Chicago shoegaze band Sunshy released their debut album, I Don’t Care What Comes Next, in 2024. Credit: Ayethaw Tun
On September 29, a newish music festival called Slide Away announced its first Chicago event, to be held at the Aragon Ballroom in late May. Champaign space-rock band Hum, whose highest-charting Billboard single came out more than 30 years ago, will headline. The other midwestern projects on the bill at that point—Sunshy, Cloakroom, and Lovesliescrushing—tend to play small clubs when they aren’t opening for bigger acts. That’s when they perform live at all, of course—heavy ambient duo Lovesliescrushing, formed in Michigan in 1991, had played fewer than ten gigs prior to regrouping a couple years ago.
The Aragon can hold close to 5,000 people. Trying to fill that space can be daunting even for popular performers, never mind a lineup heavy on cult favorites. The initial Slide Away announcement listed a single Chicago date, but demand was so great that the fest added a second show three days later. Slide Away night one
Hum headline; Nothing, Chapterhouse, She’s Green, Total Wife, and Crate open. Fri 5/22, 6 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 1106 W. Lawrence, $75.75, 17+
Slide Away night two
Hum headline; Nothing, Chapterhouse, Lovesliescrushing, Cloakroom, and Sunshy open. Sat 5/23, 6 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 1106 W. Lawrence, advance tickets sold out, 17+ Slide Away launched two years ago in Philadelphia, the hometown of festival founder Domenic Palermo. He fronts Nothing, who’ve played almost every Slide Away concert; they’ll perform their second album, 2016’s Tired of Tomorrow, in the penultimate slot of both Chicago shows. Palermo’s band is not only a critical part of Slide Away but also an important avatar of the noisy rock subgenre that defines the festival: shoegaze.
For the past couple decades, shoegaze existed largely on the margins of indie rock, but a new generation of underground acts and Billboard-charting teens have helped bring it to unforeseen levels of popularity. Slide Away isn’t even the only shoegaze-heavy festival in Chicago this month: On Saturday, May 2, the organizers of Cold Waves present Space Echo, whose bill combines alt-rock, metal, and shoegazers such as Ringo Deathstarr, Spotlights, and Bleary Eyed. Space Echo
Radius stage: Failure, . . . And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, Shiner, Ringo Deathstarr, Slow Mass. Cermak stage: Baroness, Torche, Spotlights, Open Hand. Sat 5/2, 6 PM, Radius, 640 W. Cermak, $89.40, 18+ “It’s just become such a part of the fabric of guitar music—you can’t even really say ‘indie music’ anymore. I think that’s primarily where it lives, but it’s super ingrained in hardcore and punk music at this point,” says music critic Eli Enis. “It’s super ingrained in mainstream rock listeners, with Deftones being the huge example.”
During the current shoegaze resurgence, Enis has become the music’s most important chronicler. Next year Macmillan will publish his book When the Sun Hits: The High-Volume History of Shoegaze. Much of his work in this area appears in his newsletter, Chasing Sundays, named after a lyric from Nothing’s “Guilty of Everything.” After years of covering Palermo, Enis has very recently become friends with him, and Chasing Sundays is partnering with Slide Away on a series of promotional interviews around this year’s festival dates.
Enis first saw Nothing in a small club in Rochester, New York, in 2016, and he credits the band with drawing him to shoegaze. “They were so loud—the loudest show I’ve ever seen, to this day,” he says. “I was so smitten by everything. The sheer power, but also the prettiness—the way people generically describe shoegaze being so overwhelming but also so sweet.”
In the decade since, Philadelphia has become one of the biggest hubs in shoegaze, thanks to Nothing and the younger artists coming up in their wake. Chief among them are They Are Gutting a Body of Water, an outre project fronted by Douglas Dulgarian. He also runs the indie label Julia’s War, which has released a lot of inventive shoegaze and throws a relatively modest fest of its own. The Julia’s War Festival punches above its weight, though: In 2022, it included a headlining set by Astrobrite, a noise-pop project founded in 1993 by Lovesliescrushing guitarist Scott Cortez.
