You’d think that in this world of near infinite music offering, of 80k tracks uploaded every day to streaming platforms, that music lovers would never want for anything.

And yet it’s not true. There a type of music that I call shoegaze electronica that seems to revel in its scarcity, a new song giving me the occasional flash of hope every few months, the reality of which is never quite fulfilled. 

Which is why the news of Maria Somerville’s Luster (Remixes) EP, coming in January, made me so happy. This record, the coming together of heavily hyped young shoegaze singer and various talented remixers, would surely create a new landmark in shoegaze electronica and everyone would have to pay attention.

Shoegaze electronica is, essentially, the combination of shoegaze vocals and guitars with electronic production, a combination that seems so damn irresistible that I can’t believe everyone isn’t making it. You can trace its roots back to 1988 and My Bloody Valentine’s Public Enemy-sampling Instrumental Number 2, via Andrew Weatherall’s remix of Soon

The genre - if genre isn’t too ornate a word for such a rarely-sited phenomenon - reached its brief apotheosis in 1993 with the release of four records: Pentamerous Metamorphosis, an album-length remix of Chapterhouse’s Blood Music by Global Communication; Seefeel’s Quique; and two Slowdive records: the band’s now adored second album Souvlaki and the 5 EP, on which Reload (aka Global Communication) remix In Mind to astral results.

Since that brief flowering… not so much.

It would be wrong, perhaps, to say that shoegaze electronica died in 1993. Seefeel would continue releasing fantastic records, while Spooky’s remix of Lush’s Undertow - one of the genre’s very best songs - came out in 1994.

And there were some tentative flowerings in the following years. In 2002 - way before the start of the current shoegazing revival - Morr Music released Blue Skied An’ Clear, in which acts like ISAN and Múm paid tribute to Slowdive. Later on, both Ulrich Schnauss and M83 made whole careers out of exploring the edges between shoegazing and electronica, while The Field’s music often has the distinct air of balancing dream pop fuzz and electronic fervour.

Later still, My Bloody Valentine’s 2013 album mbv showed the influence of jungle music; Avalon Emerson’s blissful ambient-house remix of Slowdive’s Sugar for the Pill in 2017 was an instant classic; and Dania’s excellent Listless album from earlier this year had a definite edge of shoegaze crossover.

But, for what seems such an irresistible force, it’s amazing we haven’t seen more of shoegazing electronica, even as the shoegazing revival has gone from strength to strength. Foggy ambience and blissed out electronic production work so well together that you’d think that one of the endless shoegaze revivalists might have hit on the combination by chance, if nothing else. But no.

(As a mark of how little of this stuff exists, I once tried to pitch a compilation of shoegaze electronica to Cherry Red, only to come a cropper when I could barely fill one CD of the stuff, let alone three.)

And so back to Luster (Remixes). Somerville’s dreamy, reverb-heavy and  - let’s face it - very Slowdive music always felt ripe for remixing and her move to 4AD meant that she had the budget for experimentation. I could so easily imagine the vocals of, say, Projections (from her 2025 album Luster), peeping out over the top of a post-rave synth and drum machine haze.

Except, well, it turns out that Maria Somerville doesn’t make music just for me and Luster (Remixes) is a far broader, if less coherent, record than the one I was dreaming of. Luster (Remixes) is a record where shoegazing meets electronica, but also 80s pop, industrial racket, trap-house and Deafheaven-style blackgaze.

To start with the most satisfying song: the Seefeel remix of Stonefly is a classic worthy of shoegaze electronica’s glory year, the vocal melody stretched out and looped back in on itself like a gathering fire, while the guitars seem to shimmer across the mix, the whole thing kept barely together by a slightly awkward, stuttered rhythm. I could listen to a whole weekend’s worth of this.

Sadly, nothing else on the record lives up to it. colle (aka Maya McGrory of Chanel Beads)’s remix of Projections adds plucked strings to the mix in a way that makes the song a little bit too fussy and uptight. Fatshaudi’s remix of Up, which follows, drops Somerville’s vocal into a hazy world of echo, only to spoil things with a horribly 80s synth riff that suggests cheap romcoms.

The second half of the record is a lot more interesting, if considerably less enjoyable. It’s hard to fairly appraise side two, in many ways, because I want music to reach out and make new connections; but one of the things I love about shoegazing in general - and Maria Somerville’s music in particular - is that it is easy to lose yourself in, without necessarily being easy music. And, sadly, the second half of Luster (Remixes) is so incoherent as to make sitting down and listening to it in one go a challenge.

To whit: YHWH Nailgun take the delicate flower that is Violet and smother it is abrasive guitar effects and a clanking drum rhythm, to the extent that Somerville’s vocals feel like a robotic afterthought. No one comes out of it well.

Similarly, Asa Nisi Masa & Oscar18’s abrasive, trap / house take on Corrib is interesting although it’s hard to avoid the impression that they have thrown away anything that was worthwhile in the original song - vocals, melody, restraint - in favour of their own sonic vision. Sometimes brilliant remixes can come about this way; but this is not one of them.

The Boris Luna mix of October - a mixture of Somerville’s October with Luna by Japanese noise rock band Boris - which ends the record, is also the nadir. I can still remember when I was introduced to blackgaze, the utterly improbable but bizarrely well-fitting mixture of black metal and shoegaze. It was 2014, I was wandering around Primavera Sound and I came upon Deafheaven, then still running high on the back of the release of their classic Sunbather album. 

I could barely believe what I was hearing, this audacious mixture of sounds, whose extremities of light and dark, sweetness and filth, seemed to meet perfectly in the middle. The band sounded oddly inevitable, as if shoegaze and black metal were always meant to come together.

