Chasing Fridays: My Bloody Valentine live, Dublin trip log, Glixen Q&A

My girlfriend always says my newsletter needs more pictures, so this is her lucky week. As I teased in the previous Chasing Fridays, I traveled to Dublin last week to see My Bloody Valentine's big comeback show and spent some time traveling around the city. It was a big trip for me (my first outside of North America), and I saw a lot of cool shit that I ended up documenting for myself and my readers. Because we are, like the characters in The Substance, one. You can read my full review of the MBV show over at The FADER, and peep my less formal account of the experience down below. In addition to my music-related trip log, I interviewed Glixen singer Aislinn Ritchie for this week's Chasing Down Q&A. It's a good one.

My shoegazing journey to Dublin, Ireland: a trip log

As mentioned above, I traveled to Dublin last week to see My Bloody Valentine play the biggest shoegaze show of all time. Outside of that spectacular event, I had a blast venturing in and around the city with some great new friends, and also spent a helluva lot of time on planes and in airports with my headphones on. On my flight over, I decided that it would be fun to take little notes on my phone throughout the weekend and publish them as a trip log on Chasing Sundays. I was pretty good at keeping up with that task throughout my stay, and the fruits of my labor are available for your entertainment below. Half music blog, half diary – whatever, it's a holiday, you shouldn't be reading music criticism anyways. Happy Thanksgiving.

Thursday Nov. 20

3 a.m. EST: I'm on my redeye flight to London's Heathrow airport, where I have a three-hour layover waiting for me before taking another hour-and-change flight to Dublin. It's dark in the cabin and I'm sipping orange juice that's pleasantly unsweet after struggling to get maybe a collective half-hour of sleep. I downloaded all 3,287 songs on my "Shit I Like" Masterlist playlist and have been shuffling through them for hours. The roulette just landed on Silver Jews' "The Wild Kindness" (perfect song) and then flipped to a Swearin' song where the guy vocalist sings that I don't recognize ("Stabilize"). During takeoff I heard a song by Real Life Buildings, a band who really caught me during the late 2010s and who I recently remembered with the intention of revisiting. Heard a couple more tracks during this flight and am happy to report that they fucking rule. Basically like LVL Up if they were slightly more emo and also slightly more slowcore.

11 a.m. GMT, 6 a.m. EST: Still running on 30 minutes of shuteye because I can't sleep on planes. Bleary-eyed and drinking a coffee, but listening to Total Wife instead of Bleary Eyed. I'm a guy who likes to collect strange coincidences, and I already experienced a great one. I was gazing up at a huge screen displaying a day's worth of flight times. Dozens upon dozens of flights going all over the world. A strange man I've never seen before, who trusted me to watch his phone after 10 seconds of eyeing me, asks me if I'm flying out at 12:55. He's correct. We're on the exact same flight. He smiles confidently, as if he somehow knew where I was going. I'd like to think he did. 

1:30 p.m London time flying to Dublin: Eating the best airline biscuit I've ever had and listening to Crystal Castles. I don't know why but I feel most compelled to listen to "problematic" music when I'm traveling. Kanye is a road trip requirement, for instance. Maybe because I'm not grounded in my home terrain I feel less bound to the social contracts I've submitted to. Or maybe because I'm a thrillseeker and the excitement of flying in a foreign land is even more tantalizing if I'm listening to something that's, even in the most minor way, transgressive.

3 p.m. GMT: Landed in Dublin and my buddy Eoin snagged us a cab from this absolute caricature of a boomer Irishman named Dermot. Within the first ten seconds, he was moaning about how the other drivers are "a pain in my derrière," how "me mate was slagging me off," and then further disparaging the other cabbies as hapless "muppets," a word that I'll be bringing back home like a souvenir. Dermot didn't take a breath from talking once throughout the half-hour journey to the heart of Dublin, and I was living for it.

He's the island's first (and only) third generation cab driver, and says he started while his dad and grandfather were still actively working, meaning the whole paternal line were on the road simultaneously. That was many years ago, and "now I'm just a nobody" he says casually, yet with a touch of mourning for the generation of Dublin that's been washed away by time. Dermot was also certain that I, in my leather jacket and sunglasses, was a rockstar being picked up at the airport by management (Eoin, in his peacoat). They don't make 'em like that anymore. 

