Standing ankle-deep in mud waiting for Slowdive to begin their set at this year’s Green Man Festival, it was hard not to notice how mixed the packed-out crowd was. In front of me: a group of teenage boys dressed in all-black, cross-body bags and all, quietly passing around a joint. Behind me: a Gen X couple and their young kids, who later took a family selfie with the stage. Beside me: a lone raver who seemed to be teleported there directly from a free party in the 90s, who turned to me at one point to proclaim that Slowdive wrote “the songs New Order never could”.

I got what he meant; Slowdive’s knack for building to a speaker-blowing, heart-bursting crescendo is singular. Emerging from the same Thames Valley shoegaze scene that produced My Bloody Valentine, Ride and Chapterhouse, their sound is so tender it makes you feel like Ricky Fitts going nuts over a plastic bag in the wind. Warmer than the English stoicism of Lush, more pastoral than the machine-like grind of MBV, the tranquilised quality of their music belies how many rules they were breaking. Experimenting with odd tunings, layers of noise and effects against a cultural background of ambient, dub and drum and bass, Slowdive stretched the density of shoegaze across a vast landscape, creating a sound that’s spatial yet delicately layered. As Alan McGee phrased it when he signed them to Creation Records as teenagers: “I think you’re fucking ethereal”.

The British zeitgeist, sadly, did not agree. By the time they released the now-beloved Souvlaki in 1994, Oasis had debuted and Britpop was in full force. Bravado, pints and football shirts were in, and there was little room left for art school aesthetics and quiet introspection. Critics turned on them, they broke up in 1995 after the release of their third album Pygmalion, and the band remained a memory for almost two decades as founding members Rachel Goswell and Neil Halstead continued in a new direction as Mojave 3. During their hiatus Slowdive went from industry letdowns to cult darlings, their fanbase becoming a broad church encompassing everyone from filmmaker Gregg Araki to games designer Hideo Kojima to discerning TikTok teens. Ever since their reformation in 2014, they have played to sold-out, cross-generational crowds and hit one new milestone after another, making their Glastonbury debut in June and earning their first Top 10 album (in multiple countries) with this year’s everything is alive.

It’s perhaps unsurprising that Slowdive are experiencing a second wind – vindicated, like many artists who aren’t appreciated in their era, by the arc of time. As Araki suggested recently, perhaps it’s “the search and the effort” element of discovery that’s drawing this particular generation to a slow-burning band like Slowdive. “When you find it, it’s like treasure,” he says. “It’s something you cherish.” There’s also the fact that teenagers will always gravitate towards art that feels like it’s made from their perspective. It’s why films like The Virgin Suicides and books like Catcher in the Rye are continually discovered by new generations. The same is true of Slowdive’s music, which captures the emotional overwhelm of adolescence in a way that practically brings you to your knees. Though never rooted in nostalgia, that feeling is still present in their music today, underpinning the sweeping optimism of “kisses” and the dreamy post-rock of “alfie.”

Dedicated to Goswell’s mother and drummer Simon Scott’s father, who both passed in 2020, everything is alive is a glimmering record draped in the weight of experience. Intimately produced with tactile instrumentation, the songs evoke the hopeful melancholy of their early albums, but the emotion doesn’t come crashing in waves – it feels baked in, lived in, more ‘watching your long-term partner in the garden through a window and feeling a profound love for them in that moment alongside the awareness that everything is ephemeral’ than ‘having a cigarette in front of your laptop at 2AM following a devastating break-up.’ 

“I’ve never seen the point in rehashing stuff you've done before,” Goswell tells me over Zoom from their tour bus outside the 930 Club in Washington, where they’ll be playing later that night with Drab Majesty. “I think there has to be a new energy to everything you do for it to be worthwhile. We certainly don’t consciously sit down and say ‘this record’s going to sound like this.’ The recording process, just like anything, is a journey, and you don’t know where it’s going to end up – but that’s part of the beauty of it.”

Hi Rachel! How’s the tour going? 

Rachel Goswell: It’s been great! We’ve been out for a week. We just played in Toronto, two nights in New York, Boston, and Washington tonight. There are loads of Slowdive fans queuing up outside the venue already and they’re not even going to get in for another three hours or so! It’s loads of young kids, which is really nice. I spoke to two boys earlier who have been there since this morning!

Speaking of talking to people on the road, I saw that you ran into James Duval and Gregg Araki in New York.

