Shoegazing

Remember shoegaze? If you’re under forty you won’t, though you might have come across it later. It’s the rock music that took over indie charts, and critics’ chatter, from about 1989 to 1992. Mid-tempo, meditative, sometimes earsplittingly loud but emotionally subdued, shoegaze offered fuzzy, layered guitar lines with smoky, blurred timbres; tremolo bars, odd tunings and effects pedals; reverb-heavy, warbling vocals, sung by fey men and (less often) confident women. It was invented in Dublin and London by My Bloody Valentine on Isn’t Anything (1988) and Loveless (1991), and played beautifully by (among others) Ride, Swervedriver and Lush.

The critic Dave Ross of Sounds apparently named the genre after noticing that the singer from Moose (who’s now raising a child with the singer from Lush) kept looking down at the stage rather than at his bandmates or into the audience. Maybe he had to keep track of all those pedals; maybe he was too shy to do anything else (he later said he was trying to read the lyrics). The songs asked for swaying and listening, not for dancing; for humming and maybe (given all the fuzziness) for decoding, not for singing along. The volume on all those guitars was meant to shut the world out, to create a safe space behind high, thick walls of sound. And it seemed to carry no broader message, or social force: it wasn’t necessarily anything – to paraphrase My Bloody Valentine – except its musical self.

Till now. There’s a shoegaze revival underway, and it’s youth-led, and characteristically trans. These latest shoegazers started in home recording during the months and years of Covid and quarantine, when young people (sometimes the same young people) also jump-started the jittery, obviously synthesised, pitch-shifted music called hyperpop. With nowhere to go except online, young musicians crafted songs whose opaqueness and inward-turned artifice fit their own lives. Often those lives were trans. You could find one, for a while, on the pop charts, in the echoey anguish of Ethel Cain’s ‘American Teenager’, though most of her music is more goth than gaze.

New Jersey’s Jane Remover became internet-famous in the 2010s for electronic dance music and hyperpop, came out as trans in 2020, and switched to mid-tempo guitars for the partly acoustic Frailty (2021) and the louder, stronger Census Designated (2023). On her EP ♡, released in December 2025, the old fuzz effects join new ones derived from dance music, as Jane insists (on ‘How to Teleport’), in her noise-covered, pitch-shifted alto, ‘I didn’t know I could break like other dolls if the parts could hit the ground.’ (Dolls don’t have to be trans girls, but here they are, as in the garments advising ‘Protect the Dolls.’)

I learned about Jane from my teenage kids, who knew I’d like the feedback swirls of Census Designated. Its vocals, when you can make them out (good luck with that), speak to the way it feels to grow up in a body that doesn’t belong to you, whose boundaries blur when someone tries to touch you, when you fear that you’ll get hurt if you try to define, or even decide, where you stop and the rest of the world begins. The folds and fogs in Census Designated remind me of Talia Mae Bettcher’s recent book Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy, which argues that the boundaries separating self from other, real from imposture and men from women change from context to context. For trans people, in particular, it’s sometimes a hostile act when someone asks just who we think we are.

Shoegaze, which blurs everything, is a perfect fit for the mode of uncomfortable indecision, of turning away too-sharp questions, familiar to every trans person who’s spent a long time trying to figure it out. The blurs of shoegaze also fit – more practically – our uncertainties as to how our voices should sound, since layers of distortion, pitch-shifting and other post-production alterations let trans girls take their voices higher than they could otherwise go. With its multiple layers and muzzy horizons, shoegaze serves other young artists who sing about trans and non-binary genders: yeule, from Singapore, alternates shoegaze with hyperpop, as in their 2023 album softscars, or their cover of Broken Social Scene’s ‘Anthem for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl’ from the movie I Saw the TV Glow (2024).

It’s also making a return in the regroupings, revivals and comeback albums of a few artists old enough to remember the first go-round, such as Blueboy, whose trans-friendly, delicate beauties I wrote about here all the way back in 2011, when I still didn’t know what my pronouns should be. Inactive for twenty-odd years, the Reading-based band recently reformed, making their former cellist and backup singer their lead vocalist. Their reunion album blends shoegaze propulsion with airy pop hooks, nostalgia with fearful looks forward, and an album-wide concept (each song is named after a number) with singles that could stand alone.

