Chasing Fridays: Shoegaze check-in, Beach House live, Oral Q&A, more

Hello hello, this is once again a very jam-packed issue of Chasing Fridays so I'm going to get right into it. This week, I wrote about a bunch of shoegaze, my second time seeing Ninajirachi, and my first time seeing Beach House in 16 years. Then, I interviewed that band Oral who I evangelized last week, because they're absolutely fascinating to me and I truly believe that they will be an important band in the arc of music in the 2020s.

To read that interview and all the others I have behind the paywall, you need to subscribe to Chasing Sundays for $5/month. I need as many paid subscribers as I can to keep this thing sustainable, so if you like my writing and are able to give me that meager sum on a monthly basis, that would be immensely appreciated. In exchange, you get access to a lot of paywalled writing and playlists. I think it's a damn good deal.

Checking in on the shoegaze revival

A friend recently asked me for a status update on the shoegaze revival, and for the first time in several years, I didn't know exactly how to answer. Basically all the young bands who were spearheading the genre's comeback in 2022/2023 (TAGABOW, Wednesday, Feeble Little Horse, Wisp, julie, etc.) are considerably bigger now than they were then, and most of shoegaze's established veterans seem to be thriving in 2026. DIIV and Nothing have dropped well-received new music, Chapterhouse and Swervedriver have embarked on successful reunion/nostalgia tours, and Slowdive are still sitting at a cool 6.4 million monthly listeners on Spotify (that's 4x bigger than Geese, mind you).

Shoegaze is still happening, it's still bigger than it's ever been, and I think the most acclaimed bands in the genre will continue to do well, both financially and creatively, for at least the next few years. However, I think it's evident that the number of new shoegaze releases that feel vital and transformative to the genre's lineage seems to have waned over the last calendar year. You can see it reflected in my coverage throughout 2026 that shoegaze hasn't excited me this year to the degree that it did from 2020-2025, when it felt like I was discovering a new band every month who were reworking the genre's toolkit in a new and invigorating way. The most cutting-edge indie-rock I've heard lately has been spawning out of other genres, but that doesn't mean shoegaze has completely stagnated.

I thought it would be interesting to examine four recent shoegaze(ish) releases that serve as a sort of sample platter for where shoegaze sits in 2026. Some of this music I like, some of it I don't, but I think all of it speaks to the genre's creative health at this particular point in time.

They Are Gutting a Body of Water - "free willy"

I'll stop glazing this band when they stop dropping the freakiest, cleverest, and koolest music in shoegaze's modern era. There's no other band in the 2020s who've consistently pushed shoegaze's sound forward in the way TAGABOW have for the last seven fucking years straight, and they're continuing to outdo themselves on the upcoming KOOL FAITH/LOOSIES II record, a 29-song, guest-packed follow-up to their crucial 2024 loosies joint, swanlike. TAGABOW's albums get the most love from their fans, but let it be known that many of their weirdest, most radical songs live on the EPs and mixtapes they dribble out in between their formal LPs.

"free willy" had been buried on their YouTube channel since June 2025, but the Philly group finally unearthed it for the masses a couple weeks back, and good god. Nobody is doing it like them. I wish they were, to be honest. I wish there were other bands torching icy trip-hop beats with scalding guitar dissonance. Contorting their sensually sinister vocal harmonies into phantasmagoric whispers. Attacking their docile lumps of fuzz with jabs of feedback that chew with the destructive precision of drill bits. Adorning their noxious feedback swells with haunting countermelodies that plink up and down the scale like skeleton legs skittering on a dark staircase. I wish other bands were making those sounds, but at least we have TAGABOW.

Amira Elfeky - "Breakdown"

For the last couple years, Amira Elfeky has been my barometer for seeing how shoegaze is integrating into the major label rock world. The Atlantic Records signee and recent Bring Me the Horizon tourmate emerged from the same nu-gaze stew as Wisp, but her sound has since flitted awkwardly between djentrified metalcore and Deftonesy detritus. I thought her tangential association with shoegaze was going to be completely severed the further she drifted into metalcore's maw, but her new single "Breakout" has more 'gaze in its makeup than I certainly anticipated. It mostly sucks, but it's an interesting specimen for examining the long tail of influence that TikTok circa 2023 continues to have on the culture.