“I owe those guys a lot—I owe that Philly scene,” Cortez says. “Those kids gave Astrobrite so much love, and they helped revive us a bit. Even though they regard us as legendary, they kind of brought life back into us.”
Astrobrite recorded the material compiled on Crush in 1995.
Cortez moved to Chicago in 1998, and over the years he’s enlisted lots of different musicians to flesh out Astrobrite’s live show—including Andrew Marrah, who plays guitar and synth in one of Chicago’s most notable shoegaze bands, Airiel. These days Astrobrite consists of Cortez, bassist Kelly Coffey, and drummer Ryan Davis, who also fronts grungy shoegaze trio Sleepwalk. The many other great shoegaze acts emerging from Chicago include Sunshy, whose dreamy, romantic 2024 debut, I Don’t Care What Comes Next, carries a torch for genre lodestar My Bloody Valentine. And northwest Indiana band Cloakroom are one of the touchstones of contemporary shoegaze. Both groups play the second day of Slide Away.
Does all the shoegaze talent in these parts add up to an identity, though? Is there such a thing as “midwest shoegaze”? I posed this question to almost every musician I talked to for this piece. All of them have lived in the midwest, and most of them still do.
“I think ‘midwest shoegaze’ inherently has some kind of emo/postrock association that we’re not a part of,” says Dim bassist Bill Connors. “Aside from the MBV influence, I don’t really think there’s much there to categorize us as shoegaze in 2026.”
I’ve thought of Dim as a shoegaze band—and a quintessentially Chicagoan shoegaze band—since I first heard their self-titled 2015 album. They’re crushingly loud and all-consuming, their electronic percussion swings like house music but maintains an industrial sting, and they smuggle a little sweetness into their pop hooks. Dim’s self-titled 2023 EP sounds like it could only have been made by a Chicago shoegaze band. If they’re not shoegaze, what are they?
Dim’s self-titled 2023 EP
“I think more generally of what we make as amplifier sound system music,” says Dim singer-guitarist George Joseph Miller IV. “I know the term ‘shoegaze’ was originally meant as a dig, but it’s ironic how it speaks to the way the music is performed versus the way it sounds, which completely misses the point for us. Our focus is the immersive physicality of the sound and losing ourselves in that, whatever you want to call it.”
Dim’s approach isn’t radically different from Cortez’s. He likens the first wave of UK shoegazers to 19th-century impressionist artists. “Those guys, they look at color as experience, as texture, which is what shoegaze is doing,” Cortez says. “Shoegaze is like, ‘We’re gonna pull from the ambient aesthetic,’ which is, ‘Let’s really look at the sound of things, every aspect of it.’ That philosophy doesn’t die. Musical trends? Stuff like that [does]. But a philosophy? Since shoegaze is now being distilled as a philosophy, you can put it into hip-hop, metal, any genre.”
Midwest shoegaze owes its recent resurgence in part to young Chicago-based bands like Griefeater. Credit: Eric Tan
A distinct midwest shoegaze sound has probably evolved several times, but the earliest instance I could find happened roughly 30 years ago and a few hundred miles east of Chicago. I didn’t have to look hard to learn about early-90s Detroit band Majesty Crush, who took cues from the 4AD catalog and helped inspire a space-rock scene that radiated out of the Motor City. In 2020, Third Man Records released Southeast of Saturn, a compilation of 90s Michigan bands that demonstrates the breadth of that scene: It includes the soaring postpunk of Majesty Crush, the echoing postrock of Windy & Carl, and the textured drone of Children’s Ice Cream. Many of the acts on Southeast of Saturn played out together and maintained close ties. Lovesliescrushing and Astrobrite are the outliers, having operated in those years mostly in their own bubble.
Majesty Crush appear on this 2020 compilation of 1990s Michigan bands.
Prior to forming Lovesliescrushing with vocalist Melissa Arpin Duimstra in 1991, Cortez jammed with another Michigander. Kirk Marrison, who in ’94 would form the trio Kiln, shared Cortez’s love for ambient music and the 4AD catalog. But Cortez says he found kinship with other shoegaze musicians only after he and Arpin Duimstra moved to Arizona in 1992. Brandon Capps, who fronted shoegaze group Half String, booked Lovesliescrushing for the Beautiful Noise shoegaze festival in Phoenix in 1993.
