my bloody valentine

It’s easy to imagine a band whose music is as transportive as My Bloody Valentine as never having to worry about the banalities of mortal life, but of course, they do. Looking back on 1991’s Loveless—an album that invented a dreamlike strain of rock no band had explored before—bandleader Kevin Shields says the mythology surrounding the album’s fraught recording process had less to do with the birthing pains of creative genius than paying the bills. “There where chaotic times with money,” he says. “There should’ve been ore one around. But the direction we went in meant there was no money around.” The direction we went in. While Nirvana was reconfiguring the basic vocabulary of rock, MBV (who formed in Dublin, Ireland, in 1983) evolved from ethereal post-punk (“Feed Me With Your Kiss,” “Lose My Breath”) to a sound that mixed the conventional bass-drums-guitar setup with a production sensibility borrowed from techno and hip-hop, dissolving the boundary between rock and electronic music. (Ambient music pioneer Brian Eno once said their 1991 track “Soon” was “the vaguest music to ever have been a hit“—high praise in his circles.) After taking three years between 1988’s Isn’t Anything and Loveless, the band famously took 22 years before releasing their next album, 2013’s darker, more fragmentary m b v. “I realized it was actually better and more relevant than I thought it was,” Shields says of revisiting the album’s initial sessions in 2006—the irony being that it sounded no less relevant seven years later. When nobody’s walking your path, you can take as long to pave it as you like.