Rachel Goswell: Yeah! I’ve always kept in touch with them and we always see them whenever we’re in Los Angeles. They always come to shows. I think they’ve come to every single show we’ve done in LA, whether it was Slowdive or the Mojave 3 years. I only found out on our first day in New York through a mutual friend that they were in town. The show finished at 9PM and they literally walked into the venue just as we were doing “Golden Hair”, which is the last song of the set, but we hung out for a bit afterwards and that was lovely. It’s just a shame I couldn’t go to the [4K restoration] screening of Nowhere. That would have been cool. I went to the premiere of that back in the 90s, in Leicester Square in London. It definitely feels like a full-circle thing.

Araki obviously has a long history of using Slowdive’s music in his films – he called the band his “spirit animal” in one interview. Why do you think your work pairs so well?

Rachel Goswell: The music is, I suppose, quite emotional. There’s a lot of feeling in there. It’s been a long time since I’ve watched Nowhere, but I know that it opens with “Avalyn”. There’s definitely a resonance there – and with Mysterious Skin as well. [The director] Scott Haim was in Boston when we were there, so we met up with him, and he’s come to the shows the last three times. It’s funny, it feels like wherever we go in America now, we know somebody pretty much everywhere we play. I was looking at our tour dates thinking, are there any days where I literally don’t know anybody? Turns out, no.

“You’re never going to get over the loss of somebody that you love, it’s just an ever-evolving process of dealing with it” – Rachel Goswell

That must be a nice feeling. 

Rachel Goswell: It is, but sometimes you kind of yearn for a day of just complete quiet. It’s a real whirlwind. We’re out here for nearly four weeks so by the time we go home I’m going to be really knackered [laughs]. But I live in a small village in Devon, so I can just go home and be really quiet for two weeks before we kick off the UK part of the tour. 

It feels like your music is often shaped by quiet, pastoral settings. The cottage in North Wales where the seeds of Souvlaki were sown, the Thames Valley surrounded by the Cotswolds and the Wessex Downs growing up, Neil’s studio in Cornwall now. Your music I think, more so than any other shoegaze or post-rock band, feels like a landscape. It feels very bucolic and romantic. I was wondering if that’s something you feel too, and whether your surroundings inform your songwriting much?

Rachel Goswell: Neil wrote the latest record and he’s predominantly the main songwriter in Slowdive, but there’s been a few over the years that we’ve written together, and I think the landscape will definitely have a bearing on the sounds. Obviously, there’s a lot of layering of all the different instruments, and for a lot of the songs also layering the vocals as well and them not necessarily being super prominent. It’s all part of that texture. I think “Slomo” was inspired particularly by Newquay, where Neil has lived since 1995. He’s a surfer, so he’ll always be by the sea. When he’s not by the sea, he’s definitely a fish out of water.

There’s definitely something about the sea where, if you’re the sort of person who gravitates towards it, you kind of need it to feel normal. 

Rachel Goswell: Definitely. And I find with touring, particularly now – we haven’t done much touring since 2018, and obviously we had the COVID era in between, so this year for us is really the biggest amount of live shows we’ve done in a long time. We went to Australia earlier in the year and I really noticed, very quickly, how much I needed to be surrounded by trees and green, because it’s all cities that you’re playing in. Our daily ritual on that tour was to find a botanical garden to go to and just to have that sense of grounding. So I find that’s very important for me when I’m out now. 

One thing that sets Everything Is Alive apart from previous albums is that it’s tinged with loss and a new kind of darkness. While your early albums have a kind of dreamy, forever-summer kind of vibe, this has more of an autumnal feeling of transition. Perhaps that’s partly an age thing, but I know there were some personal losses and shifts for the band around this album too. Could you speak to those a little bit and how they come through in the songwriting?

Rachel Goswell: I lost my mother early on in the pandemic and Simon lost his father, about two months apart. I don’t think that those losses affected Neil’s songwriting, but on a personal level for Simon and I it was, and still remains to an extent, a difficult time. You’re never going to get over the loss of somebody that you love, it’s just an ever-evolving process of dealing with it. So on a personal level there was sadness, but it was good to have each other in terms of our friendship, to support each other and talk through those things. But those losses didn’t directly affect the songwriting. 

A lot of people think that “Prayer Remembered” is a very sad and mournful song, but Neil actually wrote that after the birth of his son in 2019. He wrote that the morning or a couple of mornings after he was born. I remember when we first heard it. It was actually a very easy song to record, because it was quite straightforward and the structure was there and the band just sort of played around him. It was done very quickly. I remember singing various melodies in the studio that would have gone really nicely with that track, but Neil was adamant that he didn’t want any singing on it. It was a very personal snippet of time for him and it was right that it remained instrumental. Sometimes you don’t need to have vocals on a track for it to hold beauty and meaning. There are a few tracks we’ve done over the years that have remained instrumental, so that’s also part of what we do. 

