Chasing Fridays: The Hives, forever ☆, Total Wife Q&A, more

First off, I want to thank everyone for the kind words about my cloud-rock dissertation that I published last week. I had a lot of fun thinking about how to convey a sound/sensibility that feels distinctly new to me in 2025, and I appreciate all of the thoughtful responses to what I cooked up – yes, even the raised eyebrows. This week, it's back to usual Chasing Fridays programming. I wrote about four new albums from bands young and old(ish), and then interviewed one of the greatest shoegaze bands of our time for this week's Chasing Down Q&A. Tap in or get left behind.

The Hives - The Hives Forever Forever The Hives

To the extent that any album needs to exist, the new Hives album really doesn't need to exist. That's part of what makes it likeable. The Swedish garage-rockers took 11 years to make their 2023 album, The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons, which was a very respectable return to a form that they never really strayed from. 2012's Lex Hives was, and remains, the most forgettable of their lot, but it wasn't a bad record. It was just a less-good Hives record. That's basically how I feel about how The Hives Forever Forever the Hives compares to the more consistently juicy Randy Fitzsimmons. The Hives are running on auto-pilot with this set, but because The Hives are such an eternally pleasing band to me (they were my first favorite band!), hearing them toast themselves for a brisk 33 minutes is a quaintly enjoyable experience.

I have to give the band credit for really committing to the premise of The Hives Forever Forever the Hives' self-flagellating title. Several of the best songs on here are virtual re-writes of previous Hives songs. The main riff in "Enough Is Enough" cuts it mighty close to "Hate to Say I Told You So," and "O.C.D.O.D." is a spunky acronym chant-along that's basically just "A.K.A. I-D-I-O-T" with different letters. I don't think any fan wants originality from The Hives in 2025, and the band know this, making only small tweaks around the margins. Howlin' Pelle Almqvist pokes the drop-ceiling of his vocal range on "Hooray Hooray Hooray," spicing up his usual melodic phrasings with a chirpy falsetto. He sounds more pissed-off than he has in 20 years on "Enough Is Enough," stomping through the track's entryway with the lol-inducing lyric, "Everyone's a little fuckin' bitch!" Elsewhere, The Hives just sound like The Hives. A band who could keep on making records forever that forever sound like The Hives.

forever ☆ - Second Gen Dream

Do you ever struggle to decide if you like a band because you actually like them or because you want yourself to like them? Ever since I wrote positively about forever ☆'s song "Heat Seeking Missile" last month, I've had this pang of doubt nagging at me during each re-listen. Something about the Kansas City duo's studious Medicine worship, combined with their fussily preened sportscar visual aesthetic, just rings a bit hollow to me. I dragged my feet on listening to forever ☆'s debut album, Second Gen Dream, because I just don't like looking at the cover art. It feels like it's trying too hard to conjure a vibe in the same way that band After are trying a too hard to conjure a vibe. Both forever ☆ and After are American bands hybridizing 90s British music (shoegaze and trip-hop, respectively) with what I can only describe as Y2K pop art, and I think it's a combination of sounds and looks that's going to age really poorly in just a couple year's time. It already feels hokey and cheap to me now.

Despite my qualms with forever ☆'s goofy schtick, I finally gave Second Gen Dream a few spins, and the majority of my skepticism has been sandblasted away by just how entertaining most of these songs are. The band are incorporating jungle breaks into shoegaze in a way that doesn't feel derivative of TAGABOW or Full Body 2, and in fact sounds super invigorating during an era when most shoegaze bands are treating drums like an afterthought. "3 Point Star" is one of the wildest drum 'n' gaze songs I've ever heard: animated breaks, tactfully employed scrums of guitar fuzz, and chopped-up vocal mews that swirl around the beat in ghastly spiral formations.

"Heat Seeking Missile" and another single, "Competizione," are serviceable Curve-esque pop songs, but I'm more partial to when the band get lost in the DAW cooking up abstract bangers ("S-Klasse Dub") or giving into their droniest, most indulgent whims, like how the extended climax of "Supercharger" growls like a six-speed hitting 60mph and choosing to hover in third gear. While my usual instincts would incline me to say, "I wish the album was longer, though," I actually think seven songs at 22 minutes is enough forever ☆ to hold me over for a good while. The tinny drum tones, shrill guitar squalls, and high-pitched ethereal coos wear down my ear pretty quickly, and this band aren't yet writing the kind of hooks that would be necessary checkpoints on a longer project. After taking stock of all my complaints and compliments, I feel confident proclaiming that I actually, truly like forever ☆. Their music, that is. Not that godawful cover art.

