Pre-order my book "When the Sun Hits: The High-Volume History of Shoegaze"

The day has finally come. I'm incredibly excited to announce that my debut book, "When the Sun Hits: The High-Volume History of Shoegaze", will be released on March 30, 2027 via St. Martin's Press. It's now available for pre-order through most major retailers, and I'd be very grateful if you bought it.

The book is exactly what the title suggests: a detailed chronicling of shoegaze's entire history, from its proto years in the 1980s to its present-day renaissance in the 2020s. I trace how this once niche and regional genre of rock music had a brief yet pivotal flash in the alt-rock zeitgeist at the tip of the 90s, but then quickly declined before it was able to secure its own footing in a rapidly changing music landscape. For the next 15 years, shoegaze remained a critically revered yet commercially and culturally marginal style of indie-rock; a relic of the 90s that had little place in the 2000s.

But then something strange happened. Shoegaze began to thrive again at the turn of the 2010s, yet in a totally different sonic and social environment from the one it originated in. Punk, metal, and hardcore fans – mostly in America, not shoegaze's native U.K. – adopted shoegaze as their own, and as the genre's pioneers began reuniting to great fanfare, and a whole new generation of pedal-pushers were reviving the style worldwide, shoegaze was on the rise again.

Even so, nobody in the 2010s could've predicted where shoegaze would go in the 2020s. Its popularity exploded online, its DIY underbelly was flooded with innovative new groups, its once-overlooked originators grew their fanbases tenfold, and shoegaze became what it is now: a universally recognized, internationally flourishing pillar of Gen-Z alternative music. A genre with enough lore, enough permutations, and enough of a rollercoaster arc to warrant an entire book about its fascinating evolution thus far.

"When the Sun Hits" is the first-ever book that constructs a narrative throughline for all four decades of shoegaze's existence. There've been other books, videos, and articles that focus on specific bands and/or eras within the genre's lifespan, but until now, there's never been a comprehensive documentation of its entire lineage. My process involved interviewing over 40 sources (musicians, journalists, label owners, publicists, fans) and conducting several months worth of intense archival research, including combing through every issue of Melody Maker and NME printed between the years 1988 and 1995.

My hundreds of pages of notes and hundreds of hours of listening culminated in a project that I'm immensely proud of. I've never committed this much time and energy to anything in my life, and I'm confident that "When the Sun Hits" is far and away the best thing I've ever written. If you don't believe me, you can pre-order the book right here and judge for yourself.

Naturally, I'll be promoting my book on Chasing Sundays for the foreseeable future, but it won't impact any of my regularly scheduled programming (weekly newsletters, semi-regular longform pieces, etc. etc.). If anything, I'm going to be using the opportunity to publish more often on this site, especially writing that's relevant to the subject matter in my book.