Airiel

Airiel

Since 1996 · United States

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Winks & Kisses (2004)

Winks & Kisses collects four EPs' worth of layered guitar noise and half-buried melody, closing with "In Your Room," the track that gives the whole compilation its clearest pop moment. Guitars stack into a dense wall that still leaves room for a genuine vocal hook to surface, a balance the record maintains more consistently than most American shoegaze of its era managed. The whole collection favours mood and texture over individual songs standing apart from each other. It's the fullest document of a band that kept the genre's original blueprint alive well past when anyone was paying attention.

Sleeve notes

Winks & Kisses · 2004

Airiel formed around Chicago in the mid-1990s under guitarist and songwriter Jeremy Wrenn, arriving well after shoegaze's original UK wave had already crested and finding almost no equivalent scene of its own in the United States. The band built a dense, effects-drenched sound directly out of My Bloody Valentine, Ride and the Cocteau Twins, treating those influences less as a reference point than as a genuine inheritance to keep extending.

Winks & Kisses gathers the four EPs the band released between 2003 and 2004, its closing section named for the Principality of Sealand, whose micronational government later made the band honorary lords in recognition of the reference. A long-rumoured concert on the Sealand platform itself was announced and never happened. Airiel kept working in fits and starts across the following two decades, sustained more by a small, devoted following than by any wider recognition of the genre they'd stayed loyal to.