Sam Rosenthal, owner of Oregon label Projekt Records, attended that show, and that same year Projekt reissued Lovesliescrushing’s 1992 self-released debut, Bloweyelashwish, on cassette. (The Numero Group, for which I’ve written a few liner notes, reissued it on vinyl last year.) Cortez and Arpin Duimstra recorded the album in a Tucson motel room without air-conditioning, with a big box pushed against the front door to keep crickets from getting inside through the crack underneath. Cortez describes the album’s A-side as feeling like the first time he encountered Arizona heat after a lifetime in Michigan. “The first half is just getting hit in the face with a wave: ‘Here’s one chord,’” he says, imitating the sound of a crunching, distorted guitar. “Brutal. Just brutal.”
Lovesliescrushing’s self-released 1992 debut
Lovesliescrushing recorded without amps, plugging instruments into effects pedals and plugging the pedals directly into a four-track recorder. “There’s no air—it’s straight electricity,” Cortez says. “It’s like making movies without ever having the camera pointing at anything outside. It’s all done in-camera.”
In February 2026, Chicago label Harlem & Irving digitally reissued Sunrise Experimental, the 1995 debut full-length from Chicagoland shoegaze band Star Phase 23. They’d formed from the remains of the short-lived Shift, who blended emo and space rock—their lineup on 1994’s Aquifer E.P. included bassist Cory Osborne, who’d go on to play with local shoegazers Airiel and Lightfoils.
Star Phase 23 arose in the midst of a vital northwest suburban punk scene, but they sought out musicians who wanted to play traditional rock instruments in unorthodox ways. Founding member Brian Kelly (who runs Harlem & Irving with Star Phase 23 bandmate Bob Davies) found those musicians at raves.
This year Harlem & Irving reissued Star Phase 23’s 1995 debut album.
“It very quickly became clear that there were three major hubs of this growing culture and this intersection between punk, rave, chill, ambient, shoegaze, experimental,” Kelly says. “There was Chicago, there was Madison, and there was Milwaukee.” At a gig in Madison, Kelly encountered Milwaukee shoegaze band Ignore the Ground, who drew from the danceable, psychedelic vibe of the late-80s and early-90s Madchester scene that included the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays.
“They had their own Bez who hung out onstage with them, danced, and played percussion. And they had a very early Verve [vibe]—like, A Storm in Heaven, early EPs,” Kelly says. “Cool, groovy kind of shoegaze stuff.” Ignore the Ground connected Kelly and his collaborators with like-minded Minneapolis group February.
The overlap between midwestern shoegaze and dance music became vividly legible at Even Furthur, a massive 1996 Wisconsin rave famous as the site of the first U.S. performance by Daft Punk. The rave’s Alive Stage featured ambient-leaning rock bands such as February, Windy & Carl, and Low.
Because these bands often lived hours apart, they couldn’t always play with groups on their wavelength. Ignore the Ground front man Brian Foote recalls sharing bills with ska bands in Milwaukee, because so few people played the kind of textural rock his band liked.
“Brian Kelly is the one who put Labradford’s A Stable Reference on a tape for me,” Foote says. “And I was just, ‘Wait, there’s people who aren’t our five homies doing this kind of music in the United States?’” Labradford issued almost all of their droning postrock through Kranky, a Chicago-born label that in the 2000s would hire Foote as general manager. After Ignore the Ground dissolved in the mid-90s, Foote and some of his bandmates drifted deeper into electronic music. Bassist Joel Kriske and guitarist Marc Hellner formed Pulseprogramming, a Chicago IDM act that performed at Play, an experimental dance series at Danny’s that Kelly and Davies founded in 1998.
From left: Brian Kelly of Chicago label Harlem & Irving; Melissa Arpin Duimstra and Scott Cortez of Loveliescrushing Credit: Kirk Williamson; Julian Arpin-Cortez
Foote went on to combine the sound of Ignore the Ground and the downtempo dance music of Milwaukee label Wobblyhead. “I had a band later called Nudge that would try to merge those two things,” he says, “or try to be, like, an electronic version of a shoegaze band or a live-band version of a downtempo thing—you know, smear that line.”