I remember a few years back when there was a panic among shoegaze lifers in faded Stereolab shirts that the genre was going to be co-opted by the mainstream and diluted of its subcultural essence. I thought those fears were pretty ridiculous back then, and even moreso now considering what the culture vulturing of shoegaze actually ended up looking and sounding like: a shoegaze-tinged Flyleaf. "Breakdown" is a melodramatically dreary hard-rock song where the verse guitars are fuzzier and grainier than were on "All Around Me." It's definitely influenced by shoegaze's recent ascent, but it's not actually shoegaze, and I don't think anyone's pretending it is. Just like how a line can be drawn from Mudhoney to Creed, there's a line from Nothing to Amira Elfeky that "Breakdown" embodies. Sure it's strange, but it's also so corny, lame, and divorced from the actual nexus of shoegaze that it poses zero threat to what's happening in the underground.

Lembrete - soneca

In the wake of shoegaze's first wave (the years 1993-1995, in particular) many of the most interesting shoegaze-related sounds were emerging from the margins of the genre: Seefeel, Bowery Electric, Flying Saucer Attack, all the early post-rock bands metabolizing shoegaze, etc. I think we're living through a comparable period in the genre's development right now (one to two years out from an undeniable peak of activity), and correspondingly, the most compelling shoegazey sounds I've heard this year are coming from artists who are using the genre as a launching pad for further-out exploration. I don't think soneca, the debut album from the Italy-based, Brazil-originated, Portuguese-sung band Lembrete, is fully shoegaze, but it's certainly a huge influence on their breathtakingly modern sound.

soneca doesn't have the gritty, disheveled, and hyperactive character of the shoegaze that I've found most interesting this decade. This is actually a quite recumbent and pastoral album: a fusion of spacious post-rock, psychedelic dream-pop, and stonily fatigued shoegaze, all cast in a cloud-rock tint – a twinge of DAW-designed artificiality – that gives the otherwise loose and naturalistic record a faintly contemporary hue. The swaying grooves and bleary melodies are grounded in Lembrete's love of MPB, but the layered instrumental textures on songs like "eu Lembro" and "vagalumes" have a weightless tactility that's quintessentially shoegaze-ian. You'll know it when you hear it, and once you hear this record you won't be able to turn it off.

untitled (halo) - "easy rider"

Wow, I didn't expect untitled (halo) to drop two singles in a row that truly amazed me, but here we are. Moreover, I didn't anticipate the L.A. cloud-rock cryptids would get this gazey – or this poppy, for that matter – with it on their Dirty Hit debut. This song reminds me a lot of Sword II's record from last year, which scrubbed away the lo-fi scuzziness that's coated much of the decade's American 'gaze in favor of a sound that's warm, crisp, and striding.

untitled (halo) aren't a thoroughbred shoegaze band, which is why the Autolux-ish "easy rider" is so intriguing to me. It tells me that shoegaze is still a desirable sound for a coastal Cool Kid band like untitled (halo) to pursue. And the fact that it's a great song, both unpredictably structured and unexpectedly anthemic, shows there's still ample opportunity for surprises when the genre's being manipulated by capably curious hands.

Ninajirachi, MGNA Crrrta live @ Stage AE

I had the opportunity to see Ninajirachi again, who I had a blast seeing earlier this year and whose 2025 album, I Love My Computer, is at this point my favorite record from last year. This time she played to twice the amount of people I saw her perform to in Cleveland, which makes sense considering I see twice as much chatter about her online as I did at the top of 2026. Her opener for this gig was MGNA Crrrta, the NYC hyperclash duo whose 2026 album, Beautiful Disaster, had a couple songs on it that I enjoyed. Their set was mildly amusing in the sense that they didn't even try to pretend that they weren't just lip-syncing to backing tracks the whole time, and spent the majority of their time onstage pogoing and frolicking in front of their Myspace-pastiche visuals.

I don't think MGNA Crrrta's chic laziness – the performance equivalent of the "fuck it I'm young" meme – was offensively bad, but it's pretty astounding how forgettable their set became once Ninajirachi took the stage. The Australian producer is just operating at a completely different level than her contemporaries, both in terms of the sugar-rush jubilance she radiates with her physical presence, and also the quality of the songs she pumps through the decks. She pulled out many more remixes and unreleased songs than she did the last time I saw her, while also sprinkling in all the hits from I Love My Computer to keep the sardine-tight dancefloor jumping. The 2,400-cap venue, which she sold out, is the smallest stage she'll ever play in Pittsburgh. I'm glad I got to sweat to her one last time before she enters the big leagues and never returns. Deservedly so.

