It’s easy to pinpoint when trends in music begin: People rally around a specific band or album, a new scene forms around a shared sensibility, or a particular sound permeates the zeitgeist. It’s more difficult to determine when something ends. After years of slowly creeping back into the fore, shoegaze’s popularity exploded in 2023 due to a confluence of new fans, new bands, and fresh energy. That’s the year I locate as the formal beginning of a new shoegaze era, and it’s safe to say that we’re still living through that same period even as 2025 comes to a close. Some of the revival’s most crucial bands have evolved away from shoegaze proper (Wednesday, Hotline TNT, Greet Death), and many of the new-jack fans who never engaged with the genre beyond Deftones TikToks have predictably dropped out, but if you look at the numbers, the fervor around shoegaze music remains at a fever pitch.
The genre’s most important band, My Bloody Valentine, returned from hiatus last month to play the biggest non-festival shoegaze shows of all time. Slide Away, the American shoegaze fest helmed by Nothing frontman Nicky Palermo, sold out multi-thousand capacity venues on both coasts — and they’re likely to do so again in 2026. Whirr’s comeback was huge. They Are Gutting A Body Of Water are an underground phenomenon. Wisp remains an above-ground phenomenon. And most importantly, there are so many fucking bands making shoegaze right now. Many of them are mediocre, yes, but many of them are genuinely great. While 2024 was riddled with cool shoegaze songs despite feeling like an off-year for standout full-lengths, 2025 provided us with a wealth of great shoegaze albums and EPs. These are the 10 best.
10
Glixen take a lot of shit for being fashionable musicians playing a style of shoegaze that’s been flooding the zeitgeist for several years now. Even if their Y2K aesthetic turns you off, and even if you never want to hear another Whirr-influenced shoegaze band ever again, Glixen’s songs are hard to deny, and that’s what makes them one of the genre’s most hopeful prospects. With Quiet Pleasures, the Phoenix band shed all traces of their dream-poppy past and embraced a sound that’s dark and sticky like black licorice. The louder you play songs like “sick silent” and “shut me down,” the denser Glixen’s guitar fog becomes. Sure, they can write murmurable melodies when they want to (“lick the star”), but it’s the ghostly atmosphere and leadened weight of their sound that’s drawn me back to Quiet Pleasures all year long.
9
nabeel is the project of Iraq-born, Virginia-based songwriter Yasir Razak, who’s released a handful of EPs over the last couple years that are all worth your time. This year’s ghayoom غيوم is his best yet, eight songs that combine the breezy, crunchy indie-rock of Wishy with the sweet tea stickiness of Wednesday’s shoegaze years. Razak is writing songs with the toolkit of bright melodies and stocky chords that’s dominated the last 30 years of English-speaking indie-rock, but he sings his songs in Arabic, giving his tuneful shoegaze a unique phonetic quality. Opener “resala – رسالة” glides lazily forward in a way that fans of Hotline TNT and Dinosaur Jr. will appreciate, but Razak’s throaty pronunciations add an extra fleck of texture to the song’s craggy shoegaze gradient. Like so much of the best shoegaze, you don’t have to understand a word of what nabeel is singing to feel like humming along.
8
Shoegaze and drum ‘n’ bass go way back, but ‘gaze bands usually employ fast breakbeats for the shavings of texture that fall off a distorted break played at dizzying speeds. TAGABOW and Full Body 2, for instance, don’t make dance music; forever ☆ do. On Second Gen Dream, the Kansas City duo crank through seven slabs of turnt-up noise-pop that might not get the dancefloor jumping vertically, but will certainly have bodies wiggling and waving at sweat-inducing velocity. Shoegaze-wise, forever ☆ are pulling from the baggy industrial-pop of Curve and the mechanized psych scorches of Medicine, but their songs almost sound more like remixes of shoegaze songs that don’t exist — a very cool quality. With tracks titled “S-Klasse Dub” and “Supercharger,” and an aesthetic that pines desperately for ’90s club culture, forever ☆ are very intentional in how they want Second Gen Dream to be received. Keep your sunglasses on indoors to get the full effect.
7
Like the next record in this list, terraplana’s natural was produced by Joo-Joo Ashworth, and this album even features a guest appearance from Winter herself, who just so happened to spend a portion of her childhood in terraplana’s home city of Curitiba, Brazil. That’s pretty much where the similarities end. terraplana’s warm, articulate shoegaze songs don’t rely on very much reverb and dodge many of the genre’s common tropes — candied melodies, intense “drops” of fuzz, a million layers of effects — by choosing detailed eloquence over smeary ethereality. A song like “Charlie” gets breezily swept up into energetic gusts where you can still hear the strings bending amid the distorted miasma. All of these cuts have really strong basslines, especially closer “morro azul,” where the twin guitar leads curl around the rhythmic pulse like ivy encasing a fallen log. So much shoegaze sounds alien. terraplana’s music sounds, well, natural.