Kelly also moved further into ambient and dance, becoming smitten with the catalog of German label Kompakt. He credits his DIY punk background with informing his approach to shoegaze.
“If you were to go through the archives of all of the seven-inches that were created at that time, you would definitely hear gradations of how much people were paying attention to audio quality,” he says. “Some people were just recording direct on a four-track, redlining everything, and putting it on a seven-inch that was also redlined to the max, so it’s just a treble machine coming at you. Some folks would pay more attention, sculpting their sound and trying to be more thoughtful about it. But the through line for that is a real dedication to playing with sound in ways that might not be traditional. Trying to kind of deconstruct what music really was.”
Midwest punk musicians outside of Kelly’s circle were also hearing new possibilities through shoegaze. Facs front man Brian Case (whose previous band, Disappears, worked with Kranky), got there eventually, but in the 90s his head was elsewhere. “The thing that I really started responding to at that time was Dischord,” Case says, “so I was ‘no effects.’ That changed over time, of course, as I wanted to be a little less literal and more abstract.”
Ambient music and punk both continue to play a role in midwest shoegaze. “I’m obsessed with ambient music,” says Cloakroom bassist Bobby Markos. “That’s primarily what I’m composing, listening to, and going to see outside of Cloakroom nowadays.” He and Cloakroom front man Doyle Martin met as teenagers in northwest Indiana’s punk scene. In the early 2010s, after Martin’s emo project Grown Ups fizzled out, he invited Markos to jam. Markos was still playing in posthardcore group Native, but he made the time.
“He came into a coffee shop I was working at,” Markos says, “and was like, ‘I got this new thing going, sounds like Tom Petty. You should come play bass on it.’” Cloakroom developed their signature style—lush and contemplative, with huge, molasses-thick riffs—after Martin and Markos saw slowcore pioneers Codeine play Lincoln Hall in 2012. The show blew Markos’s mind.
Cloakroom released their most recent full-length in 2025.
“Right after that, we came back to my parents’ house,” Markos says. “We were jamming in my parents’ basement—we were playing these riffs, and I’m like, ‘Let’s play ’em Codeine slow.’ Those riffs that we had that felt more classic rock–y, kinda like 90s rock–y in their initial feel, once we were playing them at that tempo, then the delay took over, the reverb took over, and all the etherealness came in.”
Markos didn’t think of Cloakroom as a shoegaze band till the music press began writing about them. “With the shoegaze thing, it was like, setting out to make one dish and not totally following the recipe, and then you realized you ended up making another dish,” he says. “Like, ‘I set out to make this soup, and now I’ve got curry.’ That was how we arrived at it.”
In 2013, Cloakroom signed to Boston indie label Run for Cover. The label was known for posthardcore and emo, so some of its fans probably got their first taste of shoegaze through Cloakroom. “I aggressively kept up with Run for Cover’s roster. It was probably 2014 to 2019—[I] was listening to everything and anything they put out,” says Sunshy bassist Gwen Giedeman. “Cloakroom was one of those bands that I got really into from that. I didn’t really think about genres that much, and I realize that a lot of what I liked was shoegaze.”
“In 2015, when Further Out by Cloakroom came out, that was a really, really big record for me and just totally redefined the way I listened to music,” says singer-bassist Lukas Skucas of local shoegazers Griefeater. “I was a pop-punk kid, and that exposed me to a whole new world.”
From left: Northwest Indiana band Cloakroom, who play the second night of Slide Away; engineer and solo shoegaze artist Seth Beck, who runs West Town Magnetics Credit: Vin Romero; courtesy Seth Beck
Sunshy synth player Jordan Zamansky has a theory for the new popularity of shoegaze. “I think that there were more and more people listening to shoegaze during COVID, because it is a very solo experience,” he says. “There’s a lot of stuff in the textures that lend it to a real headphone-listening experience.”