Beach House live @ Stage AE

I had spent a full hour gazing into the spellbinding aurora, breathing in the enveloping fog, and bathing my ears in the oily fountain of synesthetic sound when I had the realization: Beach House might be the dream-pop band. At this point, the Baltimore trio have been active longer than the Cocteau Twins ever were. Their eight-album output may lack the mystical twinkle of Mazzy Star, the teary ache of Galaxie 500, and the chimerical tweeness of The Radio Dept. – all bands, like the Cocteaus, who prove that the best dream-pop embodies the heart's unrealized yearning for heavenly deliverance, rather than the frictionless bliss of actual (imagined) paradise. Beach House's music, however, epitomizes the genre's celestial longing, and their live show is a theatrical rendering of that striving – and failing – to achieve ascendance.

I hadn't seen Beach House live since 2010, long before the words "shoegaze" and "dream-pop" had entered my lexicon. Since then, they've released the best music of their career (7, Bloom, Depression Cherry) and, through the lottery-activated engine of organic TikTok virality fueling streaming prosperity, have become one of the biggest millennial indie bands, and unequivocally the most recognizable dream-pop band on earth. I wasn't surprised that the vast majority of their Pittsburgh crowd weren't conscious for 9/11, but I was a little taken aback at how normie most of them were. That's what I mean when I say Beach House are the dream-pop band. The scope of their fanbase has extended so far beyond people who have opinions on Alvvays, and it's the elements of their music that attract such casuals that distinguish them within the dream-pop canon.

Most dream-poppers in the 2020s are camping out under Mazzy Star's desert horizon; the solemnly ethereal sweet93, the translucently lustrous Fine, the rustically glimmering Ivy Knight. There's a dimness – a cloudiness, even – that hangs over most of this decade's oneiric guitar music, and Beach House avoid that front entirely. During their show, it occurred to me that the chromatic richness of their music – the gossamer synths, Victoria Legrand's husky contralto, the other, even more gossamer synths, the sparing use of distorted guitars – makes Beach House sound pleasantly anachronistic in the era of angular maximalism and sullen minimalism. Their music occupies a different part of the spectrum, transmitting an unfiltered eroticism that's unafraid to smear, to tempt, to indulge in euphoria without shame or restraint.

The sensation was too much for some Pittsburgh attendees. During the majestic climax of "Drunk In L.A.," when Alex Scally's feedback felt as palpable as the voluminous fog, a fan behind me fainted, one of several people who collapsed during the hour-and-a-half long set. I sympathize with the fallen because I sometimes had trouble retaining consciousness while I stared deliriously into the prismatic light show, a strikingly tasteful collage of color and vapor that provided a more immersive visual accompaniment than a giant screen of trippy videos would've. Beach House are more tactful than that. They also, more than any dream-pop band who've ever existed, have the confluence of budget, technological wherewithal, and audience size to simulate ascension at such a lofty scale. Beach House are living the dream-pop fantasy. So much so that it almost feels real.

Chasing Down

Dove, Sadie, Kolja, and Navarro
of
Oral

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

I don't usually write about the same band two weeks in a row, but Oral are a worthy exception. In case you missed it, the Hudson Valley screamo/noise/indietronica group just dropped their debut album, Line of Jewels, and it's one of the most arrestingly fresh and visceral records I've heard all year. It pools together so many of my favorite undercurrents from the 2020s in a way that feels genuinely innovative and not performatively eclectic, which is an issue I take with 95% of the bands trying to Push the Boundaries of Heavy Music, or whatever. That's not to say what Oral are doing sounds effortless – quite the contrary. Line of Jewels is incredibly intricate; its DAW-based production, its expressive performances, its dizzying breadth of sounds. Oral are a lot. Open wide.

For this week's Chasing Down Q&A, I asked Oral's four members about the band's creative philosophy, their backgrounds, their strange genre amalgamations, the album's singular production, playing a "Psychocandy ripoff set" while opening for ear, and much, much more.

Read the full interview below – and the 70-plus others in the archive, with a new one added each week.