Glen Jackson Taylor

In 2023, Slowdive are, improbably, the closest thing the strange and ephemeral shoegaze scene has to “survivors”—a band that can still play its catalog to festival audiences decades later, whose new songs occasion cheers instead of drink-line evacuations. Their self-titled 2017 comeback felt exultant: with its thick, overdriven guitars and bolder, cleanly etched pop choruses, it might be the loudest record in Slowdive’s catalog, an invigorated blast from old friends who have fallen joyfully back into each other’s company again. On everything is alive, those two former kids look up, startled and amused to discover the wrinkles on each other’s faces. It’s the first record where you can hear, and feel, the weight of those previous years, and the shadows of the losses that etch the contours of a life entering its 50s. The music is wispier, more skeletal—a gust of distortion from 2017’s “Sugar For the Pill” would blow it all away. Ironically, it’s the closest they’ve come since reforming to recreating the sound of 1993’s glimmering, jewel-like Souvlaki, but it’s been darkened and complicated by age and perspective. This isn’t summer music; this is sunset music, attuned to and aware of fading glories.