My Bloody Valentine

My Bloody Valentine formed in Dublin in 1983, moving to London shortly after. The early years were unremarkable — a series of lineup changes and stylistic shifts that gave little indication of what was coming. Kevin Shields and Bilinda Butcher's vocal interplay was always distinctive, but the sound was still finding itself.

'Isn't Anything' (1988) was the first indication of what Shields was capable of. The guitar sound — achieved through an unconventional tremolo technique that he has never fully explained — was unlike anything else being made. Distorted but melodic, abrasive but beautiful.

'Loveless' (1991) is one of the most important albums ever made. It took three years and nearly bankrupted Creation Records. The guitar sound Shields achieved — layers of distorted, pitch-shifted, tremolo-arm-manipulated noise — created a new sonic vocabulary that defined an entire genre and influenced everyone from Radiohead to Slowdive to Deerhunter. It sounds like nothing else before or since.

After 'Loveless', Shields essentially disappeared. There were rumours of a follow-up for over a decade. The band played occasional shows but released nothing. The silence became legendary — a kind of artistic perfectionism taken to its logical extreme.

'mbv' finally arrived in 2013, twenty-two years after 'Loveless'. It was released without warning, crashing the servers of their website within minutes. The record picked up exactly where 'Loveless' left off and then went somewhere new — the final three tracks in particular pushed into genuinely new territory. The reunion tour that followed was one of the loudest things ever committed to a stage.