[Forum Digest] Recommend Me Some Good Shoegaze Bands

Volume 3 of our forum digest series turns the clock back to a 2018 thread on the Nanj (Live Jupiter) board of Open 2channel titled “Recommend me some good shoegaze bands, Clemens.” We introduced the genre’s three foundational masterpieces in our Introduction to Shoegaze, and this thread is packed with the exact bands you should hear next. Even seven years after the thread was posted, every band named here holds up—if anything, the list is even more relevant today.

Starting with the Essentials

“They drenched everything in guitar feedback, so close enough to shoegaze” is a Hall of Fame ruling that settles thirty years of genre boundary disputes in three seconds. And seven years after this thread was posted, Cigarettes After Sex have grown into a band that sells out arenas around the world. The posters’ ears were spot on.

The Depth of the Japanese Scene

There is nothing quite like the thrill of explaining the band name “My Dead Girlfriend” (“Shinda Boku no Kanojo”) to someone hearing it for the first time. And the observation—already in 2018—that shoegaze textures were filtering into Japanese idol pop anticipated one of the most distinctive underground crossovers of the years that followed.

Deep Cuts: Where the Thread Really Takes Off

Poster >>24 is a true denizen of the deep end—not many people rattle off Astrobrite and Fleeting Joys “just off the top of my head.” At the same time, >>27’s confession (“nothing besides MBV really clicks for me”) is a very real reaction in this genre, which is exactly why choosing the right second album after Loveless matters so much.

Editor’s Notes: Quick Signposts for the Bands Named Above

• Lush — 4AD stalwarts built around twin female vocals; start with Spooky (1992).
• Chapterhouse — Central figures of the original UK “Scene That Celebrates Itself”; Whirlpool (1991) was ahead of its time in fusing shoegaze guitar swirl with dance beats.
• Drop Nineteens — Boston legends famous for Delaware (1992), who returned in 2023 with their first new album in thirty years.
• Swervedriver — The high-octane drivers of the original UK wave; if you want muscular propulsion over dreaminess, pick them ahead of Ride.
• Cigarettes After Sex — The modern doorway on the slow, nocturnal dream-pop side; strictly for after midnight.
• Luminous Orange — The Yokohama-born project of Rie Takeuchi, one of the most important figures in Japanese shoegaze.
• Sugar Plant — Quiet treasures of 1990s Tokyo indie/dream pop, now undergoing a major international reassessment.
• My Dead Girlfriend (Shinda Boku no Kanojo) — A band that makes you do a double take at the name and then silences the room with sheer wall-of-sound conviction.
• 65daysofstatic — Post-rock, as the thread rightly points out, though the visceral thrill of their guitar walls sits right next door.

Conclusion: Checking the Answers Seven Years Later

What makes reading a 2018 thread in 2026 so rewarding is checking how the predictions aged. Cigarettes After Sex became global headliners, Drop Nineteens actually reunited and released new music, and shoegaze has become a shared musical language for Gen Z listeners worldwide. The recommendations in this thread did not expire after seven years—they aged like wine. Once you finish the five core albums in our Introduction to Shoegaze, work your way through the names listed here one by one.

Further reading: Introduction to Shoegaze / DIGEST 001: Essential Western Albums / DIGEST 002: Classic Japanese Rock Albums

Source: “Recommend me some good shoegaze bands, Clemens” (Open 2channel, Live Jupiter board, March 12, 2018; original thread from 2018 is no longer archived online; posts are CC0 / public domain).

Editor’s Postscript: Shoegaze as an Unending Search

From 2018, when this thread was posted, right up to the present day, shoegaze has gone through wave after wave of revival while steadily widening its reach. Beyond the reassessment of pioneers like My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive, each new generation of independent bands keeps updating the equation of “abrasive noise + aching melody” in its own voice.

The dry, slightly sideways, yet deeply passionate tone of Japanese message-board music threads turns out to be a natural match for an introspective, detail-obsessed genre like shoegaze. Use the bands named here—Ride, Chapterhouse, Swervedriver, Lush, and their Japanese peers—as doorways to find your own personal answer inside the wall of sound.

Sorting the Thread’s Bands by How They Build Their Sound

Even though every band in this thread gets grouped under the same “wall of sound” label, they build that wall in very different ways. My Bloody Valentine strum chords while holding the tremolo arm in motion, locking a constantly wavering pitch directly onto tape. Ride construct their wall out of the chime of a twelve-string guitar and a driving rhythm section, while Slowdive treat the long decay of reverb and delay pedals as if the echo itself were the lead melody. They share a shelf name, but what your ear follows is completely different.

That difference maps directly onto where you should start. If you want to be overwhelmed by the sheer density of distortion and pitch drift, go to My Bloody Valentine; if you want to follow clear vocal harmonies and propulsion, go to Ride; if you want to listen to the time it takes for a sound to vanish into space, go to Slowdive. The way this thread begins by checking off the foundational names makes complete sense as a practical order for feeling those differences firsthand.

We leave encyclopedia-style histories to our main genre guides. What is worth preserving here is the concrete gathering of listeners seven years ago pointing at specific records and saying “listen to this sound”—advice that has not aged a day.