Chasing Fridays: Sunshy, Knifeplay, Wisp, and more

Heyo, it's the day after a holiday but I'm still here bloggin'. I've got a four-pack of reviews for this week's Chasing Fridays column – my weekly roundup of music criticism and (sometimes) gig reviews. I wrote about a new-ish record that totally smacked me over the head when I first heard it earlier this week, and then scribbled some thoughts on new releases by Knifeplay and Wisp. Finally, I commented on the cross-genre appeal of a young Chicago band called Interlay, who are borrowing from shoegaze in some interesting ways. Thanks for reading!

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Sunshy - I don't care what comes next

Listening to this album was frustrating. It's the last week of November. I'm working overtime trying to catch up on as many 2024 releases as I can while simultaneously attempting to revisit my favorite albums of the year and narrow down a proper list. I thought I was making decent progress and then BOOM – Kendrick dropped a serious contender for my top 10. I spent the weekend digesting GNX and reordering some of my rankings to see where it might fit. Once that fire was tended to I threw on this Sunshy album I'd been meaning to check out just to relax —and BLAM! Now, I'm sitting here with my head literally shaking from side to side, because I don't care what comes next might be one of the greatest albums I've heard all year. Fucking hell.

Sunshy are a relatively new shoegaze band from Chicago, and this is their first-ever project. Somehow, I missed that the venerable shoegaze label Longinus Recordings (Parannoul, BrokenTeeth, etc.) had released a cassette run of I don't care what comes next earlier this month, so my introduction to the band was through Leor Galil's great Chicago Reader profile of them, in which he calls Sunshy "one of the most compelling bands of the ongoing shoegaze resurgence." Those are strong words, and as someone who listens to a helluva lot of shoegaze, I have to say that I was skeptical of that claim. However, before I even finished my first playthrough, there was so much egg dripping down my face that I was drowning in yolk. Of all the amazing young bands spearheading what I deemed The New Wave of American Shoegaze, very few have dropped a full album's worth of material that's as cohesive, charming, and fully-realized as Sunshy's debut.

According to Leor's Reader profile, Sunshy co-vocalist-guitarists Wesley Park and Sascha Deng initially bonded over both having the My Bloody Valentine-themed Keeley Loomer Fuzz Reverb pedal on their respective boards. They faithfully employ that pedal's sound throughout this record, particularly on the standouts "Hyacinth" and "Dissolve," where the guitars blow through the mix with a force that rivals someone yanking open the emergency exit hatch on a jumbo jet. However, what I like about Sunshy is that they're not a straight MBV tribute act. Besides its ozone-tearing riffs, "Hyacinth" is otherwise a chipper and dulcet pop tune that's brisk and glistening in a way that recalls Blankenberge or even early DIIV.

Closer "Stop saying how you've been" heaps a siren-like synth atop the flood of guitars in a way that tacitly nods to "Only Shallow," but its massive crescendo uses wide-angle keyboard notes to give the hovering groove an almost proggy feel. It sounds like music that would emanate from a benevolent UFO as it descends for a sloth-like landing, or like a lost B-side from All Natural Lemon and Lime's 1998 masterpiece Turning Into Small. Most contemporary American shoegaze bands are either going for TAGABOW's lo-fi drabness or Whirr's sullen plods, which makes Sunshy's fluorescent hooks and uplifting tempos particularly refreshing. They don't really sound like any other band on Longinus, nor do they fit neatly into any one ridgeline of the genre's current topography. At the same time, their tasteful use of synths and sampled drums, coupled with the album's lively, punchy production, sounds acutely modern. There's nothing retro-gaze about it.

I'm floored by how great this record is. There's been a lot of amazing shoegaze songs this year, and a handful of fantastic shoegaze full-lengths, but I'm tempted to say that 2024 feels more like a transitional year for the genre than 2023 was. Even if my favorite shoegaze bands released new LPs this year, I'd probably still be putting them up against I don't care what comes next. So yeah, fuck you Sunshy for making my AOTY list making even more stressful. And thank you, Sunshy, for making a slice of shoegaze as staggeringly good as this.

