A couple of weeks ago an analysis by the website Chartmetric concluded that, since TikTok became popular around 2019, the average length of a song has nosedived while the length of albums is going up. It’s prompted by artists working out that they’ll earn more through streaming if fans listen to a greater quantity of shorter songs, and also by the attention-grabbing clips of TikTok requiring them to race to the chorus in seconds or risk losing their audience to the next thing.
It sounds convincing, but does nothing to explain the simultaneous resurgence of the meandering, unhurried shoegaze scene. An indie subgenre that got its silly name through the bands’ tendency to stare down through their floppy fringes at their guitar effects pedals instead of interacting with their fans, it produced top 10 albums in the early Nineties for My Bloody Valentine and Ride but attracted ridicule when it started to look self-indulgent next to the coarser, more immediate thrills of Britpop. Slowdive were dropped by Creation Records in 1995, in between the first two albums by their rather more noticeable labelmates, Oasis.
