Read anything about My Bloody Valentine and inevitably it will go on about guitars: glide guitars, drone guitars, sludge guitars, tremolo guitars, detuned guitars, distorted guitars, womb guitars, loud guitars, guitar textures, guitar experiments guitars guitars guitars.

Which is fair enough, really, when you consider that My Bloody Valentine are one of the most innovative guitar bands of all time, a group that managed to reinvent the guitar sound time and again during the late 80s and early 90s, to create some of the most thrillingly visceral music of this - or any - era.

But, among this avalanche of guitars, something can get missed. Because My Bloody Valentine were also one of the first rock bands to seriously experiment with samplers and electronic music techniques, their catholic musical tastes driving them towards Public Enemy, Andrew Weatherall, London pirate radio and more. 

In fact, I like to think that even if you stripped away all the incredible guitars from My Bloody Valentine, you’d still have one of the most brilliantly innovative groups of their generation. And, with MBV playing Primavera Sound this weekend, this piece is my attempt to show it, via five songs that prove MBV’s electronic chops.

1) Instrumental No 2

All I Need, from My Bloody Valentine’s 1988 debut (ish) album Isn’t Anything, is probably the first concrete example of the band using what we would consider the classic tools of electronic music, in this case a drum machine used to give a heartbeat effect, alongside a reverse reverb programme on an Alesis Midiverb II digital effects processor.

The group also started experimenting with samplers around this time, the most obvious example of this being Instrumental No 2 (also known as Instrumental B), one of two tracks given away on a limited 7-inch single that came with early copies of Isn’t Anything.

Kevin Shield, MBV’s eternal driving force, told Apple Music that the band had started to experiment with “roll and delay units that basically had sampling ability”. “I wanted to try out the idea of looping something and doing some music over it,” he added.

Shields was a big fan of Public Enemy’s second album, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, and so he decided to plunder a drum loop from that album’s Security of the First World and put some ambient guitar glide all over it. “At the time ‘acid house’ was a buzzword and when we did Instrumental No. 2 I was kind of like ‘This is the future of it,’” Shields added.

Instrumental No 2 wasn’t the future of acid house. But it did leave a long trail. Madonna’s Justify My Love, which came out in 1990, certainly sounds like she has heard it, while the song’s combination of hip hop beat and angelic fuzz sounds like a definite precursor to trip hop. And, even if not, Instrumental No 2 is evidence of an incredibly inventive band who make boundary-breaking music that slips down like honey, perfectly listenable in their experimentation.

2) Glider

The band got a “proper” sampler, an Akai, in 1989. One year later, on the Glider EP, the public got to hear the results. The record’s title track was, according to Shields, “made up of mostly guitar samples and mostly guitar feedback”: “I was just recording the feedback and then we’d narrow it down to one bit.” 

Technically, this wasn’t the most sophisticated use of a sampler - Shields told Apple Music that the band didn’t even know how to plug a sampler to a keyboard at that point - but the results are stunning, a patchwork of alien noise that sounds like little else on the planet, with just enough melody and structure to pull the listener through. Obviously, Kevin Shields’ 10-minute version of Gilder is the one to go for, a psychedelic work of genius that showed just how far ahead MBV were of the chasing pack.

3) Soon

Glider (the song) was the experimental brains of the Glider EP. But Soon was the heart, the legs and the pumping blood, a song that Brian Eno said set “a new standard for pop” as “the vaguest music ever to have been a hit”. It might be my favourite My Bloody Valentine song and it’s certainly the most danceable, as a thrilling breakbeat meets layers of glide guitar in a pure propulsive rush. 

According to Mike McGonigal’s 33 1/3 book on Loveless - My Bloody Valentine’s second album, which closes with a slightly different mix of Soon - most of the drums on the album were made up of loops performed by regular drummer Colm Ó Cíosóig, who was suffering from physical and personal problems at the time. In general, the idea was that the listener wouldn’t be able to distinguish the difference between live drumming and loops, apart from on Soon, which is meant to have a more obviously sampled sound.

Andrew Weatherall’s remix of Soon, from the second Glider 12 inch, leans into this idea slightly further by sampling the drums from Westbam’s Alarm Clock, a popular club track at the time, creating a song that is more obviously “dance-y”, if not actually more danceable than the fine original version.

4) Touched

Throughout their adventures into electronic music, My Bloody Valentine still largely sounded like a rock band, as The Stooges would know one. Glider is one notable exception to this, as is Touched, the third song on Loveless and one assembled entirely by Colm Ó Cíosóig.

The song has long been a mystery to me, 57 seconds of timpani, synthetic strings and dinosaur groan that doesn’t really sound like the work of human beings, let alone a band. In 2021, however, Ó Cíosóig lifted the secrets of the song on Tim Burgess' Twitter Listening Party revealing that it is “the story of a sexual encounter… the first part is anxiety followed by the release then the sadness”. More pertinently, perhaps, to this article, he said that he made the song in two hours using just strings and timpani samples, more evidence of a band employing novel production techniques to take music into entirely unexpected places, beyond rock, dance and genre itself.

5) Wonder 2

In the 1990s, when My Bloody Valentine retreated back into the endless studio, there were rumours that Kevin Shields was into pirate radio and the next My Bloody Valentine record would be drum & bass. 

The years passed and - beyond the release of a couple of decent cover versions - nothing happened. In 2012, in an interview with The Quietus, Kevin Shields confirmed the band’s interest in drum & bass talking about the band making “slowed down drum & bass” except it was “Really fast”. (Oddly, the actual quote appears to have disappeared from the article). But I still didn’t think I would ever hear it.

