Similar artists: seventh cloud, High., Cigarettes for Breakfast
Recommended songs: “Driving Out the Weeds,” “A Butterfly’s Last Dance”
Mondaze‘s sophomore album, Linger, is a collection that swallows you whole and leaves you drowning in the muffled stomach of celestial shoegaze, something that has sounded the same ever since the early 90s with bands like Slowdive, Ride and My Bloody Valentine. Released via Bronson Recordings, Mondaze joins contemporary bands like Diiv and Deerhunter, searching for new noises within the untouched genre and digging for depth and uniqueness.
With track titles like “Dilute the Pain,” “Numb,” and “A Butterfly’s Last Dance,” we endure themes of loss and rebirth. Linger is a nod to the memories that we cannot quite escape, which is something we ponder in the song “Lines of You,” a song about trying to outgrow your past.
Mondaze was formed in Faenza, Italy, in 2016 and is a late bloomer to the genre 27 years past its prime. Often, when I come across another shoegaze album, that classic wall of sound that encapsulates your entirety, sending you into some deep focus or longing, all sounds the same. However, on a track like “Dusty Eyes,” it is a refreshing, plucked-apart, loopy, and echoing chamber of guitar-centric introspection.
How much more genre-bending tactics can be pulled off in shoegaze anymore, really? It is a classically bent and distorted form of sound that should be comforting every time you find it to be precisely what it has always been: an ambient soundscape that frequently evokes feelings of melancholy or deep reflection. Linger does not escape the sound of the 90s– it is an homage to the pilgrims who came before.
The band says, “This album is about contemplation… but there’s also an element of action, a kind of non-action that comes from the awareness gained through reflection.” The band also touches on stillness, an excellent way to describe how this album can make you feel. It puts you on pause, observing life from outside of your own body, waiting for that metaphoric needle drop. We wallow in the album’s lush reverb and echoing delays, tossing us into a dream-like state, “A world where finding moments of stillness in everyday life has become rare.”
Mondaze also noted that there was no time like the present to release the album. The subtle power and post-punk inspiration are a constant commentary on the state of the world. If you need to zone out and have some sort of soundtrack to your fading life, shoegaze is always a great choice. It sounds dramatic, but so is “heavy shoegaze,” as the band describes their exact genre.
Keep up with Mondaze: Instagram
