Okay, firstly, this is a retarded name for a genre. I fucking despise the idea of prefixing anything with “nu” – it was never cool. Not when Limp Bizkit arrived, and not since then. Whoever’s pulling this shit and playing the name game needs to take some of their beer money, buy a thesaurus, and do us all a fucking favour.

Now, I’m not going to pretend to know the first thing about the history and context behind nu-gaze music. I didn’t write a stupid-long book about how much it changed my life or where the leader singer from the band that pioneered the genre dropped a dookie for the very first time, that shit ain’t me. If you want that then Amazon probably have your back. I’m just here to give you some of my favourite acts, the whats and whys, and a nice download or two.

Nu-Gaze is, fundamentally, a continuation of shoegaze. Shoegaze is great, but there’s only one band I consider truly shoegaze, and that’s My Bloody Valentine. To me, MBV are shoegaze in its purest form. Anything before them, and anything beyond them, just don’t match-up. Their album Loveless basically defines the shoegaze sound as it should be heard; wailing, distorted, and lucid. But not so overdriven and noisy that it becomes derivative. It evokes the feeling of crashing to Earth whilst sleeping, and it’s fucking marvelous.

Now, in much the same vein, shoegaze’s bastard step-son, nu-gaze, is looking to inherit a few of daddy’s attributes: overdrive kicked up to 11, and lots of melodic, jangly lead guitars. Only this time it’s bringing other elements to the mix, for instance, electronica has fucked one of shoegaze’s teenage daughters behind the town hall and refused to raise its child, creating bands such as The Radio Dept. and M83 as a result. Of course, there are then bands such as Deerhunter and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart who embody a far less overdriven sound; far more poppy, but still suitably dream-like and droning. These could be described as the distant, youngest cousins of shoe-gaze. The ones that grew up in boarding school and never quite “got it” but still ended up making pretty special fucking tunes in their own right.

Other notable siblings and or hangers-on are…

• Autolux (Future Perfect is an incredible fucking album, and if you don’t own it you should probably reconsider your direction in life)
• The Silversun Pickups (Carnavas was good… Let’s pretend that’s the only album they’ve released… !)
• Asobi Seksu (quirky Japanese lead singers are always nice – ask Deerhoof).
• The Horrors (Not exclusively nu-gaze, their first album was a goth-punk mess. However, Primary Colours, whether by accident or not, is an incredible example of nu-gaze music)

The Horrors – I Can’t Control Myself

Atlas Sound – Recent Bedroom

Autolux – Plantlife