The story of Griefeater fits into this theory. The band formed after Skucas and guitarist Ethan Rader started sharing music they liked in the early days of the pandemic. “We had a collaborative playlist, just shoegaze songs we liked,” Skucas says. “We were like, ‘We should totally do a band once we can play and see people.’” Their debut album, December’s Worn, has a chilly, blustery bite that reminds me of walking around Palmer Square in January, and Skucas sings about the park throughout the record.
Griefeater released their debut full-length in December 2025.
Worn feels like part of a local scene—specifically, a midwestern shoegaze scene. Skucas credits engineer Seth Beck with helping shape the album’s sound. Griefeater worked with him at the suggestion of Jake Morse, who drums in Chicago shoegaze group Brady and helps run indie label Flesh & Bone. Last year the label released Beck’s poppy solo shoegaze album, Soft Heaven.
Beck grew up in Allendale, Michigan. His early musical influences include his older brother, Eric, and his friend Jim Versluis, who both play in one of the other great midwest shoegaze bands of the past decade: Greet Death. “They always had an attitude of, like, ‘We can do it if we want to,’” Seth Beck says. “That was really inspiring.” He joined Greet Death in 2024, after moving to Chicago.
Seth Beck’s 2025 solo album, Soft Heaven
Beck now runs a Humboldt Park studio called West Town Magnetics with four other engineers (including Morse). His job has let him hear how other artists play around with shoegaze. “Shoegaze is so popular and everywhere. Everyone’s pulling on it a little bit in some ways,” he says. “I was recording a band the other day—it was kind of a reggae song, and then the chorus comes and it’s fuzz pedals.”
Interlay Credit: Chloe Dutton
“I’m not really a music-theory person at all—a lot of the writing is guided by tones, because of how much it can change a sound,” says Alexandria Ortgiesen, who fronts Chicago-via-Madison band Interlay. “I like the mix of reverb and distortion, ’cause it gives a sense of darkness that you don’t really get if you just play clean. I think that’s a pretty shoegaze ethos.”
Ortgiesen doesn’t think of her band as shoegaze; she came up in punk, and she moved to Chicago for its bustling DIY scene. But everyone has a slightly different definition of shoegaze, some more expansive than others. When Cortez addresses the genre’s current local landscape, he speaks of many newer acts fondly—including Interlay.
Interlay released the EP Hunting Jacket in 2024.
His list includes some bands I hadn’t thought of as shoegaze either, among them cheeky indie experimentalists This House Is Creaking, whose use of guitar effects dovetails with Cortez’s sound-first philosophy of shoegaze. Most of the artists I interviewed don’t sound alike, but they share aspects of their approach to making art. Many of them found a new creative direction with the help of effects pedals associated with shoegaze: distortion, delay, reverb, chorus, etc. They discovered they could begin not with a structure but with an immersive atmosphere.
“It allowed me to not think about writing a song as ‘Here’s four chords and a bridge and all this,’” Case says. “I could get the sound in my head out. That became a starting point for so many things, and it still is today. I can create a texture or a mood, which I’m much better at than writing a song.”
As I talked to more musicians, the aesthetic territory that shoegaze could potentially claim seemed to get larger, with more flexible borders. “I think shoegaze has just become a blanket term for bands who like to get a little noisy and like to get a little heavy without, like, a clear distinction on form,” says Sunshy guitarist and singer Wesley Park. “Genres can change and mold over time, it’s perfectly fine. But that’s what I’ve observed being the big shift in what is known as shoegaze in the past ten years.”
The 2024 debut album by Chicago group Sunshy
Among the artists I interviewed, Sunshy comes closest to capturing the classic UK shoegaze sound—even the strictest purists would acknowledge that I Don’t Care What Comes Next belongs in the genre. “When I was 12, my dad took me to see Slowdive—it changed my life,” says singer and guitarist Sascha Deng. “It was just so overwhelming, because I’d never experienced anything like that before as a wee tween.”
But for the next Sunshy album, the band are taking a different approach. “I fear we’re straying from the shoegaze path daily, and that’s totally OK,” Deng says. “What’s important to me isn’t necessarily following that specific genre but to create an atmosphere that draws people in.”
“I feel like I’m always writing pop songs that are incredible bangers,” Park says. “That’s what excites me.”