Wisp - "I remember how your hands felt on mine"

Wisp's new song is pretty good! I've written a lot about the L.A. shoegazer whose first-ever song, "Your Face," blew up on TikTok last year and added fuel to the genre's ongoing inferno of popularity. I was pretty mixed on her debut EP, Pandora, but was intrigued to hear her singing over a brighter, less explicitly Whirr-whore-ish track on Tanukichan's "It Gets Easier" earlier this summer. "I remember how your hands felt on mine" follows that thread under her own name, featuring the quickest tempo in her growing catalog and a chorus that's more shimmering than it is shut-in. The riffs hit pretty hard the guitar layers are a little more intricate than most of Pandora. It's a positive step forward.

Knifeplay - Spirit Echo b/w Cry Babies

I saw Knifeplay at the Slide Away shoegaze festival earlier this year, where they played a three-song set of entirely new material. It was staggeringly beautiful, and one of the fresh tunes they debuted was "Spirit Echo," nine minutes of transcendent dream-pop that prominently features new-ish co-vocalist Johanna Baumann. I consider Knifeplay to be a big part of the 2020s shoegaze renaissance, especially the influence their nocturnally scuzzy 2019 LP, Pearlty, has had on this generation of Philly noise-makers. Their 2022 album, Animal Drowning, draped their world-weary waltzes in Cocteaus-y tinsel, resulting in one of the most singular and peculiar shoegaze albums in recent memory.

"Spirit Echo" fully divorces Knifeplay from their distortion-addled origins, nestling somewhere between Moose's ...XYZ and Beach House at their dreariest. It's a lot to digest, and I think Knifeplay's songs always work best within the context of a full-length album. Regardless, I'm very intrigued by this new direction. As for what's remained the same...Knifeplay's funereal pop melodies and soul-scarred vocals have always nodded heartily to the work of Matthew Lee Cothran (Elvis Depressedly, Coma Cinema, etc.), who the band cover (kind of) on the B-side to "Spirit Echo." "Cry Babies" was originally performed by folk artist Noel Thrasher, who co-wrote the track with Cothran over a decade back. Baumann takes lead vocal on Knifeplay's version, which sounds like something 4AD would've issued in 1988. No one else is doing it like Knifeplay right now.

Interlay - Hunting Jacket

Astute readers of Chasing Sundays can probably tell that I'm very intrigued by where shoegaze lives in 2024. The bands that border, vacation to, and even colonize shoegaze have always been deeply important to how shoegaze as a mode of guitar expression has evolved – whether that's Stone Roses and Bark Psychosis in the 90s, or Title Fight and Balance & Composure in the 2010s. Particularly in the present day, the musical and aesthetic surroundings of shoegaze are as pertinent to shoegaze's culture as the sound itself. To wit, a band like Interlay are a fascinating subject to me.

The Chicago-via-Wisconsin group don't make shoegaze, per se, but they're absolutely emblematic of this moment where shoegaze's shrapnel is piercing the flesh of so many neighboring sounds. Interlay recently opened for heavy-gazers Trauma Ray in NYC and dropped a cover of "Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)" last month. The cover art for their 2024 EP, Hunting Jacket, looks like the demo for a melodic black-metal band from 1997. They have all the trappings of the shoegaze-metal crossover I dissected earlier this year, but their sound, much to my satisfaction, charts a different course than the Amira Elfeky's and Fleshwater's of the world.

Hunting Jacket tracks like "Medic" and "Aces" aren't all that different from what a band like Ovlov were doing 10 years back. Smashing Pumpkins are an obvious influence on the heavier moments, but their singer has a punk howl-quaver that's rooted in the lineage of Kim Deal, Corin Tucker, and Marisa Paternoster. So, not remotely shoegaze. That said, the 'gaze-frayed guitars of "Grass" and "LVS" crackle like newspaper kindling in a bonfire, and the floating feedback in its concluding title-track takes Thurston Moore's humming noise-drones to shoegaze-ian heights of ecstatic bliss. The fact that Interlay dress their music up in metal garb, tip their hats to Deftones, and play shows with nu-gaze hellraisers like Trauma Ray, while also sounding like an indie-punk band who wouldn't have fit snugly alongside shoegaze or alt-metal even a decade ago, is fascinating to me. Maybe it is to you as well.