8 p.m. GMT: I'm eating chili chicken ramen in the cozy apartment of my two wonderful hosts, Eoin and Laura, who are telling me about their meet-cute that sounds like the plot of a twee movie from the late 2000s. Laura and her friend went to A Sunny Day in Glasgow gig that Eoin booked, but she forgot her jumper at the venue after leaving. She doubled back to seek out her treasured hoodie, and also to talk to the cute guy in the Velvetsy striped t-shirt. The jumper remains MIA all these years later, but her life with Eoin seems like a worthy trade. So yes, shoegaze brought me to Ireland, and of course my hosts were brought together by shoegaze as well. 

Friday Nov. 21:

6 a.m. GMT: After nine hours of restful sleep I'm up early answering texts and listening to the seagull caws penetrating the quiet morning. Eoin and Dermot explained that the seagulls, which I thought were fascinating to see soaring through this urban metropolis, are "a menace." A recently enacted law preventing fisherman from dumping their waste at the shoreline has decimated the seagull's food supply, so now they've been forced to come inland to search for food, where they essentially behave like an invasive species. Eoin warns that they'll snatch a sandwich out of your hands while you're strolling through Dublin's main drag if you're not on high alert. I'd like to see one try. Seriously, I think that'd be funny. 

2:30 p.m. GMT: I'm in an authentic Irish pub drinking a draft Guinness 0.0 and eating my first fish and chips in nearly a decade (just broke veg a month ago). It's the most quintessentially Dublin experience, except the music blaring out of the bar stereo is the most American bullshit imaginable: Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Eagles, "Tiny Dancer." Very funny.

6 p.m. GMT: Sitting in the living room drinking exquisite cherry cola and listening to dub techno softly on the record player. Was out all afternoon. Took the train out to see the sea down south. Beautiful views, and also several lunatics swimming in 30 degree weather. Trecked though centre city Dublin popping in and out of stores. No music in my headphones, just trying to take in the sounds of the cityscape and be #present. Oh, one café was playing 21 Pilots and Eoin, 15 years my senior and a lifelong indie head, was appalled. Rightly so. 

10 p.m. GMT: At the pub talking to a new mate about shoegaze. 

11 p.m. GMT: Still at the pub talking to another new mate about shoegaze. 

Saturday Nov. 22:

4 p.m. GMT: After puttering around St. Patrick's Cathedral and Marsh's Library, a library that was founded in 1707 (!), Eoin, Laura, and I end up trekking down to an MBV merch popup that's happening in Dublin's tourist city centre. My friend is DJing inside but there's no chance I'm getting in with a line that wraps around the block and barely budges during the 20 minutes we spend gawking at it. I meet two Americans from Charlotte, NC who say they waited two hours in line to get into the bar and buy "Loveless" beanies. They also say the merch on Etsy is more interesting than the official stuff MBV has here. A shoegaze busker is playing out front the bar and MBV classics are leaking from the bar and into the streets. Shoegaze is alive and well in Dublin.

7:20 p.m. GMT: I'm seated for the MBV show listening to Laraaji playing softly through the arena speakers. The whole weekend has been building to this moment but it's one of those situations where I still haven't fully accepted what's about to take place. I'm seated with a bunch of people in pink "after party" wrist bands but can't figure out who the VIPs around me are. I realize that I may be surrounded by famous '90s shoegazers for the rest of the night, but won't be able to recognize them in their middle-age bodies.

At one point, a teenage girl down the row takes a pic with the flash on and then curses in embarrassment when I spot her, shifting her lens away as I glance in her direction. I think she's trying to snap a photo of someone notable in my section. A handful of guys around my age are seated down the row, but I can't figure out who they are. Guess I'll never know

1 a.m. GMT: At an after party in a bar called Whelan's where a couple members of MBV eventually show up. The bar is packed with hundreds of people and a DJ is blasting the Stooges and Sonic Youth while drunk Gen-Xers swing themselves around the dancefloor. I get in a convo with a booking agent for ML Buch, Astrid Sonne, and many other Copenhagen groups. I ask him what he thinks of cloud-rock and he laughs, admitting that of course he accepts the term even if he thinks it's silly. W.

Sunday Nov. 23

1 p.m. GMT: I'm in a car with Eoin and his friend Brew, who's driving us along the coastline out to a small village called Howth. The sun is out, the windows are cracked. and we're listening to Lush's Spooky while cruising down the seaside. It's hot in the car but the 35-degree wind feels incredible on my arm. We eventually pull off at this "secret overlook," according to Eoin, where we take a short hike on a path along the shoreline that leads to this magnificent cliffside view.

