For Slowdive to return and merely retread the past, as seminal as they’ve been in sculpting the shoegaze mold, would have been boring. In their post-reunion form, guitarists and vocalists Rachel Goswell and Neil Halstead, guitarist Christian Savill, bassist Nick Chaplin, and drummer Simon Scott have acknowledged those fingerprints but reconvene more concerned in pushing their sound forward into something beyond legacy act territory. On their 2017 eponymous reunion album, they carried it beyond the haze and into orbit among stardust and deep space, making it clear that time’s passage had very much brought them to a different point, but still altogether astounding to the senses and dreamy, pop palettes.

everything is alive, Slowdive’s fifth studio effort, is another assured leap from the veteran band over 30 years from their inception which presents their art as something once more evolved from it, and likewise, evolving what the definition of shoegaze can be by one of its godliest creators. The melodic emotional patterns outlined by lush crushes of guitars still exist beneath the surface, but where they once fully enveloped you to hypnotic effect, they stimulate a calming frequency through soft synths, fine-tip acoustics, and Goswell and Halstead’s voices glowing from within.

Romantic longing, sighs of grief, and the occasional capturing of a moment of perfection in our nature, be it the company of angels on “alife” and lovers on “kisses”, or the sun and the ocean on “skin in the game” reposition the Reading quintet somewhere between Earth and the atmosphere here — more in touch with the physical form without departing the cosmos fully. Other areas of the listen such as the instrumental “prayer remembered” and “chained to a cloud” cinematically cascade in directions unintended to whelm, though impossible to deny their transformative effects on brainwaves and environmental energy.

Where Slowdive’s voyage ends at this stage is anyone’s guess, but for now, it amazes as always, in ways unforeseen by any mile marker on the timeline.

Highlights: “andalucia plays”, “kisses”, “skin in the game”

Slowdive’s everything is alive will be released September 1st on Dead Oceans.