speaking, Ulrich Schnauss doesn't even make pop music, let alone a niche-y underground version of it. For the better part of the last couple of decades, the German electronic producer has been exploring the outer fringes of IDM, with his reverby and remote collections of synthesizer-led electronic music. But Schnauss' music, and in particular 2001's Far Away Trains Passing By shares a spiritual sort of connection to the music that was emanating from the UK a decade earlier.

The stolid washes of synthesizers that populate tracks like "Knuddelmaus" recall the amorphous masses of guitar that Slowdive was coating their songs with back in the early to mid '90s. And natch, there's a cover of Slowdive's "Crazy For You" included on the album. But this isn't hero worship by any means. Schnauss' placid tones are a world away from stereotypical shoegaze sonics. He's managing to be part of the lineage and subvert it with the cool haze of ambient techno at the same time.

Drop Nineteens' sophomore album Delaware came out in 1992, long after the shoegaze aesthetics had coalesced in England. Over on these shores, the wave of largely English music took longer to make a sonic impact, but when it did, there was a whole host of American bands cribbing the style—Drop Nineteens from Boston were one of those bands, and one of few that did it well. Well entrenched by this point of their careers in the heightened emotion of bands like Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine, Drop Nineteens stretched out on Delaware allowing themselves the space for experimentation that separated them from their influences.

The whammy bar heroics on "Reberrymember" still retained the obvious fingerprints of Kevin Shields and co., but even in the same song, they weren't afraid to delve into sounds both darker and lighter than MBV ever attempted. Singer/guitarist Greg Ackels unleashes some phlegmy screams atypical for the genre, jarring the record from its otherwise dead-eyed take on the genre. Delaware's important for its diversity, and for showing that a band need not stick to well trod genre signifiers to make an engaging shoegaze record.

For the better part of the last couple of decades, Aidan Baker has remained one of the most prolific artists in experimental music—issuing a handful of fully realized LPs each year under his name and a number of high profile collaborations. Nadja, named for Andre Breton's dizzying, surreal novel, is his metal leaning band with bassist/vocalist Leah Buckareff.

2008's Bliss Torn From Emptiness consists of just three long tracks, but each one contributes to the overall surge and sway of the record. Leaning heavily at points on Baker's abstract electronic work and dirging drum lines, the record is of a piece with a lot of the records that shoegaze spawned. These are spacious and desolate environments Baker and Buckareff have crafted here, largely devoid of the sort of yearning that populated many of their forebears record, but nevertheless as compelling while relying on many of the same gliding sonics.

By the time the idea of shoegaze rolled around, the British label 4AD had already entrenched itself as a fruitful home for downcast indie rock. Lush who formed in London in 1987 were another of that label's fine productions, but they stand out for their career arc.

Though they started out in stereotypically shoegaze realms, by the time 1994's Split dropped they were edging ever closer to more traditional guitar pop music, including the nascent Brit-pop that was on the verge of storming through the UK. Split naturally melds Lush's earlier impulses toward abstraction with catchy and straightforward pop songs. It's a lot more easily apprehensible than large swaths of 4AD's catalog, and it's one of the best.

Dan Barrett and Tim Macuga's 2008 debut as Have A Nice Life was indicative of their varied tastes, drawing equally from traditions of industrial, folk, ambient, and post-punk styles. Curiously, what resulted sounds a whole lot like a bleak, tortured version of shoegaze.

Particularly when Barrett and Macuga allow themselves to get heavy, the instrumentation bears down on you in the same way that it might on a stereotypically shoegaze record. Deathconsciousness is a strange record, if only for the incredible number of styles and texture that the duo manages over the course of its 85-minute runtime, but in spirit, if not in sound, it seems to owe a lot to the washed out strains of England in the early '90s.

There's a whole strain of the music that gets called shoegaze that wouldn't exist without Cocteau Twins. Liz Frasier's murmurs and Robin Guthrie's airy instrumentals prefigured the funereal dirges of some of My Bloody Valentine's deep cuts, as well as the whole catalogs of bands like Ride and Slowdive.

Treasure is one of many highlights in the band's catalog, but really epitomizes the otherworldliness that they sought to achieve. Even though some of the more stereotypically shoegaze bands were doing so in a more composed way, they were striving for the same unearthly quality.

Based on their music, it seems pretty safe to say that the four men who made up Adorable meant their name with a knowing wink. Their debut album Against Perfection, released in 1992, was a stormy, melancholic record—descendant from decades of similarly minded British guitar pop.

This is like Echo and the Bunnymen or the Cure, but with a head full of prescription pills and an expensive reverb unit. "Sunshine Smile," the leadoff track from this record, distills everything the band did well over the course of their career into a neat five minutes. Vocalist/guitarist Piotr Fijalkowski gives an unruffled performance about the titular girl with a sunshine smile as guitars storm and swirl around him. Against Perfection is tidy and maybe a bit precious at times, but it's definitely not adorable.

At the time of the release of Pigment in 1991, the Czech band Ecstasy of Saint Theresa capitalized on two different trends that were reaching a critical and commercial zeitgeist—though they did it without really knowing it. Though Pigment is a seamless mix of the distant emoting of shoegaze and the jangly drive of twee, the Ecstasy of Saint Theresa were just doing what seemed right at the time.

The band's Free-D (Original Soundtrack) was the first Czech album released by a Western label after the fall of the Eastern Bloc, and Pigment which was self-released laid the groundwork for that effort. Though Pigment is short, it's a perfect exploration of the Venn Diagram between twee and shoegaze, prickly and precious in equal measure.

The London duo Curve made one of the most unique records of the era by not limiting themselves to the strictures of guitar band formats. Though Toni Halladay and Dean Garcia adopted the washes of guitar and hazy emoting of the indie pop bands of the era, Doppelgänger also cribs heavily from dance music, producing a foreign strain of the genre that manages to be both more rhythmically and melodically complex than much of what came before it. Curve would go on to explore this strange concoction further, but no one else came close to distilling the mixture in as dark or alluring of a way.