Greg Ackell stood in the hallway at Downtown Recorders, cradling his band’s debut single, preparing to truck his producer. Paul DeGooyer had spent the day giving Drop Nineteens’ “Winona” the abrupt volume shifts that alt-rock radio in 1992 couldn’t get enough of. While DeGooyer mixed, Ackell stewed silently at the console. In an act of insubordinate whimsy, DeGooyer’s assistant engineer had secretly made his own “Winona” mix. He hard-panned two Ackell vocal takes, letting them paddle against the band’s steady current of shoegaze. The result traded drama for a wire-crackle warmth; Ackell credits it with reorienting how the band approached recording.

After DeGooyer finished, Ackell snapped up the “Winona” two-inch tape and headed for the studio exit. Wise to the singer’s scheme, though, the producer got to the door first. What happened between their standoff and Ackell’s escape is lost to time. But Drop Nineteens got the tape to the assistant, paying him out of their own pockets to finish the mix, which made it on the band’s debut, Delaware. In the end, all DeGooyer could do was holler across the parking lot as Ackell sprinted to his car. “You’re a real piece of work, Greg!” the singer remembers him yelling. “You’re not the Rolling Stones!”

But at that point in their career, the ’Teens surely felt as untouchable as the Glimmer Twins. They were five loosely connected college kids with a strong work ethic and capricious instincts. Several of them had attended expensive New England prep schools: Ackell and drummer Chris Roof played in the same band at Northfield Mount Hermon, pursuing shared musical passions (Echo and the Bunnymen, R.E.M., the Velvets) in a kind of pressurized bubble. The experience would serve them well as they navigated a similar bubble: the Boston indie rock scene. Drop Nineteens didn’t round into shape playing gigs or auditioning for local labels. They just did their studies, and in their downtime recorded tapes that whipped the UK music mags into a froth.

1991 presents the bulk of those tapes, remixed and remastered for the first time. The set has been billed as a “lost LP,” but these songs (circulated online as Mayfield) were drawn from demos, recorded with slightly different band configurations. Together, they established Drop Nineteens’ reputation as leading lights of U.S. shoegaze. “The American Slowdive!” Melody Maker crowed in their July 1991 review of the band’s first demo EP, hailing the “sonorous ambient music-for-cathedrals-on-fire delights within.” The mag awarded the demo—which they called “Mayfield,” after the opening track—their Single of the Week: a coup for an unsigned band.

The EP’s homemade quality (Roof recorded the drums at his parents’ house, then tracked everyone else in his dorm closet) added to its allure. “Mayfield” barrels out of the gate like a runaway Arctic train—the 2025 mix adds propulsion by removing a flanged drop-out section. As vocalist Paula Kelley winds black ribbons around Ackell’s melancholy topline, sheets of guitar clip overhead: proto-blackgaze. The two other EP tracks included here are dreamier, but no less impressive. On “Kissing the Sea,” Kelley stretches out over shimmering guitar abstractions before Ackell tags in with the rhythm section. Even though the imagery is surface-level shoegaze (dreams, water, pillows, hiding), Roof and bassist Steve Zimmerman keep things bobbing, like “Nightswimming” with a steady dogpaddle. “Snowbird” repeats the play, but grandly: Zimmerman and Roof again pop up partway to relieve Kelley, only now they march everyone confidently into a squall.

Like everything else in Drop Nineteens’ fledgling existence, hooking the UK press was a combination of ambition and happenstance. Ackell’s college girlfriend was studying in England, so he flew to see her on spring break, his luggage stuffed with tapes. He handed some out to cool-looking kids at shows, posting others to the London labels he knew from his record collection: Creation, Fiction, 4AD. It was 4AD who passed the EP to Melody Maker, and 4AD who called Ackell after he returned to Boston. At that point, Drop Nineteens still hadn’t played live.

They also weren’t officially a band. Kelley was the only one with prior experience in Boston’s punk and DIY scene; she sang on the demos but treated Drop Nineteens as a side project. After the critical success of “Mayfield,” Ackell decided two things. First, he apparently needed to listen to Slowdive. Second, the ’Teens should record more tunes. The contract offers they’d fielded hinged on releasing their existing demos, but the band held out for a proper album. So they fired up the Tascam, this time without Kelley, who was busy touring with local heavyweights Crab Daddy. Hannah Yampolsky took her place on the Summer Session EP.

Summer Session was quickly written but languidly played. Having demonstrated a sense of dynamics on their first demos, the ’Teens worked on maintaining moods at altitude—and, perhaps, demonstrating what they had learned from their newfound peers. On the ice-tipped “Daymom” and “Song for J.J.,” Yampolsky and Ackell cruise in woozy sync. “Back in Our Old Bed” attempts a budget version of MBV-style senserush: Ackell is backmasked for entire verses, while Roof impatiently mashes his kickdrum, waiting for a chance to unleash hell. He gets one at the end, thumping his kit while lead guitarist Moto Yasue calls down a blizzard. “Soapland” plays in the wintry wreckage, as Yampolsky—cycling through minor-key awe and dream-pop bliss—rides the most austere Bo Diddley beat imaginable.