6
Samira Winter has been writing dreamy shoegaze records for 10 years, and Adult Romantix feels like the one she’s always been working towards. Winter is a student of the shoegaze blade, and she’s become exceptionally talented at dialing in fizzy guitar tones and finding grooves that you can really nod your head to (the choppy beat in “Sometimes I Think About Death” is so sick). Songs like “Misery” and “Just Like A Flower” are the rare shoegaze tunes that would also sound good played on an acoustic guitar, and that quality is central to what makes Adult Romantix so rewarding. This is a pop record draped in the clothing of shoegaze. But unlike so many opportunists jacking the genre’s aesthetic to make listless vibes fodder, Winter actually understands shoegaze as a form of sonic expression, and she wields it here to enhance the sensuality and heartbreak in her wistful indie-pop spells.
5
forty winks don’t like being called shoegaze — but too bad! When you channel the psychedelic refrigerator growls of Lovesliescrushing as well as they do on “liadfh,” or write a song as simultaneously bashing and blissful as “noise,” you don’t get to escape shoegaze’s fuzzy clutches. But, like so many of the best working ‘gazers, forty winks have their own take on the form. Their penchant for slackery hooks, jerky rhythms, and crispy guitar tones certainly nods to their Pittsburgh elder siblings in Feeble Little Horse, but forty winks’ songs are more technical than Feeble’s, and they play more like rough-housers than goofballs. “commie bf” boasts some serious shredding, and “spurs” is a spiky pop song that leaps in and out of a murderous screamo scrum. Be careful with Love Is A Dog From Hell: This is shoegaze that might require gauze.
4
Nyxy Nyx have been kicking around the Philly underground for a decade now, but the lineup for their first full-band studio effort transformed them into a fucking supergroup: Midwife’s Madeline Johnston, A Sunny Day in Glasgow’s Josh Meakim, and other current/former members of Knifeplay, Spirit Of The Beehive, and Sun Organ. Together, they made an album that wrings deep emotions out of dank, haunting sludge-gaze. Tracks like “empty gesture” and “ashtray” are propelled by glugging riffs that plow forward like construction trucks rumbling across uneven terrain. They prove that Nyxy Nyx have power, which makes it all the more impressive when they rein it in for brooding ballads like “they called u -Wild-” and “hold me (I’m shaking).” Songs where Nyxy Nyx play delicate melodies strung with aching tension, and then slowly release the pressure like steam from a kettle. Cult classics, indeed.
3
After taking a break from straight-up shoegaze on last year’s experimental loosies collection, They Are Gutting A Body Of Water returned to their ear-aching foundations on this year’s harrowingly personal, brilliantly dissonant LOTTO. The live production peels back the heavily layered sound of 2022’s surrealist Lucky Styles, revealing a band that’s just as weird, thrilling, and one-of-a-kind even at their rawest. Shoegaze is rarely as exciting as the crashing climaxes in “the chase” and “sour diesel,” as personally gutting as the lyrics in “rl stine” and “american food,” or as clatteringly cuckoo as “slo chrostic” and “herpim.” LOTTO isn’t as transformational for the genre as TAGABOW’s last few releases were, but their best songs are in this batch.
2
Easy. That’s how Bleary Eyed make it look. Their magnificent third full-length is effortlessly downable and endlessly fun to unpack. But let it be known: Writing shoegaze songs of this caliber is no easy feat. The Philly band has become one of the best in their city’s evolved scene by honing a form of sampledelic shoegaze that never gets lost in the quirked-up sauce. Easy‘s title track is one of the decade’s great shoegaze earworms for its pile-driving chords and crystalline synth melody. Nothing fussy going on here, just top-tier rock craftsmanship. When Bleary Eyed do apply syrupy Auto-Tune, twittering synths, and/or arch drum machines to their songs, it gives them a cyborgian sparkle without gumming up the works with needless frivolities. Helluva band, helluva record.
1
There’re some people who just don’t care about shoegaze in the 2020s. Who groan that there aren’t any actual innovators in the field, and that too many of the genre’s torchbearers are simply picking at the scraps of a sound that peaked with Loveless. To those people I ask: Have you heard Total Wife’s come back down? The more I listen to this record, the more I think the Nashville band has made the album I’ve been waiting for. The definitive 2020s shoegaze masterpiece. An album that rounds up all of shoegaze’s greatest attributes and plops them down in their own sonic environment. My Bloody Valentine’s spectral squeakiness and liminal melodies are loaded into Total Wife’s DAW, where the duo makes all variety of glitchy incisions, stitches together fragments of jungle, hyperpop, and slowcore, and Frankensteins a shoegaze curio like no other. If you don’t like come back down, did you even like shoegaze to begin with?