For the apotheosis of trans shoegaze, though, you’ll need another new band, the Los Angeles duo swanskin (Cleo McKenzie and Juno Raphael). They released their first album, boymoder, at the close of 2024. It uses those fuzzes and vapour trails, reverbs and tremolos, to portray its fugitive, frightened, defiant, unsure-of-themselves, not-quite-doomed trans girls. ‘Boymode’ means presenting yourself as a boy or a man: it’s something trans girls and women – or people who think they might be trans – still do to feel safe, to reduce daily risks, either psychic or physical.

Boymoding is, also, no fun. But boymoder is. The album tells stories of trans unease, of what the duo’s press kit calls ‘gender fatalism’, of how it feels when you can’t be who you are, or (maybe it’s the same thing) when no one accepts you once you try. It’s a special case, if you like, of the ‘nobody gets me; I’m not like everybody else’ vibe that has animated rock and roll since the Kinks and the Who. But it has special force when it points to false friends, tough family or unwelcoming partners who want you to live in a body that’s wrong for you.

‘Apostatic Selection’, swanskin’s best track, sounds confident, even anthemic, till you focus on the words: the title and chorus describe the evolutionary mechanism whereby prey animals evolve to look like less typical versions of themselves, so predators have a tougher time finding them. It’s the same process (swanskin say) that leads trans and queer people to hide or contort ourselves: God help us if we get clocked (recognised, called out) for trans. ‘Polymorphic, apostatic, preyed on beyond belief’, with ‘camouflaged phylogeny’, the singer says she’s ‘sick of getting called a faggot/With my friends out on the street’. No wonder, she goes on, ‘I need relief/I need to breathe.’

Wanting to hide – to look unlike other trans women – we blur ourselves, make our existence unclear. But hiding also makes us lonely, and keeps us outside a potential community. The rising keyboard hooks in ‘Photochemical’, and the pleasant guitar that strums away behind them, mask the singer’s description of crushing sadness: watching a beauty, an angel, another girl, who comes into mental focus like a developing photograph, the singer realises she’ll never look that way. Her soft tenor vocals duplicate the keyboards as she evokes the ‘crushing love’ she may never find, the sunlight she thinks she’ll never deserve. Instead she experiences – as the folky ‘Transangelicism’ explains – ‘apostatic days’, ‘sleepless and opaque’, both avoiding and seeking a loved one’s gaze.

Trans people have no monopoly on the contradictory wishes the album explores – how to be seen and not seen; how to reveal yourself to friends, or lovers, or strangers, who might reject you if they knew the truth. And teenagers have no monopoly on strong feelings. You’re not wrong if you hear, in boymoder, teen angst, emotionally delayed (as in many trans people’s lives). And you aren’t wrong if you hear both hiding and striving, attempts to use rock music both to act out that angst and to give listeners reassurance. You might also find strips and slices of other stories: an angel, like the one in Gabriel García Márquez’s short story, fallen to earth and neglected; a figure who overidentifies with Jesus and keeps putting herself in harm’s way.

‘Be not afraid,’ swanskin advises in ‘Ribbons’. Good advice, if you can take it. Yet the song unfolds into scary complaint, surrounded by bleeping and purring synthesised bells. ‘My saccharine sisters give me nothing’; I cannot (or not yet) ‘craft a personhood to our demands’ (note ‘our’; not ‘their’). When you’re not ready to make yourself clear to yourself, to see yourself the way that you want to be seen, when ‘facial features begin to glitch’ in every mirror, it’s hard to accept help. The undulating bass lines in ‘Sheep, Dog’ refuse ‘a hand I don’t want to hold’ while ‘trapped in the Deep South’ (McKenzie was born in Arkansas), promising to get out. The patches of static that punctuate the album are a reminder how hard it is to get clarity when you look back on your life – harder still once you try to share it.

‘The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography,’ Oscar Wilde wrote, and of course he was wrong: critics need to write about art and artists whose worldviews are nothing like our own. Listening to swanskin, though, does send me back to my autobiography: they use their Gen Z experience, and their early-1990s musical tools, to reflect the feelings I had in the 2000s and 2010s, when I came to realise, gradually, that I wanted to live as a woman, that I’d feel fulfilled if and only if I could do so, though I did not know how I could get myself – let alone other people – to see or believe it. It’s sad to see those feelings of wanting to hide, of terminal uncertainty, in the rising generation, but it’s lovely to see how they make those uncertainties, those wishes to hide behind noise, clouds and walls, into art.