There might not be a hotter indie rock subgenre among the Zoomers than shoegaze. For whatever reason, the under 28 crowd is flocking to bands whaling away at ludicrously distorted guitars, abusing their whammy bars, and cloaking their vocals deep in the mix. 

For me, shoegaze has always been one of those styles that has some pretty high highs and some pretty… not low lows, per se, but some very mid mids. Sure, I’ve written about Wednesday more than any other band in the past two years or so (although they cut their shoegaze with a healthy dose of country and grunge) and I’m always happy to tell non-music obsessives that they really should get around to listening to My Bloody Valentine, but I’ve never been able to get into other big name shoegaze bands like Ride, Slowdive, and Swervedriver, and even though I really like individual tracks from more recent projects like DIIV and Tanukichan, I find sitting through full albums of theirs to be a bit of a bore. I’m similarly ambivalent about the ever growing cohort of Zoomergaze bands that have cropped up and been served up to me by the Spotify algorithm. 

At least, I’ve been bored by their records. When I saw verity den open up for Rosali and Mowed Sound in April, I was perfectly entertained, but when I queued up their album on the train ride home, I was underwhelmed by what felt like a pretty formless, weightless collection of songs. The same could certainly be said for Plastic and Prize Horse, both of whom I saw play at Baby’s All Right on Wednesday, November 20th. At first, the Queens-based Plastic just sounded loud for loudness’ sake, but they managed to pull it all together for a solid closing to their set, and Prize Horse were an absolute blast, both metaphorically and literally – I’ve never felt a plastic cup reverberate in my hand more than when they were pounding through “Further From My Start,” and I’ve never heard a shoegaze group make such efficient use of a fuzzed-out bass. But for as much as I enjoyed both bands’ live performances, I still found their studio work wanting – Prize Horse simply don’t capture the power of their live show on record, and Plastic haven’t yet figured out enough original ways to attack the form to justify putting out a 76-minute debut album (the guitar work of George Schatzlein and drumming of Sam Kuryzdlo are brimming with potential, however). They seem to lack what too many shoegaze bands, regardless of the generation they belong to, are also in desperate need of – a discernible sense of personality.

Granted, distance is an important piece of the shoegaze formula – the point is to abstract guitars to the point of pure sonic texture, to turn an instrument synonymous with grit and earthiness into something ethereal yet still weighty – but too often that distance gives way to a sense of blankness that truly sets in once the vocals start. From my perspective, you can sort shoegaze vocals into three broad camps: there’s wispy male vocals, typified by DIIV and Slowdive, which is fine in doses but after a while just feels like it has the nutritional value of eating a big bowl of whip cream for dinner. Then there are what I call the stoner metal vocals used by bands like Prize Horse, because they’re clearly influenced by the sort of deadpan, masculine-but-not-growling vocals of stoner metal groups like Electric Wizard and Torche (a group that, had they debuted 15 years later, would definitely have been slotted in as shoegaze), an attempt to recreate the heavy-soft dynamic of shoegaze guitars that, in my opinion, just ends up sounding weak and hollow. Rounding it out are wispy female vocals, apparently the only kind of female vocals allowed by most shoegaze bands, and can be found at their best on tracks like genre standard “Only Shallow,” and at their worst on the chaotically boring “De-Luxe.”

One of the few shoegaze bands that doesn’t seem to fall into any of these traps of the genre are Wishy, the headliner from that aforementioned November 20th show at Baby’s All Right. Granted, it’s a bit disingenuous to refer to Wishy as solely a shoegaze act – the bulk of their 2024 EPs, Mana and Paradise, were mostly composed of more orthodox examples of the genre, sure, but they also demonstrated an ear for melody and openness to experimentation that’s rare among their peers. On their debut feel length album Triple Seven, released earlier this year, they expanded their sonic palette even further, taking in Superchunk-style power pop and Sundays-style dream pop, elevating them from another mere Zoomergaze band into a group that has the potential to leave a serious imprint on indie rock as their career develops, a potential that was emphasized by their primordial-yet-powerful live show. 

