My Bloody Valentine

Loveless (1991)

Kevin Shields spent approximately £250,000 to achieve a guitar sound that had never previously existed — the 'glide guitar' technique, using the tremolo arm to detune and retune mid-strum while heavy reverb smoothed the pitch variation into a blur. 'Only Shallow' opens with a drum attack that suggests a more aggressive record before the guitars swell into that characteristic warmth; 'Sometimes' is so gossamer that notes dissolve before they fully arrive. The record remains the most technically radical statement in guitar music made since Jimi Hendrix.

Sleeve notes

My Bloody Valentine

Loveless · 1991

Kevin Shields spent approximately £250,000 making Loveless (1991) and nearly bankrupted Creation Records in the process. The budget was not wasted. Loveless remains the most fully realized statement in shoegaze — a record where the guitars are not so much distorted as liquefied, where the songs underneath the processing are immaculate pop songs that you can just barely hear, where Bilinda Butcher's and Shields's vocals float inside the music rather than sitting above it. It sounds like it was engineered by someone who wanted to make a record you could feel in your body before your ears processed it.

The route to Loveless was Isn't Anything (1988), which had done something no one had done before — used the tremolo arm not as a flourish but as a texture-making device, creating waves in the guitar sound that were controlled to the point of being compositional. Shields's technique involves a specific application of the whammy bar while the note is sustaining that produces an inhuman shimmer. It's been imitated for three decades and not replicated. The twenty-two-year gap between Loveless and m b v (2013) seemed to prove the point: there was nowhere further to take it.