“We don’t want to have to define every single song. We’d rather throw the question back at people and say: well, what does it mean to you?”

Slowdive’s early appeal was rooted in teenage emotion – a time when everything is new, overwhelming, very tender. Neil says in the Pitchfork documentary about Souvlaki that it’s the kind of music that could only come from an 18-year-old. How has your own relationship to those first three albums changed with age, and what’s your relationship to them now?

Rachel Goswell: As people, obviously, we’re a lot older. I think generally the teenage angst has definitely all gone, but it’s been replaced by middle-aged angst [laughs]. We’re all parents and there’s 30 years of life experience since those records were done. Initially when we came back and started to play those songs live again, it would take me back in my mind to those points in time when they were recorded and the things that were going on at the time. Now when we play them, I just see a sea of people – and a lot of really young people who are the age we were when those songs were recorded. There’s a lot of emotion on the faces of people in the audience. I’ve always been a people watcher when we’re doing gigs anyway, but to see how much those songs mean to people… And naturally they resonate with younger people because we were that age when they were written. So I guess that appeal will probably always remain, to an extent, for young people hearing it for the first time. 

I don’t sit down and listen to those old records anymore. I think probably a lot of artists would say that once a record’s recorded and mastered you listen to it for a certain amount of time and you’ll always be critiquing it, wishing that XYZ was slightly different, never 100 per cent happy with every track. But there comes a point after that where you’re listening to the songs and relearning how to play them live, which is what we’ve been doing recently for this tour, and mentally you’ve moved on a bit. You don’t think about those songs in the same way. Once they’re released, they become owned by everybody and everyone will have their own interpretations of what the songs mean. You get the odd Slowdive song that’s very transparent lyrically, but a lot of it is very ambiguous, and again that’s always something that we’ve done. We don’t want to have to define every single song. We’d rather throw the question back at people and say: well, what does it mean to you?

That younger fanbase is definitely something that’s grown between now and the last time you toured extensively. You’ve been rediscovered through TikTok and boosted by the recent resurgence of shoegaze bands in North America and South Korea. What’s it been like seeing that happen? Is it an enthusiasm you’ve been able to feel, on stage or off?

Rachel Goswell: Definitely. Ever since we came back in 2014, our audiences have always been noticeably generationally mixed, and very mixed gender-wise as well. I think COVID and TikTok have had a lot to do with some of it, and it’s brilliant for us. Our manager received an email before our Australian tour earlier in the year from a 15-year-old complaining that the gigs weren’t all ages. They really wanted to see Slowdive and they didn’t think it was fair that you had to be 18 or whatever it was. So from that point on we were like, well, just open everything to all ages then. So now our shows are all ages, wherever we can. I swear there was a 12-year-old in the audience in Auckland, standing in front of me and Christian, and that was mind-blowing because she was just so small! We also have a lot of people our age, who have been with us from the 90s, bringing their teenagers to the gigs and experiencing Slowdive with them, which is lovely to see. It’s really quite special. I love talking to people that come to the gigs, too. I think it keeps us younger in some ways. 

We’ve all got teenage children as well who are now understanding what their parents do. Not my son, because he’s got additional needs, but other people in the band have older kids who are realising what their dads do and what Slowdive actually is. Some of their school friends like the band. Although, one of Christian’s kid’s friends was like, ‘your dad’s band is shit!’ – so they’re going to have to put up with a lot of that as well [laughs]. But it‘s great. We’re very lucky to be in the position that we’re in, and we don’t take it for granted. 

I saw your set at Green Man and was really heartened to be behind this group of teenage boys who were right at the front, all dressed in black, smiling quietly and passing around a joint. It reminded me of being the same age going to shows with friends, being completely swept up in a really specific way. What are the bands that you associate with that feeling growing up? 

Rachel Goswell: Haha! That’s our audience all right. I used to be the same when I was a teenager. Me and Nick used to go up to London to The Marquee to see various goth bands at the time, like Fields of the Nephilim and The Mission, and we’d always be right at the front. I was smoking spliffs as well, so I see myself in the audience now. It’s like having my youth reflected back at me.

everything is alive is out now

The UK leg of Slowdive’s tour kicks off on October 30. You can get tickets here

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