Two years ago, Drop Nineteens returned with Hard Light, their first new album in 30 years. As is oft the case when bands step out of and back into view for decades lengths at a time, it wasn’t so much of a surprise that their sound in the present had shifted away from where they were yesterday — the dreamier tapestries that made their 1991 debut full-length, Delaware, a cult classic, for one within the shoegaze scene — as the quintet solidly transitioned a blurred focus into more upkept slowcore and indie rock corners with muted shades of feedback behind them, making them the logical godparents of today’s younger static-shifters like Horse Jumper of Love and Wishy.

To understand how they got from there to here makes the release of their “lost” album, 1991, all the more important in not only understanding the story of Drop Nineteens, but the story of shoegaze’s arrival on American soil after planting its seeds across the pond in England. Collecting early demos, now remastered in more crystalline form, we’re privy to hearing the quintet in their most nascent stages of recording music from within the tiny walls of Bostonian dorm rooms and the potential it would expand into. The influences of stylistic originators My Bloody Valentine, Ride, and Slowdive are apparent in the way these 9 tracks whirl through the air with an opaque glow surrounding them in a kindred intent to experiment with layered effects and hazy, granular textures that have come define the timeliest of shoegaze and dream-pop sounds.

Yet still, there’s an underlying “rockism” beneath it all. If you can imagine peeling back the feedback curtains on their surface, 1991‘s songs reveal that Drop Nineteens were every bit plugged into the ’90s college and alternative rock amperage akin to their Baystate peers Dinosaur Jr. just as well with being very drums-forward and using distortion to accentuate rather than to wholly swallow what are otherwise deeply melodically-defined songwriting structures. In today’s lens, this approach has become visible amongst rising artists in the modern shoegaze revival, but that this was over 30 years ago, lost in time, making 1991 a critical document in the evolution of American shoegaze.

Highlights: “Daymom”, “Mayfield”, “Another Summer”

Drop Nineteens’ 1991 is available now on Wharf Cat Records.

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