ear - The Most Dear and the Future

A couple weeks back, I called ear "one of the coolest young bands in America." At the time, the duo had only four songs to their name, and all of them were fucking dazzling. This week, ear added a whole album to their arsenal of cryptic, minimalist electro-pop. I don't know how to condense ear's sound to a single descriptor. Some of it is basically ambient music made up of downtempo beats, warm water synth pads, and bleary sound collages. Other tracks on The Most Dear and the Future – "Real Life," "CMYK," "Theorem" – are plunky pop songs that recall the milky ethereality of Porches circa Pool and the taut danceiness of Water From Your Eyes circa now. I might call ear cloud-rock, or I might just implore everyone in my orbit to listen to The Most Dear and the Future with an open mind and see if the music makes them feel as wired and creatively hopeful as it does to me.

kinoue64 - Nichijou Shometsu

kineou64 is a vocaloid shoegaze soloist from Hiroshima, Japan who's released a fuck-ton of albums throughout the 2020s. I really liked his 2024 EP, 半永久機関, and then slept on its follow-up from March of this year until just last week. That was foolish of me. Vocaloid shoegaze – a digitized sub-genre of shoegaze that's constructed using the Hatsune Miku voice bank, as popularized on the iconic Mikgazer Vol. 1 comp – usually sounds pretty one-note to me, but kineou64 is a great songwriter who harnesses the technology's uncanny textures and humanoid pitches to accentuate shoegaze's otherworldly essence. Nichijou Shometsu is stuffed with chirpy, synth-assisted shoegaze numbers that are perky, brittle, and rich with the kind of youthful ennui that transcends genre, language, and even mortal consciousness.

Chasing Down

Luna Kupper and Ash Richter
of
Total Wife

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

Late last year, I sent a prayer into the universe that 2025 would be the year the shoegaze revival codifies its own hype into history by delivering a bevy of generational full-lengths. There're still a few high-profile drops left on the docket, but so far, that call has been answered by two bands: Bleary Eyed and Total Wife. I already wrote a great deal about Bleary Eyed's phenomenally catchy, texturally electrifying Easy, and now I'm pleased to endorse Total Wife's clattering, jacked-up, and also hella catchy come back down. Between this new LP and their 2022 album a blip, the Nashville band have produced two of the decade's most superior shoegaze offerings. a blip is a superb blend of scuzzy retro-gaze that pulls from Swirlies' lashing guitars, MBV's palpitating hooks, and Duster's crashing crescendos. come back down sounds like the genre's future.

Every time I run back the benevolently shrieky guitars in "chloe," the eyeball-flipping glitches in "naoisa," and the heavenly synth melody in "make it last," I feel like I'm hearing shoegaze for the first time all over again. Total Wife, the duo of Luna Kupper and Ash Richter, treat shoegaze like a malleable substance: something that can be stretched, squeezed, and radically reformatted in a DAW. Jungle breakbeats and hardcore techno pulsations are splattered on the same canvass as baggy grooves and slowcore trods, giving the album a rhythmic undergirding that's restless and exhilarating. Up top, Total Wife adopt MBV's preference for dry guitars and reverb-less vocals, providing a sense of creeping closeness that makes the quiet parts feel cozily intimate and the loud parts strike with a violent impact. come back down is a shoegaze triumph and one of the year's best records.

For this week's Chasing Down Q&A, I asked Total Wife about the Nashville scene, underrated shoegaze greats, mixing in the dreamstate, the creation of come back down, and more. Read the full interview below.

Who are the best bands in the Nashville scene right now? 

This is the non-exhaustive list: Rig B, Celltower, make yourself at home, Melaina Kol, Baby Wave, sour tooth, Stunt Girl, could be better, Oscar Lindsey, Zook, Fawn Soto, Fate Chimera, Briefskin, Candynavia, lowGenesis, The Orbit Sound, bookNOTbrooke, Bats, Iven, The Sewing Club, Finger Foods, Bagel Fanclub, Catacomb, Fresh Air 4, Body Electric, Heartattack.

I read that Luna would be mixing the new album and then doze off and the songs would follow you into the liminal dream state. What kind of dreams were these songs inhabiting? Would be curious to know if there're any specific dream-state visuals or feelings that you associate with this batch of music. 

Luna: If I’m mixing and really sleepy, pretty much the same thing always happens. There’s a stillness, then this 4D form starts taking shape, and I can feel it in the room and in my chest. Everything becomes a bit of a sensory blur because I will have been so focused on listening that I don’t realize I’m falling asleep.

I just really have a hard time staying awake if I’m tired at all, it’s kind of an accidental and unavoidable technique. One thing I kept experiencing was this blue tunnel, and there was somebody in there, that’s all I can really explain.