“Your face” was the first song Natalie Lu had ever made, and it happened nearly instantly. One night, she sang over a fuzzy rock instrumental she nicked from the producer grayskies on YouTube; the next day, it went viral. Within months, she vaulted from computer science student to a major label star.
As Wisp, Lu is a prominent case study for a new generation of shoegaze artists who’ve honed their technique not in basements with friends, but on a laptop and DAW. Zoomers have crowned her a latter-day shoegaze princess, the wunderkind presiding over the genre’s recent boomlet. It’s a resurgence that’s spawned festivals, like Slide Away, and shocked 1990s pioneers out of retirement—including Slowdive, with whom Wisp toured in 2024. The new generation has unleashed plenty of freaky innovations on the style but also produced a heap of slop-gaze: indistinguishable foghorns of fuzz and reverb-stained singing destined to soundtrack aggressively stylized summer-vacation reels.
Wisp’s debut, If Not Winter, tries to sculpt a world out of her ASMR-meets-arena-rock odysseys. A press release describes the album like a medieval fantasy quest, full of “holy grails from villages,” a triumph of “experimental cartography.” Our trip to these faraway lands begins by cresting the grunge-gaze volcanoes of “Sword” and “Breathe onto me,” before daylight fades to atmospheric dusk on “After dark” and “Guide light.” Then everything resets: “Latvia” stands in a town square as a bell tower chimes. The title track drops us in a patch of grass with folksy acoustic strums. Soon the reverb fog returns and we’re soaring through a wind tunnel of metallic hard rock and billowing shoegaze. By the end of this musical hero’s journey, Wisp seems to realize that the pain she’s endured was worth it: “Told myself I wouldn’t run back/But it’s so different when you’re all I need.”
If Not Winter is deliciously distorted and pleasing on the surface; at peak moments, like the gale-force tempest of “Breathe onto me,” the music feels electrifying. But prolonged listening reveals how insubstantial and third-hand it all is. Lu’s vocal delivery hovers between a coo and a stage whisper, though it rarely delivers the sort of blissful incoherence that shoegaze and dream pop are known for. The softness makes sense on a raw acoustic ballad like “All i need,” but it feels more like rote theatrics on “Black swan,” where the raging noise practically begs her to snap out of her feathery stupor. She’s previously said she wants her music to sound like she’s underwater, but mostly it sounds like she’s just floating somewhere.
Behind the stonewalling exteriors of great shoegaze albums lie big feelings and emo vulnerability, but this aspect of If Not Winter often feels abstract and impersonal. The protagonist of a voice memo dreams of meeting a lover at a coffee shop; the rest is cheesy love poetry (“Holding your heart/My skin rips apart/Weren’t we once art?”), confusing rhymes (“Gasoline near my feet/Your tears burn through my heartbeat”), and over-the-top edginess (“Cut the light that shines in me/So my darkness is all I see”). The blandness of the vocals means that none of these lines prickle with gravitas or feeling.
Wisp’s approach to older shoegaze resembles PinkPantheress’ take on UK garage—rewiring it for the 2020s and layering in hushed bedroom-pop vox—but with a fraction of the sound-hopping curiosity and moxie that Pink brings to the party. Sadly, some of If Not Winter’s most hypnotic passages are also its most derivative. The witchy synths flooding over highlight “Guide light” feel cribbed from Elusin’s “Highway,” another surprise TikTok smash from an act with an enchanted-forest aesthetic. The crystalline static that opens “Mesmerized” smacks of My Bloody Valentine’s wonky feedback sampling, but Philly shoegazers Full Body 2 do that second-hand trick better on “keygen memory.” Cool ideas flash up here and there—“Get back to me” could be a microwaved Cocteau Twins instrumental; the barely audible susurrations on “Save me now” and fluttering hook on “Breathe onto me” hit perfectly—but they fizzle out quick.
The core concept of Wisp’s music—blanket-soft purrs draped over the gnarliest, most calamitous riffs—could be intoxicating if executed with more nerve and weirdness. The torrential “Black swan” just makes me want to listen to quannnic’s “life imitates life,” whose anesthetized meltdown actually sounds frayed, unpredictable, and on the brink of collapse. Wisp’s music simulates the thrill of reckless, no-holds-barred rock without actually fucking with the formula.
