Soon after My Bloody Valentine skulked into the Wembley Arena spotlights, the initial roar of some 12,000 fans abated. Wearing a brimmed black hat, something about him suggesting a past life in haberdashery, Kevin Shields raised his right hand in a meek wave, surveying what might have been the biggest crowd in history to convene for a shoegaze gig. When his hand returned to his guitar, there was a moment of ordinary anticipation, ordinary hush. Then, in a haze of Loveless fuchsia, Shields flicked a switch, and we violently rematerialized in another room altogether.
The opening jolt of “I Only Said,” loud enough in its own right to upset the general order of things, creates a sort of metaphysical rupture. Every weapon in the MBV arsenal swarms every piece of you from every direction at once, a harmonic big bang. Guitars sweep through your being, so loud they drown out even Deborah Googe’s bass, now a tool of pure palpitation. It is as if your psyche splits in two—one happily existing outside the sound, the other knowing nothing but. Those of us without earplugs stupidly massaged our jaws, heads tilted, eyelids quivering, listening to overtones through our teeth.
Bombing straight into “When You Sleep,” Shields paddled the tremolo arm like a mad scientist convinced he has finally made the contraption that will turn man into vapor. The busy frequency spectrum reconfigured the song’s DNA. There are melodies and resonances buried in Loveless that I adore, truly adore, while faintly suspecting they might be imaginary, figments of harmonic suggestion. Live, the band’s cataclysmic volume precludes close observation, and melodic detail succumbs to feedback like dust caught in an exploding star’s stratosphere.
After a brief burst of “New You,” Shields twirled a finger to stand down drummer Colm Ó Cíosóig. Fans cheered in encouragement. Others held their breath. God, what if he wants it louder. The beat resumed, the volume its usual excoriating self, Shields’ guitar reprogrammed to give a hint of body-moving swing. As Googe and Ó Cíosóig’s rhythm section lurched to and fro in the engine room, singer-guitarist Bilinda Butcher, like a tree unperturbed by a blizzard, softly swayed in her black sequin dress.
Despite some head-bobbing, tonight’s attendees are devoted practitioners of stagegaze. This is more a matter of shellshock than muted enthusiasm. Pre-show chatter suggested a mood of boisterous tension. A smattering of fans from the shoegaze revivalist generation pottered about in baggy rags or fresh faux-vintage tees. Others were long enough in the tooth to be trading the secondhand tales of burst eardrums and that particular Valentine-tinnitus that heads have collected like backpack patches since the band’s miracle years.
After the stupefying opening suite, Butcher launched a passage of earlier songs that chart the Dublin-born band’s rise, smelting the thrash-pop whorls of Dinosaur Jr. and Hüsker Dü into celestial soup. The section is a relative breather, less a furnace of mercilessly incapacitating noise than the regular, spine-juddering hullabaloo you might expect if someone told you a rock gig was likely to be too loud. There is “Cigarette in Your Bed,” from You Made Me Realise, the 1988 EP that lifted them from Jesus and Mary Chain acolytes to prophets of gauzy glossolalia; “You Never Should,” from debut Isn’t Anything, an album that inspired so many copycats they unionized and formed a genre; and “Honey Power,” from Tremolo, the EP that lay the final stepping stone before the fathomless plunge into Loveless.
That laboriously perfected album—held responsible for Creation Records’ bankruptcy, as well as at least one label staffer’s nervous breakdown—remains a marvel of art and science. What was amazing was not that a quixotic millionaire like Creation boss Alan McGee could be persuaded to invest staggering resources in an ambitious young band’s dream. It was amazing that an album that cost so much and took so long could be so good.
The last thing you want to give someone who takes a long time to make art is a reputation as a legendary perfectionist. Post-Loveless, the world would hold Shields to the same punishing standards to which he held himself. Dropped by Creation in the early ’90s, MBV signed to Island, built a studio with a faulty mixing desk, and took a year to replace it, whereupon Shields had a meltdown. As Britpop boomed, he was smoking a lot of weed and listening to jungle on pirate radio; unaccountably, he complained, none of the agonizingly complex melodies meandering through his head were turning into songs. Still, he seemed to revel in alluding to new music that was always just around the corner.