With a decent-sized repertoire and some gigs under their belt, Drop Nineteens were ready to entertain new offers. Paula Kelley rejoined the group as a full member and the reunited five-piece embarked on a mini-tour opening for English shoegazers Chapterhouse, followed by a heavily anticipated showcase at CMJ ’91. The winning bid belonged to Caroline Records. The choice of an American label (albeit a Virgin subsidiary) was both practical and symbolic: Caroline offered the budget and creative freedom to write an LP’s worth of new material, which the ’Teens would use to make an Irish exit from The Scene That Celebrates Itself. “After the way that that second demo came together so fast,” Steve Zimmerman recalled, “We had a lot of confidence that, sure, we can write an album!”

That confidence, as much as anything, holds Delaware together. In a sense, their debut is more of a demonstration disc than 1991: a choice sampler of underground sounds. From song to song, it’s hard to tell where the ’Teens will land next. The sequencing is practically stochastic. “Winona” could be the platonic ideal of an alt-rock Track 2: juddering and tender, a shot of simple syrup to balance the sour, muddled musings of the title track. Instead, “Delaware” is followed by “Ease It Halen,” a piss-take ballad constructed from Van Halen song and album titles, intoned by Ackell like a sacred formulary. Not a hint of Diamond Dave, not a shred of Eddie: just a few sheets of guitar, hung to dry. It’s admirably perverse, and it predates Sonic Youth’s Heart homage by a month.

And though their noise-rock forebears beat them to a Madonna cover by a few years, Drop Nineteens found a new angle on theirs. Ciccone Youth imagined a Madonna who never left the downtown art-rock scene, but Drop Nineteens conjured a future where she would front Deftones. Their take on “Angel” smears her synth pizzicatos into a louche arpeggiation; the shoegaze guitars pool on the floor, like so much stage fog for Yasue to part.

For American shoegazers, 1992 hummed with the reverberations of Loveless. It was a sort of mass tinnitus event: Suddenly, some bands could hear new noises where none had existed. Medicine’s Shot Forth Self Living and Swirlies’ What to Do About Them spliced in noise and indie rock with a researcher’s rigor. On Delaware, Drop Nineteens were smashing atoms for the hell of it. The congested crackle of “Reberrymemberer” is threaded with lacerating emocore breakdowns; the breakneck closing track “(Plus Fish Dream)” sounds like Daydream Nation played at 78 rpm.

At the other extreme lies “Kick the Tragedy.” Nowhere else in their catalog do the ’Teens sound this locked in: burrowing into a baggy, strummy vamp for five-plus minutes, reveling in the sense of interplay honed across all those dorm-room demos. The song culminates in a spoken-word passage from Kelley that bristles with the confusion and curiosity of young adulthood: “I think it was the first time I realized that I could change the world/Or at least change the way me and my sister hit the clock on every tick just to see what happened….” It’s a stunning entry into the lineage of dream-pop poesy, one that includes Galaxie 500’s “Fourth of July,” R.E.M.’s “Belong,” and Life Without Buildings’ “The Leanover.”

“It’s even funny when you stop to realize I’m just 19/And how serious can anything be anyway?” Kelley shrugs at the end of “Kick the Tragedy.” For all their determined ambition, Drop Nineteens were just kids. (They were still enrolled in college while recording Delaware.) Nowhere is their youth more evident than on the album’s two ballads. Stripped of pedals, down to an acoustic guitar and a mic, Ackell and Kelley revert to precocious prep schoolers. “A waterscape religion can change a frown/Into a happy thing,” intone the pair on “My Aquarium.” The listless “Baby Wonder’s Gone” suggests someone having an existential crisis right before AP Bio: “There’s nothing left but the idea of a friend/Meet you at 9 a.m.”

The release of Delaware started the countdown on Drop Nineteens’ charmed existence. Kelley and Roof quit after a European tour; Yasue left some months later. Ackell and Zimmerman constructed a new Drop Nineteens lineup to record a second album, this time completely free of shoegaze. It was a typically strong-willed play, and it backfired: 1993’s National Coma tanked, Zimmerman left the band, and after trying to assemble a third lineup, Ackell pulled the plug. Thirty years later, most of the original Drop Nineteens lineup reunited for Hard Light, a lovely and humane comeback that dipped back into dream-pop while politely declining to re-enact the band’s salad days. The originals were always enough. As shoegaze morphed from a buzzy London scene to just another timbral choice for bedroom rockers, Delaware’s ambitious highs cemented its reputation as a foundational album, a real piece of work.