And then, out of the blue, one February night in 2013 My Bloody Valentine dropped mbv, their incredibly long-awaited third studio album, and there, right at the end, was Wonder 2 a song that, once you’d heard it, sounded exactly how you would imagine My Bloody Valentine making drum & bass to be, except you would have never been able to predict it.

I wrote about the song for The Quietus in 2014. “Wonder 2’s rhythm track thunders away at a (slow-ish) drum & bass tempo with an Amen Brother shuffle… But there’s a massive difference here: whereas the individual sounds on drum & bass tracks are typically distinctive, with the listener able to make out every sampled cymbal crash and snare hit, Wonder 2’s drums are as blurry and indistinct as the guitars that surround them.”

My Bloody Valentine are a remarkable band, ear-splitting noise merchants capable of the most delicate interventions; sludge rock dinosaurs with exemplary tunes; and a guitar group that made some of the most forward-looking electronic music of their era. I would love to know what they have been doing over the last 13 years and if they have found more ways to re-invent their sound. What, for example, would MBV make of UK Garage? Or hyperpop? Or AI music production? 

I suspect we will never know. But it doesn’t really matter: what MBV have left us is immaculate, extraordinary, inventive music that never lost its human touch. Together with lots and lots of guitars.

Some listening

Yu - tail

South Korean producer Yu’s new EP faceless, nameless is, in an abstract way, related to death. Yu, a former caregiver in a hospice, was thinking recently about a young man who used to smoke every day outside the hospice’s windows and it filled her heart with questions, including, “What colour was the sky he looked at while smoking, knowing death was near? What expression did he wear? What thoughts filled his mind?”

That might sound like a recipe for an ominously dark record, like Yu’s breaks-infested recent single BloodyMuddy. But Yu went the other way: “I didn’t want to portray someone’s death as only profound or sorrowful,” she writes, “So this music sometimes flows brightly and sometimes absurdly.” That’s a very fitting description for tail, which opens the EP in a flurry of cut-up jazz sax, falling-down beats and rave-y stabs and is probably my favourite thing that Yu has done to date.

The Durutti Column - Liars

Doesn’t everyone sound a bit like The Durutti Column these days? Or is it just me? In any case, the 2026 ground is very fertile for Vini Reilly and friends to make their return, with Renascent, their first studio album in 15 years. 

And new life sounds gorgeous on Liars, the kind of wift-y, drifty guitar number that makes everyone want to be Vini Reilly, together with the guiding hand of a drum machine beat and a spoken / sung, eminently hushed vocal, that you can’t quite make out, in a way that just works.

Bill Orcutt and Mabe Fratti - Forced & Forced & Forced

…. and talking of which, I would be amazed if US guitarist Bill Orcutt hadn’t listened to Durutti Column at some point, not necessarily because he sounds like Vini Reilly - his guitar playing is more blues-y and weighted, to my ears - but because the two artists transmit a similar spirit of musical freedom through their guitars.

Orcutt’s new album with Mabe Fratti, Almost Waking, is a gem and Forced & Forced & Forced is one of the highlights, a song on which the cello sounds like a guitar and a guitar sounds like a cello and they both don’t really sound that much like anything, all at the same improbable time.

Big Freedia and SOPHIE - Blaze That Ass

SOPHIE seemed to be moving away from dance bangers towards the end of her life, which makes Blaze That Ass, taken from Big Freedia’s forthcoming SOPHIE-produced EP, very welcome indeed. It’s a blazing, stomping, rolling slice of dance music, somewhere between classic house - it references the timeless anthem House Nation - and out-and-out industrial filth, over which Freedia unleashes all kind of vocal mischief. Blaze That Ass is both clever and stupid, which is a great thing to pull off, if you can do it.

Farsight - What if We Kissed On the Sun

Sometimes timing is everything: if this sun-kissed (and very well titled) song had arrived in the midst of a rainy January it might be seen to be taking the piss. Dropping right at the start of a heatwave AND festival season, though, What If We Kissed On the Sun sounds like the garage / house crossover of your dreams, tinkly like a childhood ice-cream van, bass throbbing like a countryside after party and drums skipping like six weeks off school. Also, has the song has precisely one perfect organ stab, which is an absolute world of discretion, meaning you have to rewind several times to take it in. 

UNiiQU3 - Mile High Club

Now that Jersey Club is all over pop music like a funked-up rash, time was nigh for the return of UNiiQU3, who was making Jersey bangers with big BIG choruses while you were dropping Cotton Eye Joe in Berghain.

She’s done it again on Mile High Club, a song that combines plunging sub bass with airy chords, a gnarled breakbeat and synth line right out of the G Funk era. Plus an utterly obscene amount of hooks. Let’s make it a UNiiQU3 summer.

Things I’ve done

How about some festival etiquette: eight tips for anyone attending Primavera Sound this week, in handy video form? 

Or you could learn some Catalan with me! Here are some phrases you need for Primavera Sound this week.

Paul McCartney - The Boys of Dungeon Lane

I reviewed the new Paul McCartney album for Pitchfork: “McCartney is such a wily old pro that there was little chance of The Boys of Dungeon Lane failing on its own terms, which makes it a low-stakes kind of triumph. But an underwhelming win is still a win and, in the right kind of circumstances (caution is advised around strong alcohol, old photos, and the holiday season), The Boys of Dungeon Lane could still hit like a (silver) hammer, a reminder that nostalgia is a powerful drug, and the most obvious path can also be the best one.” As one commenter said, “Cherish Macca while he is still around”. And I do.

The playlists

Apple Music: The newest and bestest 2026.

Spotify: the newest and bestest 2026.

Apple Music: The newest and the bestest

Spotify: The newest and the bestest