The decades that passed without a follow-up earned the band plenty of lore and, for breaching their Island contract, at least one lawsuit. The masterpiece they finally released—in 2013, on a janky website that instantly crashed—is likely the greatest rock album ever to underwhelm nearly everyone who heard it. Part of the thrill of seeing them live in 2025 is hearing m b v’s seamless integration alongside the acknowledged classics.
“Only Tomorrow” is a case in point, even if they struggle to make it. “It’s the age thing, you know?” Shields, 62, sheepishly joked after two false starts. “It’s like, wuh, what?!” Wobbles aside, he seemed in the zone for the m b v highlight—tremolo gliding in and out of the abyss, soloing incendiary, a rare instance of rock triumphalism—until the rest of the band ended on a hard stop that a daydreamy Shields overshot. He riffed a quick mea culpa with an impromptu blast of “Blitzkrieg Bop,” before “Only Shallow” and “To Here Knows When” presented opposing pillars of the My Bloody Valentine experience. The former slingshots between harmony and hysteria; the latter petrifies its beauty under a haze of ashy gray powder. Both are equally extreme, made indelible by Butcher’s suffering sighs.
More than an hour in, the ecstatic drum loop of “Soon” sparked the night’s first signs of pandemonium. We remained at emergency volume, every frequency a panic alarm, Butcher and Shields still groaning through the noise like something tremendous about to collapse. Yet the reception was precisely as if Happy Mondays had made a surprise appearance—people jabbing the air, hips swinging with merry abandon, wearing the sort of grins usually observed under bucket hats.
After a delirious “Wonder 2” and noise-pop antidote “Feed Me With Your Kiss,” a bright white lighting rig came aglow and the band silently appraised the crowd. Shields eventually squeaked out a giddy “hello.” At the previous night’s show, in Manchester, he gave a speech in support of Palestine, but tonight he is more laconic, happy to convert the arena into a sensory obliteration tank. And so came “You Made Me Realise”: a battery of naive melody that inevitably builds—and here is a promise you can count on My Bloody Valentine to keep—to the notorious scorched-earth noise interlude, that night a six-minute torrent of grit transmitted from guitar pickups into the temporal lobes of fans coaxed out of their bodies and into yet another room, a pocket of heaven or hell accessible only through self-obliteration. You can leave—plenty did—but those who stay submit to stupor, the paradise-prison to which Shields invites his fans and sequesters himself as part of his infernal pact with music. Some people remove their earplugs just for this, to be abominated in noise, feel the nausea creep in, let it flirt with a nervous euphoria before the band exhales a final chorus whose melody floods your bones.
The Dublin gig was louder, I am told, at 115 decibels. Like standing in front of a jet engine, for nearly two hours. Indoors.
Reports of Kevin Shields’ reclusive nature may have been exaggerated over the years. Still, he is not a man you expect to stumble upon in a busy room. Betrayed by his craggy black hat, however, Shields did show up in a quiet corner of the afterparty, cordially chatting with a man in a suit who transpired to be Thurston Moore. Part of me campaigned to go over and say hello, but all the options from there seemed trivial. As a fan, one never finds the words for such moments until after the opportunity has passed. As a journalist, there can really be only one question: “Where’s the new stuff, Kev?”
But for long-suffering My Bloody Valentine disciples, that question is all but exhausted. You hope, in the best case, to receive a sad little promise that you know to be a lie. Anything less would spell disaster, suggesting the two albums pledged upon their signing to Domino, in 2021, are so far beyond the pale, so jammed up in Shields’ psychic hall of mirrors, that the old, half-winked myths have given up the ghost, not even fit to fob us off. By this point, anyway, the moment to pose any such question was gone. The next time I glanced across, Kevin Shields had slipped into the ether.
