I’ll cop to being bored with the majority of contemporary shoegaze and slowcore. In a decade kicked off and arguably defined by the COVID-19 pandemic, something about sullen, shrouded, hook-averse strains of guitar rock captured the attention of a generation coming of age indoors and online. The 2020s shoegaze resurgence isn’t without its notably innovative exceptions, but, for the most part, it’s felt like a sonic redux of a subculture’s subculture that’s retroactively gotten its due. The course correction was necessary: shoegaze pioneers like my bloody valentine, Slowdive, Cocteau Twins, the Jesus and Mary Chain, and Lush were respected in their time, but the past decade in indie rock has only revealed the breadth (but not necessarily depth) of their influence.
This personal aversion might explain why the latest record from Baltimore indie rockers Teen Suicide—a band I’ve enjoyed in the past—has been a bit of a test of my own compartmentalization. Can I separate their current output from their successors who have now become their peers? Is the tedium of their music in 2026 really just a tedium that’s soured me on the genres they’re working in? Am I judging this band unfairly for not catching up to their own influences, or am I judging the current shoegaze resurgence at-large for being overwhelmingly derivative?
Teen Suicide bear the burden of being early to the shoegaze renaissance. Early adopters of Bandcamp as a music streaming platform and the lo-fi aesthetics associated with it, Sam and Kitty Ray made sparse, depressive, dreamy guitar rock with irreverent lyrics and cramped, hazy production. In 2017, Teen Suicide changed their band name to American Pleasure Club. In 2022, they changed it back. Since then, pedalboards have gotten bigger, guitars have gotten fuzzier, vocals have gotten raspier or more hushed or both, lyrics have gotten more referential and emotionally direct. Of course, not all of this can be traced back to the Rays, but it’s hard not to see their impact, as tendrils of their influence have snaked around indie rock, bedroom pop, cloud rap, and beyond, making all the internet a smoke-filled bedroom. Kitty’s dusky vocal style in particular has had an impressively wide trickle-up influence into the pop world (When I heard Doja Cat’s “Agora Hills” for the first time, I could’ve sworn she’d been listening to the Pom Poms’ self-titled).
The band’s new album—the first since their name un-change in 2022 and the accompanying release of honeybee table at the butterfly feast—takes its title from a Marcel Duchamp portrait of a similar name. Nude descending staircase headless is a great album title, and an accurate one for eerie music that spends most of its time wandering aimlessly towards something it can’t quite define, often to its credit. Almost two decades into their tenure as a band, Teen Suicide are still adept at creating definition through opposition or absence—as is the basic lyrical premise of “Suffering (Mike’s Way).” Each line starts with “it’s not,” making for a tappy power-emo list song (“not a lucrative career / mostly suffering down here / not the drinks, not the smoke / not a very funny joke”) and an uptempo energy injection in a record that tends to drag itself out, to mixed results.
But most of Nude descending lacks the lyrical specificity that made earlier Teen Suicide records more memorable, and the glints of it on tracks like “Everything in my life is perfect” don’t hit like they used to. Beyond “Everything in my life is perfect” feeling far longer than its five-minute runtime, Sam’s whining about getting head outside a Denny’s when Jun Lin’s murderer got arrested feels like a cheap shot of shock value that doesn’t actually convey much. He sings over a draggy, sedated progression about “a new folk hero for the nihilists,” but I don’t think they need one. Most of the record feels similarly lost, often in vague, washed out arrangements that lean on distortion to fill in the blanks.
Granted, it sometimes works. Opener “Anhedonia” is a piece of agonizingly drawn-out slowcore that reaches a fever pitch in the outro, during which Sam Ray’s falsetto melds with a distorted riff. The heavy, atmospheric crush of “Living death” hits like harsh sunlight through parted blackout curtains, cymbals crashing and melding with Teen Suicide’s gossamer vocal harmonies. But these moments of distinction are too few and far between to really buoy this record. While listening, I frequently had trouble identifying when one song ended and another began. More punk-leaning songs like “Spiders,” “Candy / Squeeze,” and “Keeping Her Keys” offer refuge from the tedium—they’re raw and abrasive and feature some impassioned screams from Kitty. It’s a vocal mode that I’d love to hear her in more often. I wish more of Nude descending matched the energy of tracks like these, or like “Idiot,” which stands out for its crunchy stoner rock riffs, sharp contrast, and gang vocals shared by Kitty and Sam. When the songslows down midway through and the two intone a refrain of “Even though a part of me has died, I still wanna try” before its jagged breakdown, for a moment, there’s something of promise to grab onto. [Run for Cover]
Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Alternative, ANTICS, Marvin, Swim Into The Sound and her “mostly about music” newsletter, Our Band Could Be Your Wife.
