Every My Bloody Valentine studio album ranked
There’s one band that both launched and defined the genre known as shoegaze, blasting the UK charts with a wall of feedback, noise, and lethargic, molten indie. Peaking just as grunge pulled the alternative world’s attention to Seattle—and before Britpop was waiting in the wings with its 1960s nostalgia—My Bloody Valentine was, for a moment, one of the UK music scene’s essential acts. Up there with The Stone Roses and The Jesus and Mary Chain, they spearheaded a whole new definition of psychedelic music—one that bands like Ride, Slowdive, and Curve furiously jotted notes from.
My Bloody Valentine had been slogging it for years before their fruitful signing with Creation Records. Floating around in several Dublin post-punk bands since the late 1970s, frontman Kevin Shields and drummer Colm Ó Cíosóig founded the roots of the band a few years later and jumped between The Netherlands and West Berlin, cutting a string of EPs that went nowhere. Seeking fortune in London, the pair recruited bassist Debbie Googe and guitarist and co-vocalist Bilinda Butcher, cementing the classic line-up turning heads with their supporting Biff Bang Pow! in 1988, featuring one Alan McGee as a singer. Offering to put out a single, My Bloody Valentine cut the You Made Me Realise EP and finally began garnering critical attention.
For a brief but explosive few years, My Bloody Valentine’s unique craft of indie tenderness wrapped in an unholy noise-pop racket saw them effortlessly, and perhaps unwittingly, already draped in an intriguing mythos by the time of their first LP. Following their much-anticipated sophomore effort, rumours of production costs spiralling over £250,000 and causing Creation financial ruin saw them given the boot, wandering into another disaster with Island Records’s similarly priced advance on a home studio plagued with technical issues and alongside Shields’ bout of writer’s block.
Following the eventual disintegration of the band by the late 1990s, Shields had reportedly recorded as much as 60 hours of material, long fuelling hopes of a new album. Jump to 2007, and My Bloody Valentine was back, rejuvenated, and embarking on a world tour. Following the EP’s 1988–1991 compilation, brand new material was dropped with the alluring promise of even more, but in true Shields fashion, such promises were placed on indefinite hold. While the music awaits their fabled next album, let’s rank their confounding and brilliant run of studio albums.
Every My Bloody Valentine studio album ranked:
3. m b v (2013)
With characteristically little fanfare, Shields announced the imminent release of their long-awaited third album during a show at Electric Brixton, m b v‘s independent digital release a few days later in February 2013, crashing their website due to the intense demand. Mostly assembled from some of the legendary hours of material accrued since the late 1990s, the reformed My Bloody Valentine offered fans an authentic portal to where they left off, their trademark swirl of dissonant dream pop that’s both expressionistic and impressionistic and still crackling with their old magic.
There are no significant departures in sound, but it didn’t matter when the textural waves were so enchanting, cuts like ‘Only Tomorrow’ gliding with effortless beauty and one of their finest guitar riffs buried beneath the aural Rorschach. The smatterings of drum and bass and jungle loops on ‘Wonder 2’ feel completely at home, authentically ensconced in their indie layers without ever feeling like foreign sonic elements, and ‘Is This And Yes’ radiant keys entering new and thrillingly evocative dimensions. Another intriguing step forward yet the same old Valentine, m b v is a record grounded in a reassuring familiarity while still exploring new territory.
2. Isn’t Anything (1988)
The culmination of their growing embrace of widescreen lo-fi density, 1988’s Isn’t Anything arrived with effortless confidence in their sonic affront of seductive abrasion. Recorded in two weeks in Foel Studio tucked away in the Welsh market town of Llanfair Caereinion, the intense sessions and little more than two hours of sleep a night spike the album with a fraught energy of urgent awoken energy, a burst of sudden and ephemeral activity like an indie chemical reaction that imbues an undercurrent of wired alertness beneath the listless impression.
The blistering din had yet to reach its apex, the songs’ garage structures and lyrical clarity unclouded by the later shoegaze smog, but it’s still a raucous listen. Lead single ‘Feed Me With Your Kiss’ shares an energetic proximity to Bug era Dinosaur Jr, and opener ‘Soft as Snow (But Warm Inside)’ is an apt title for the fundamental character of the record: disquiet and friction flush with red-blooded passion. A glorious summary of their creative journey to that point and standing as one of the great debuts.
1. Loveless (1991)
The mythology that draped My Bloody Valentine began to truly materialise around the drop of their sophomore effort. In a marked shift of productivity since the steady unleash of EPs, the drama of spiralling recording costs and 19 studios, Creation employees’ hair turning white over from stress, and the cranking up of their live sets’ volume that gave labelmates The Jesus and Mary Chain’s early shows a run for their money in volume wars, you’d better hope the album at the centre of such anguish and dramatic lore was worth it.
Thankfully, yes. Reflecting the stirring sensuality and smothering heat of its blushing front cover, 1991’s Loveless stands as the last word in shoegaze—the scene’s definitive statement. The confounding aural duality of soothing cacophony leaps from the speakers the moment album opener ‘Only Shallow’ emits its blistering fuzz of gargantuan slack, while later cuts like ‘When You Sleep’ and ‘I Only Said’ reach soaring heights of pop bliss amid the shifting edifice of distortion. An exquisite sculpt of clamour—both affecting and biting—no one has made noise sound so enchanting before or since.
