NewDad, an alt-rock band hailing from Galway, Ireland, released their debut album in early 2024 entitled Madra. The band, formed in 2018, has been compared to classic acts such as The Cure, and contemporary artists like Beabadoobee. The band had previously released five singles in 2020 and released their EP Waves the following year in 2021. In 2022, NewDad released their second EP, Banshee, which gained even more critical acclaim than their previous release.
Madra, the Irish word for dog, is the band’s first full-length album, was released 26 January 2024. The album begins with the opening track “Angel,” which sets the tone for the album with its spacey distorted guitars, heavy reverb, and light breathy vocals delivered by lead vocalist Julie Dawson. This particular light, shoegazey sound continues through the front half of the album, and it is only until the second half that the album starts to have more depth to it with the track “Nosebleed.”
“Nosebleed” offers more lush production, especially with its grand chorus that juxtaposes the softer, quieter verses in a more impactful way than some of the previous tracks. The album is more backloaded than I’d like, though it’s not bad at all for a debut project. It does the job of establishing a sound for NewDad fairly well, leaning into its influences enough to give it an easily identifiable sound but not so much as to entirely drown out any sort of originality or uniqueness the band has to offer. Ultimately, while it’s not very groundbreaking, the album is still able to have interesting enough aspects to make NewDad a noteworthy new band coming up on the scene.
Though, there is something else that Madra got me thinking about. Specifically, when it comes to the current state of indie rock and alt rock. There has undoubtedly been a persisting resurgence of shoegaze within these genres, Madra being one recent example of this.
Shoegaze music is a subgenre of rock that emerged in the late 80s and was primarily seen in Ireland and the UK. It’s known for its heavy usage of guitar effects, pedals, primarily reverb, distortion, fuzz, chorus, and obscured vocal mixes with an almost dreamlike quality to it. In fact, it’s this heavy use of pedals that gave the genre its name due to bands within the genre looking down at their pedals while gigging, appearing to the audience as if they were gazing down at their shoes. Bands who are well-known within the genre include Slowdive, Chapterhouse, Catherine Wheel, Lush, Ride, The Jesus and Mary Chain, and, Cocteau Twins (though Cocteau Twins are also commonly referred to as being dream-pop, a genre that has close ties with shoegaze). Perhaps the most famous shoegaze band, however, is none other than the Dublin-based band My Bloody Valentine. Formed in 1983, My Bloody Valentine has long since been involved with the development of the shoegaze genre as we know it today, releasing what is probably the most well-known and critically acclaimed album within the genre: 1991’s Loveless.
Shoegaze would be a short-lived movement, however. The genre began to die down towards the mid to late 90s, with more popular genres like grunge and Britpop gaining more traction Consequently, most shoegaze bands were either on hiatus or disbanded by the late 90s. The scene was virtually dead by the 2000s until its great resurgence that can be traced back to the mid-2010s.
The genre had been diversified with many of the new acts to emerge combining the classic elements of shoegaze music with other rock genres like grunge and different subgenres of metal, most notably black metal. Thus was born the subgenres nu-gaze (modern shoegaze), grunge-gaze (fusion of grunge and shoegaze), and blackgaze (fusion of black metal and shoegaze), among others. The shoegaze revival would only grow in 2020, with various up-and-coming shoegaze acts gaining Gen Z attention on different social media platforms. Bands like julie, Glixen, Fleshwater, Knifeplay, and, of course, NewDad have been able to gain some real traction online; the attention goes to show that shoegaze is making a pretty big comeback with today’s listeners.
While it’s hard to predict where shoegaze will go in the future and whether it will experience another decline, similar to the one of the 90s or continue to thrive within the alt-rock scene, I feel confident in NewDad’s success. The band is clearly driven, with vocalist Julie Dawson telling Rolling Stone UK, “…we just want to set that standard and prove what we can do,” in regards to Madra, an album that certainly offers the band a good starting point for what I would imagine to be the beginning of a lengthy music career.