A large part of that power comes from the fact that Wishy are able to connect with their audience beyond a mere sonic level. Sure, I had fun headbanging to Prize Horse, but I had no idea what they were saying, or what they were trying to communicate to me. The only thing I knew for sure about their lyrics is that they weren’t asking the audience things like “can you feel it?” or “are you down?/are your free?,” nor were they releasing pure human exclamations like “Whoo!” and “OwOwOw!” the way Wishy were. This isn’t to say that Wishy’s songwriting is completely devoid of darkness, alienation, or anxiety – in fact, one of their most common subjects seems to be fretting about potential unrequited love – but they seemed to determined to convert these feelings into something more than mere catharsis. They were in pursuit of genuine joy and love. “Are you down/are you free,” the phrase vocalist/guitarist Kevin Krauter uses to kick off the chorus on Triple Seven centerpiece “Love On the Outside,” could be read as a question born of desperation, sure, but it also acts as an invitation to the audience. Are you down with what Wishy is trying to give you? Are you free enough to accept that, even in these uncertain times, even if you don’t know what to do with your life, you can still have fun over the course of their one hour set? Can you allow the love that comes with repeating that question in a room full of other people into your heart? 

Well, Wishy will do their best to try and make you open to it, even if their live act is still a little raw. But even if they still need to figure out their levels a little bit (bassist Mitch Collins played great, but overpowered the vocals and guitars), they made their rawness work for them. Two or three times Krauter and fellow guitarist/vocalist Nina Pitchkites had to take breaks to tune or switch out their guitars (a problem that plagued early Wednesday shows, and something that’ll solve itself as the band gets bigger and can afford to carry more guitars/crew members with them), but rather than let the audience sit in silence, they fill these breaks with euphoric house music that just further solidified the ecstatic atmosphere of the evening. 

I don’t know exactly what music was being played, but it had the same yearning effervescence of DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ – a project that I’ve been thinking a lot about in comparison to Wishy. Both perform very different kinds of music, but they aim for a similar tone – something that I’m inclined to describe as post-post-Trump, the way that New Girl was once described as “post-post-9/11.” The fact that Donald Trump was reelected president mere weeks ago might make that sound stupid (and maybe it is), but I’m thinking less in terms of actual timeline (after all, New Girl still debuted in the midst of the War on Terror) then, as New Girl producer Brett Baer put it, the cumulative sense that “it’s okay to feel again.” Both musical acts reject the notion of embracing numbness and wallowing in alienation – the dark, anesthetizing distortion typical of shoegaze is undercut by Wishy’s catchy melodies and the sense that they’re chasing this very teenage-sort of emotion, the kind of anxiety and anticipation that only comes when you’re a young person in love for the first time. Similarly, Destiny, DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ’s breakthrough release, may read as a somewhat ironic comment on the “end of the history” mentality of the turn of the millennium, but it always finds its way back to optimism. “Something New” begins with a vocal track of someone lamenting the end of a relationship, but as the song goes on, the question of “What if we can’t get back to where we were?” is met with the upbeat reframing of “Well, maybe you could make something new.” It may seem simple, but meeting such uncertainty with positivity – acknowledging that yes, things are bad, and we will never go back to what we had, but, eventually, we could build something better – provided me with a rare sense of comfort as I spun Honey on my way home from Wishy’s show in an attempt to maintain a kind of upbeat afterglow.

To be clear, by comparing these two artists to New Girl, I don’t also mean to compare them to the twee, uptonian, dilettantish bands that defined that early-2010s era of pop culture like Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, nor do I mean to imply any sense of flippancy or indifference on their part. But I do think that Wishy and DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ give their audiences the chance to “feel” something beyond fear and anger, and give them permission to care about something other than the ongoing disintegration of our political and social order. 

That’s an important role to play, and not one that was always embraced in the first Trump era – when super earnest rock bros Japandroids released their similarly starry-eyed Near to the Wild Heart of Life just a week after Trump’s first inauguration in 2017, Stereogum’s Tom Breihan felt compelled to ask, “Has a great record ever seen so out-of-step with its cultural moment?,” saying that he couldn’t hear the album “the way it was meant to be heard” because of what was about to befall the nation. For whatever reason, that “it feels wrong to be aspirational and have fun” feeling has seemed absent from Trump’s second election, and while I would implore everyone to stay informed and diligent, I consider this to be a healthy development. The state of the world may be grim, yes, but that doesn’t mean love and happiness have ceased to exist, and it doesn’t mean that, someday, things won’t eventually get better. If you need something to remind you of all of that, I would recommend checking out Wishy next time they roll into town.