Loveless

Kevin Shields knew exactly what he wanted Loveless to sound like from the beginning of 1989. What he did not have was money, a stable place to live, or an engineer willing to execute his vision without arguing. He was effectively homeless, living in a squat that the band eventually got kicked out of. The tapes were confiscated by studios for non-payment multiple times. Over the course of two and a half years, the album passed through nineteen different studios and more than a dozen engineers, almost all of whom Shields later said stifled his process. Recording the drums for one song happened in September 1989. The guitar was done in December. The bass in April 1990. Nothing for a year. Then recording resumed.

What Shields was after was a sound where guitars, played through a tremolo bar pressed to detune the strings, merged into a continuous physical presence rather than a set of notes. He recorded vocal tracks and stacked nearly twelve of them on top of each other, no reverb, so that Bilinda Butcher's voice became a texture rather than a focal point. The production cost was reported to have reached £250,000, nearly bankrupting Creation Records. Label founder Alan McGee has said the album almost ended the label entirely.

When Loveless came out in November 1991, Shields feared it would be dismissed. It was not. The album created shoegaze as a recognized genre, and its influence runs through every band that has used noise as a form of intimacy since. The opening drum crash of "Only Shallow" is one of the most arresting first seconds in recorded music. What follows it is fifty minutes of something that sounds simultaneously like hearing and being heard from very far away. There is nothing else that sounds like this.