It's cold and so windy that my body nearly blows off the craggy rocks, but the breeze feels replenishing rather than just bitter. I can't stop taking photos because every time I glance up I'm looking at the most stunning waterside view I've ever seen. On the way up to the overlook, we pass a quartet of fluffy brown Highland Cows grazing in a pasture. I clomp through the field and get as close as I can to the gentle giants for a pic, but back off once they get skittish about me trying to touch them. The MBV show was otherworldly, but this little jaunt into nature is my favorite part of the trip.

8 p.m. GMT: In Laura and Eoin's apartment, sunk into their couch watching a movie called Riddle of Fire that's about a group of kids stumbling into a dangerously quaint adventure in rural Wyoming. Laura says that choosing the movie on a Sunday night requires a particular degree of curatorial tact. "The vibe has to be right," she says. The vibe of this movie is absolutely perfect.

Monday Nov. 24

10:30 a.m. GMT: In Heathrow airport again during my three-hour layover before my flight back to Pittsburgh. I luckily snatched a seat at one of those tall tables with charging ports and am writing my MBV show review with Aphex Twin in my ears and a decent Americano in my veins. I feel like a journalist in the movies, writing my copy on the way back from assignment. Except in the movies, the journalists usually aren't frantically running through their mental rolodexes of synonyms for "ethereal."

God knows what fucking time it is, I've stopped converting: The flight from Dublin to Pittsburgh is seven-and-a-half hours and there's no wifi on this plane. The guy seated one row in front of me, a 40-year-old punk clinging to a bad mohawk, throws his seat back into my lap 30 minutes after takeoff and stays reclined throughout the whole trip, giving me hardly any room to move. The Zofran my girlfriend gave me is keeping my motion sickness at bay, but I'm stubbornly uninterested in reading or watching movies on flights. I also don't have the phone battery or the physical comforts to finish my review, so I commit to a full work day of music.

After downing Yeezus and the new Hellp album early on, I spend a few hours rabbit holing my giant playlist. A lot of Freddie Gibbs, Boldy James, Benny the Butcher, Playboi Carti, Future, Roc Marciano, and Pusha-T. Then some Magnetic Fields, a dash of Avalanches, a sprinkle of 2020 hyperpop, some Fountains of Wayne, and eventually, Greg Freeman into MJ Lenderman into Drive-By Truckers. The plane lands to "Zip City" and "Let It Rock" and I'm nodding my head so fondly that the ladies on either side of me probably think I popped a pill in the bathroom. I rip through the airport, shuttle out to my parked car, throw on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, curse madly into the pay terminal after seeing how much the lot fee set me back for four days of parking ($80!!!), and whip home rapping every lyric to "Gorgeous." Ain't no question, if I want it, I need it. A nap, that is.

Chasing Down

AISLINN RITCHIE
of
Glixen

Chasing Down is a Q&A series with artists, friends, and others of good taste.

Glixen had a big year. They released their best music yet, the Quiet Pleasures EP, and toured all over with the likes of Beabadoobee, Scowl, Panchiko, Glare, and many others. They've had some huge looks (Coachella 2025, for instance) and are one of the buzzier young bands in the modern shoegaze renaissance, but they also have their fair share of detractors, and somehow still feel more underrated than they should be in the grand scheme of modern indie music. In honor of their newest single "medicine bow," released just last week, I wanted to welcome Glixen singer Aislinn Ritchie to Chasing Sundays so I could follow up on a few threads that I tugged on during my Stereogum profile of the band earlier this year. She obliged.

For this week's Chasing Down Q&A, I asked Ritchie about music that makes her say "holy shit," emotional shoegaze, Glixen's 2025, where the band want to go next, and more. Read the full interview below.

What was the last song or album you heard that blew your mind? Not just, "oh, I like this," but "holy shit, this is transformative"? 

Recently, I’ve fallen in love with Addison by Addison Rae, Melt by Not for Radio, and Codename: Dustsucker by Bark Psychosis. I can’t give one answer because these three albums in unison really just capture my state of being at the moment. These three have quite literally made me say “holy shit."

Who do you think is the most emotionally impactful shoegaze band? Not necessarily the best, but the band whose music always moves you the most when you hear it. 

100 percent will always be Whirr. Everything about them. Their tone, their melodies and rhythms. They’ll always be so special to me. Their music has gotten me through a lot of difficult moments as well as beautiful moments.