11 years on, the Boris Luna remix of October seems keen to destroy this happy association. The songs sounds so mushy, so weak, so incredibly ill-fitting that any residual charm drops off among the toy-town drum rush and depressingly regular crash cymbal hits, leaving a boringly thin goo that is best forgotten.

So Luster (Remixes) wasn’t the record I was hoping for - and that’s OK. The EP has added one song to the shoegaze electronica cannon and that’s praise-worthy in itself.

But Luster (Remixes) does feel like something of a missed opportunity. The success of Luster has showed how much life there is in the shoegaze sound, while the huge stylistic variety among the six artists who provide remixes here shows how shoegaze appeals to a surprisingly wide range of genres in 2025.

Luster (Remixes) could, perhaps, have been spectacular. But for whatever reason - poor choice of remixers or perhaps artists just not on their game - the record is lukewarm when it could have been scorching. Then again, perhaps that’s fitting for shoegaze electronica, a genre of music that promised so much, while only delivering in minute quantities.

Some listening

Zora Jones and DJ Polo - Abalone Kiss

Zora Jones’ return is set to be one of the events in electronic music in 2026. Last week she released a new mix, via Mixmag, and now we have the first fruits of her new music, a two-track collaboration with DJ Polo: Hoes Link Up / Abalone Kiss.

Hoes Link Up is banging in the elegant and twisted way that Jones has always offered; but I had to go for Abalone Kiss, a song so beautiful that it made me look up the word “abalone”. I was not expecting a type of sea snail. But such is the topsy turvy world of Zora Jones that you never know what to expect - beyond beauty, funk, adventure and a hefty dose of bass. (Oh and I’ve heard the first EP and it is brilliant.)

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith - I Miss the Way You Swim

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s last album, Gush, was notably described by Pitchfork as the producer’s “most libidinal collection of songs to date”, with the record’s title giving a heavy hint at the emotional joy that was found inside.

Thoughts on the Future, Smith’s new album, which arrives in December just four months after Gush, is very different; it features three long instrumental tracks, with the first single, the poignantly titled I Miss The Way You Swim, apparently shaped by loss. It’s a gorgeous song, full of lush, tickling synths, like floating down a river as the weeds caress your back, melancholy and tranquility mixed up in a delicate emotional state. 

Look out for a Line Noise podcast interview with Smith before Christmas.

Shane Parish - Maetl

Sometimes you don’t know what you want until you get it. A case in point: in all my years of music listening I had not even the foggiest notion that I wanted an album of Autechre covers performed on acoustic guitar; and then Philip Sherburne introduced me to Shane Parish and his cover of Yulquen on his Eavesdropping 1 mix. Suddenly, an album of Autechre covers on acoustic guitar was precisely what I wanted to soundtrack my December days. Luckily the first songs from Autechre Guitar were released later the same week, Maetl and Eggshell, along with the news of its release. 

The sharp-minded of you will have noticed that both tracks are from Autechre’s 1993 album Incunabula and, as Sherburne points in the album’s liner notes, the material on Autechre Guitar is drawn entirely from the 1990s - specifically Incunabula, Amber, Tri Repetae and LP5 - as this was Autechre’s “melodic golden age”.

Maetl, which is my pick of the two tracks, draws out the song’s creepy crawling central melody - one that always reminds of me Medieval music for some reason - with a huge dose of warmth and musical skill, making the beautifully unlikely cross over between campfire cook out and 90s IDM. Olé.

Voices From The Lake - Eos

Maybe it’s just because I’ve been thinking about Dave Ball after his sad death but the new Voices From The Lake album (a collaboration between Donato Dozzy and Neel) really does remind me of The Grid’s mellower moments, say Crystal Clear before it goes all pumping. Which is to say it’s melodic, deep and kind of crystalline and I could bath in its waters forever.

Floating Points - Corner of My Eye

The gulf in my affection between Floating Points in dance mode and Floating Points in jazz mode is as wide as the Grand Canyon is vertiginous. 

To my delight, Sam Shepherd is back on the jazz in Corner of My Eye, a song that suffers a little by resembling the producer’s stellar Pharoah Sanders collaboration Promises, without actually involving Pharoah Sanders, but still slinks along quite beautifully. In fact, the song makes me think of an astral voyage where you miss your mark and end up with a pretty boring slice of space - but still it’s an astral voyage nonetheless and to be enjoyed.

Things I’ve done

Line Noise podcast - with Gábor Lázár

I spoke to Hungarian wonder producer Gábor Lázár about MaxMSP, random edges, recording live and eureka moments, live at the MIRA festival in Barcelona, November 2025.

VISIONARIOS 1X04 - STRANGER THINGS 5 | PARTE 1 (CON SPOILERS)

Stranger Things crew! David Camilleri y yo nos reunimos para debatir sobre los mejores momentos de la serie 5, comentar los puntos flacos y predecir lo que podrá pasar en los últimos capítulos de la serie. CON SPOILERS!!!!!

Things other people have done 

The 30 Best Electronic Albums of 2025

A good end-of-year list should make you think ‘Oh yes, that was 2025’ and I think Philip Sherburne’s 30 best electronic albums of 2025 for Pitchfork achieves this and more. I don’t agree with all of the placings - if I did, it would be my list rather than his - but it gives me a quiet satisfaction to look back on a year in music that included both Los Thuthanaka and gyrofield’s Suspension of Belief EP.

The Playlists

Available via Apple Music: The newest and the bestest and The newest and bestest 2025.

And Spotify (for the moment): The newest and bestest 2025 and The newest and the bestest.

Paid subscribers get bonus podcasts, you know.