San Francisco trio Midrift are one of alternative music’s fastest-rising names. Arriving at a time where shoegaze is at its commercial peak – and where almost anything drenched in reverb and emotional ambiguity gets labelled as such – ‘Silhouette’ finds Midrift stepping directly into that conversation. But as the album buckles beneath the weight of its influences, it’s sometimes difficult to tell exactly what the band themselves are trying to say.
The group have already amassed millions of streams through viral singles like ‘Twin Flames’ and ‘Unrequited’, building momentum through support slots with Fleshwater and Angel Du$t, and even landed on the NME 100 earlier this year. What makes their rise more striking is their age. Vocalist and guitarist Gus Mehrkam and brothers Manoa (bass) and Kai Neukermans (drums) are still barely out of high school, yet already carry themselves with an undeniable maturity. Their grisly sound leans fully into that tension; teenage angst pulses through Midrift’s blend of emo, shoegaze and post-hardcore like they’re dragging themselves through decades of bruised relationships and emotional fallout.
The album’s strongest moments come on ‘Over Anything’ and ‘Safe And Sound’. The former balances atmospheric build-ups with explosive release and genuine grit, while ‘Safe And Sound’ pairs intricate Midwest emo-style guitars with painfully earnest lines like, “if anything is real / then tell me how to feel”. Together, they feel like the clearest examples of Midrift escaping imitation and fully carving out their own style. Elsewhere, ‘Not Far Gone’ captures teenage frustration through buoyant riffs and a fragmented vocal sample that make the track feel deeply personal. Closing track ‘If You Have To Go’ is genuinely devastating, ending the record in a blur of exhausted, yelled vocals and dragging instrumentation.
There are clear echoes of Basement in Midrift’s chugging low-end and dense guitar work, while their anxious vocal outbursts feel indebted to Title Fight’s sound. At times, the band sound like they’ve absorbed an archive of 2010s alternative music and repackaged it for the TikTok era. The challenge now, though, is if they can carve out an identity distinct enough to escape the shadow of those influences.
Still, even if ‘Silhouette’ slips into a predictable rhythm of mid-tempo chugs and explosive payoffs, the album feels significant. Midrift aren’t reinventing shoegaze so much as pushing it to the forefront of Gen Z listening habits. For a band this young, the album’s emotional immediacy already places them far ahead of many of their peers, and for that they deserve their flowers.
