5 Songs That Prove 1991 Was The Decade's Best Year For Shoegaze Music

Beauty and the fuzz (and a big dollop of sadness): That's a decent way to summarize shoegaze, a U.K.-led rock sub-genre that got overshadowed by its beefier, punchier '90s colossus of grunge and post-grunge. Initially rising and dying in the span of a few years, all of showgaze's pedal noises, walls of fuzz, and elegiac vocals reached their zenith very early on in 1991. 

No matter that shoegaze went through several crests and troughs through the '90s and '00s, 1991 is a no-brainer choice of a year because of its impact, creative verve, and the legends it spawned, like My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive, which produced shoegaze classics we'd trade anything to hear again for the first time. As for those songs, we've chosen tracks that illustrate the variety of sounds and styles within shoegaze circa 1991, as well as the year's raw quality and inventiveness. Indeed, the early years of any artistic movement can often be its most vibrant, before standards ossify and subsequent artists simply repackage what came before. This is 100% the case with all of our choices, which could only have come from 1991.

Bearing that in mind, we've chosen the best tracks from two artists that typify shoegaze's central sound, My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive. We've also got selections from Swervedriver, Mercury Rev, and Curve that show precisely how unique and cool of a year 1991 was for shoegaze. 

There's one album and one album alone that gets cited again and again as the first, last, and best of shoegaze — the point where the sub-genre's teeth clasped its own tail and devoured all hopes of bettering itself: My Bloody Valentine's "Loveless." And while we agree that the entire 1991 album is a masterpiece, we consider "Sometimes" to be the best of the best and a shoegaze song that could soundtrack your dreams.

"Sometimes" sounds like two overlapping soundscapes: a simple acoustic guitar strumming away, submerged in an ocean of fuzz. Listening to the song sounds like glimpsing a bedroom-sung teenage love tune strained through Phil Spector's "wall of sound" technique. These opposites work together to create a surprisingly sweet and childlike song, especially thanks to singer Kevin Shields' vulnerable, Billy Corgan-like vocal delivery and the synth backing tracks that sing like real violins.  

The lyrics for "Sometimes" cement the experience as well as shoegaze's sad-boy/sad-girl stylings: "Close my eyes, feel me how / I don't know, maybe you could not hurt me now / Here alone, when I feel down too / Over there, when I await true love for you." Remembering that Shields made and managed every aspect of My Bloody Valentine, down to the synths and production, you'll hear how the LP "Loveless" and its track "Sometimes" represent an irreproducible musical moment that elevates 1991 to the '90s best shoegaze year. 

Even if it wasn't a shoegaze track from 1991, Slowdive's "Primal" would be a profound track. It exudes harrowing sorrow, enough to make it hard to listen to. Its cello motifs, wordless background cries, and wall of frequencies swallow the listener, bit by bit, as the song builds and builds into a crushing crescendo of absolute darkness. "Primal" goes far, far beyond the Cure-adjacent inclinations of the rest of its album, "Just for a Day" (the band's debut), to make something transcendent not only of shoegaze, but the entire musical epoch. The song's placement at the end of the album leaves a hole that can only be filled by starting it all over again.

"Primal" is a by-product of its time as much as it is spontaneous creative urgings. In a 2014 interview with Loud and Quiet, Slowdive vocalist and guitarist Neil Halstead said that the band was, "always very organic; there has never really been a plan." The band took an almost 20-year hiatus after releasing 1995's "Pygmalion," an experimental album that prompted its record label to drop it a week after release. All this is to say, 1991's "Primal" could have only come from one singular time and one singular group, which makes it even more of an irreplaceable gem. It deepened the emotional complexity of shoegaze, just as it expanded the sub-genre's boundaries beyond anything that's come since. 

This statement might irk shoegazers who prefer their shoegaze to float in the clouds, full of fizzy fuzz, but Swervedriver's "Son of Mustang Ford," from its debut 1991 debut album "Raise," is a killer rock song. It's killer enough to fit into the '90s alternative rock scene in the U.S., like a bridge across the ocean from the band's native England, between shoegaze and grunge. It's littered with crunchy distortion, whistling feedback, and ragged guitars, but still sits within the shoegaze family. Adam Franklin's vocals do a lot of heavy lifting in this department, as they sound buried in the mix and mumbly, like a lot of shoegaze.

Truth be told, there are arguably more thoughtful and well-composed Swervedriver songs, even on "Raise," but none better explain why 1991 was shoegaze's best year than "Son of Mustang Ford." Even though shoegaze was still in its infancy at the time, standards rapidly rose into place to delineate what was and was not shoegaze. Swervedriver was already a rocky outlier in the early '90s, touring with Soundgarden and the Smashing Pumpkins and being likened to acts such as Hüsker Dü (responsible for writing a song that defined rock history in 1985). And yet it was indeed shoegaze, with "Son of Mustang Ford" typifying the sub-genre's rock roots and malleable qualities, which were on full display in 1991. So rage on, rock on, punk on, and gaze on, you shoegazers.

Any track from Mercury Rev's 1991 debut, "Yerself is Steam," brings the weirdness and expands our portrait of 1991 as shoegaze's best year. That being said, it's the album's opening track, "Chasing a Bee," that best represents shoegaze's odder impulses. 

At once a slab of pure white noise and a low-tempo, hypnotic rocker peppered with flutes and gibbering, mad vocals, "Chasing a Bee" is the most psychedelic (in the late '60s vein) of our choices. When it hits the three-minute, eight-second mark and explodes into a fuzzstorm and wah-saturated guitar maelstrom, you'll hear trippy classic rock influences all over the song. Then there are the lyrics, which are wonderfully head-scratching and assumedly make sense to someone: "Sunlit walks, I feel no harm / My primitive words match my primitive heart / It's not as easy as it may seem / Remember that yourself is steam." It's like transcribing a dream into words that kinda-sorta make sense in the most abstract way possible.

As "Chasing a Bee" and the entirety of "Yerself Is Steam" sound, Mercury Rev was all Sturm und Drang. The band existed, wrote, and performed in a state of conflict that gave birth to the electric energy evident in a song like "Chasing a Bee," a true treasure of its early '90s music. 

Few tracks showcase shoegaze's gamut of influences and diversity of sound as well as Curve's "Ten Little Girls." Starting with the core of a female-voiced, melodic, dreamy, and mid-tempo fuzz-rock track, "Ten Little Girls" builds one unique element after another into its runtime: an on-and-off rap segment, electronica and industrial elements, animalistic yips and yowls, shrieking guitars, and more. It sounds like a precursor to everything from '90s Depeche Mode to early, gothic-leaning death-doom from Paradise Lost, with a bit of dark, Bristol-scene trip-hop. And, the song was the very first track on the band's first EP, 1991's "Blindfold."

Curve is easily the most underground of our choices. They got off to a promising start with "Blindfold," which was made on a shoestring budget and got them the attention of the music industry, media, critics, and fans alike. However, their debut LP, 1992's "Doppelgänger," was basically the beginning of the end, in yet another example of how 1991 was the perfect nexus of time for shoegaze. There was enough freedom for bands to do as they wished and enough creative impetus for their music to really shine. The result is a stellar track like "Ten Little Girls," which ranks amongst the best of the year's offerings.