My Bloody Valentine

1983-present

Periods

Noise Pop Emergence

1988

Noise Pop Emergence

1988

Raw, abrasive noise pop that obliterated the boundary between melody and feedback. Kevin Shields' tremolo-bar guitar technique and breathy buried vocals created an entirely new sonic vocabulary.

Isn't Anything

My Bloody Valentine 1988

pioneering

ecstasy yearning chaos

The Big Bang of shoegaze — tremolo-bar guitar and whispered vocals merged noise and desire into a new sonic language that would define an entire genre.

Shoegaze Apotheosis

1991

The album that destroyed Creation Records' finances and defined shoegaze as high art. Two years of obsessive studio perfection creating a sound that seemed to exist between waking and dreaming.

Loveless

My Bloody Valentine 1991

isolated

ecstasy yearning wonder numbness

The sound of a dream you can't quite remember — two years and £250,000 spent creating guitar timbres that had never existed, producing rock music's most obsessive and otherworldly masterpiece.

Impossible Return

2013

Twenty-two years of silence broken by a self-released album that proved the aesthetic still had unexplored territory. Where Loveless was a pristine dream, m b v ventured into noisier, more disorienting spaces.

m b v

My Bloody Valentine 2013

isolated

wonder chaos ecstasy

Twenty-two years of silence broken to prove that the Loveless aesthetic had uncharted territory left — the final tracks' drum-and-bass experiments point toward a shoegaze that never was.