Twenty-two years after Pygmalion, Slowdive returned with a self-titled album that sounds less like a reunion and more like a band still figuring out what comes next. Recorded at their old Oxfordshire studio and mixed by Chris Coady in Los Angeles, it pulls together the shimmer they built their name on with something more immediate. Tracks like 'Star Roving' and 'Sugar for the Pill' centre on actual songs rather than drifting textures, while 'Slomo' and 'Falling Ashes' let drummer Simon Scott layer in processed loops that sit somewhere between Pygmalion's abstraction and the directness Neil Halstead was aiming for.
The group wrote by jamming on iPhones for forty minutes at a time, then carving out the bits that worked. That shows in the shape of these eight pieces. They move. Rachel Goswell and Halstead's vocals still float over the top, guitars still blur at the edges, but there is more spine underneath than on Souvlaki. It is poppier than they expected, which does not mean it sounds like anyone else. Just that the melodies arrive quicker.
For anyone who came to shoegaze through Beach House or later bands tracing the lineage backward, this is the source playing to its strengths without retreading old ground. Available on all the usual lossless formats plus vinyl, CD and cassette.
