For a brief moment, Slowdive were the most hated band on the planet. Or at least in the UK. In 1991, Richey Edwards of Manic Street Preachers famously declared, “I will always hate Slowdive more than Hitler.” Critics weren’t much nicer. By the mid-Nineties, this five-piece from Reading had been driven out by the same mob who elevated them and others like them – such as Ride and My Bloody Valentine – only a couple years earlier. It was a fleeting but storied moment in music history. When vocalist and guitarist Rachel Goswell, now 52, pops up on Zoom, though, she is forward-looking. “We’ve been in existence longer now than we were the first time around,” she says, with a sunny presence that belies her love for the gothier side of things.
Next summer, it will be 10 years since Slowdive reformed in its original line-up: Goswell, Neil Halstead, Christian Savill, Simon Scott, and Nick Chaplin. She recalls leaving the stage in tears at their first reunion show, overwhelmed by a reception so warm it egged the band on to release new music. Arriving this week is everything is alive, the band’s second record post-reunion. The album is Slowdive as we have always known them: masters of shoegaze, an evanescent genre named for its player’s tendency to literally gaze at the warrens of effects pedals by their feet. On everything is alive, Slowdive show off their arsenal: reverb-heavy guitars and a rolling rhythm section. Genteel vocals feel their way blindly but effortlessly through a fog of tremolo they have navigated hundreds of times before. If Goswell likes to look ahead, her music remains a portal to the past.
