Shoegaze, From the screen to the stage
BY Saffron McGain
From Coppola to Cambridge, Saffron McGain reflects on the history of shoegaze, the musical moments which have shaped her, and the musicians who are keeping the sub-genre alive.
Sofia Coppola’s films hold a lot for me: a holographic mess of feelings, the sticky remnants of being fifteen, and my first long-standing connection to the girl inside my mum, a Coppola fan, too.
Through all of that, there is a musical strand beating to the pulse of my nostalgia. Shoegaze: hazy, dreamlike and suspended somewhere between melody and atmosphere. Sofia has been able to capture that halo of feeling young forever; lost, untethered, hopeful. Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette and Somewhere are films that understand the power of placing the right song inside a scene. Music does not simply accompany the image; it carries the film beyond the screen and into your own life.
This is where shoegaze often seems to thrive. Lyrics blur into buzzing guitars and layered effects. Sometimes they are barely discernible. The Cocteau Twins, for example, turn the voice into something almost alien: a language that can be felt before it is understood. The music lulls you into a space where it can reflect whatever you happen to be feeling. I think this is why Coppola’s movies are so special to me. She led me to this strange new musical world.
Recently, I was lying around the house looking for something to do when I decided to have my monthly Coppola movie night. I sat with my mum and put on Marie Antoinette, a film probably etched into the pixels of our television screen. Then The Radio Dept.’s “I Don’t Like It Like This” began to emerge from the speakers. The song moves through the scene as Marie Antoinette eats chocolate in bed, leans back and steps out of the bath wrapped in a translucent white cloth. It lasts for only a minute or so, but that is enough. It conveys Atoinette beginning to find her feet, feeling briefly comfortable inside an unfamiliar life.
Coppola told the American Film Institute in 2020 that music “conveys so much of the feeling” in her films. It is this feeling that becomes both the film’s plot and the viewer’s own parallel storyline. She has also described wanting to create a “moody, kind of melancholic movement to the narrative”, asking composer Brian Reitzell to make mixes for her to listen to while writing.
Music, then, does not arrive only after the script is complete or the film has been edited. It can shape the words before the camera begins to roll.
Mum and I ended our two-film (I know, so wild) marathon with Lost in Translation. Its visual and musical atmosphere makes it feel like more than a film: it becomes a landscape for the kind of uncertainty shoegaze can express. The connection between Coppola’s cinema and the genre’s renewed popularity in the 2000s has often been noted, including by members of My Bloody Valentine.
That made me wonder where shoegaze exists now. Coppola’s films possess a distinct pre-smartphone atmosphere: time for silence, boredom and staring at bedroom walls. In a culture of constant screens, has there been less room for music that refuses to explain itself?
Shoegaze offers no obvious punchline. Its lyrics do not always announce themselves, and its songs resist the compressed logic of a fifteen-second clip. It is music that asks you to stay inside a feeling.
That was until I had a trip to Cambridge a few months ago to visit a friend. We were there for dancing, late-night conversations and too much wine, but night-punting was an unexpected highlight. As our boat dipped beneath the Bridge of Sighs, I met Hannah, a guitarist in the band Junk.
I noticed the word “shoe-gazey” almost immediately when she described the band’s music. I thought, as we dipped lopsided under the Bridge of Sighs, illuminating our punt for a moment with a warm light, that there are people out there keeping this genre alive. There is a need for this sound, and I was inspired by her excitement.
I later reached out to the band and discovered that Junk’s formation was the result of a series of accidents that turned out to be fortunate. Hannah Nathan, the group’s lead guitarist and backing vocalist, describes the band’s beginnings as “very luck-based”. She met Evelyn Wilson, the lead vocalist and bassist, during Freshers’ Week. They were drawn together by Evelyn’s Amyl and the Sniffers T-shirt and soon vowed to make great music together. Rhythm guitarist and backing vocalist Leo Howard-Cofield was a friend of a friend. Fennella Sharp, the drummer, was the only person to respond to a university-wide email advertising the vacant role. Hannah describes the process as mildly humbling, but ultimately “the best thing to happen”, calling Sharp a “shockingly talented and adaptable drummer”.
This accidental meeting became the beginning of Junk’s musical identity. When I ask how they would describe their sound, Hannah acknowledges the influence of “iconic bands of the era like Cocteau Twins and Slowdive”, but resists reducing the band to one genre.
Listening to Junk’s 2026 single, “compact disc”, I can hear the influence of shoegaze in the echoes, delays and layered guitars. Yet another sound emerges: one that belongs specifically to the band.
I ask whether they feel they are keeping the shoegaze legacy alive. Hannah says that the recent revival is “objectively awesome”, describing it as “a valuable generational link between radio mums/dads and angsty teenagers”. That link matters to me, too.
One evening, I took my shoegaze-obsessed brain to the dining table and asked my parents what the genre feels like to them. While you would never guess it now, they were grungy university students in the 1990s, and their love of music is one of the things they retained. My mum describes shoegaze as the liminal space “when you move between sets at a festival”: ears ringing from the band you have just heard, the echo of what is coming next, and the hope, excitement and adrenaline distracting you from the ache of your feet in new Doc Martens. My dad agrees, adding that the “parameters of the genre are as indistinct as the music itself”. Shoegaze can appear in glimpses, threaded through other sounds and styles. You only need to know where to look.
Junk do not necessarily see themselves as preserving a legacy. Hannah says that, with Junk, it feels more like “being inspired” and “working alongside” shoegaze. I like that distinction. The band is not attempting to recreate the past; it is maintaining its own direction while extending what the genre might mean.
Shoegaze was originally coined as an insult in the early 1990s, mocking performers who appeared to stare at their shoes while concentrating on their effects pedals. Today, those pedals are part of the creative vocabulary. Fennella says new equipment could “make room to expand our sound in multiple ways”.
The band’s live presence complicates the old stereotype of passive introspection. Junk have played the Tramlines Leadmill tent and London’s Shacklewell, with Leo describing the former as “surreal”. Onstage, the inwardness of shoegaze becomes collective energy. Hannah compares the process to “a very diplomatic and down-to-earth Pokémon battle”, with each member bringing different genres into the “fully formed Junk sound”.
Their future is similarly outward-looking. Fennella’s main goal is to build on connections made during the band’s tour and to play further outside Sheffield. She enjoyed discovering how scenes differ across the UK, and hopes to keep moving between them.
It is like my mum’s description of moving between sets at a festival. Junk are at one end; pioneers such as Lush and My Bloody Valentine are at the other. Between them lies the space where influence travels.
It is night-punting and conversations about new music. It is a festival tent, my parents’ university years and Coppola films playing repeatedly on my laptop. The through-line becomes clear– the optimistic, melancholic, warm fuzz of shoegaze.
