Artist

My Bloody Valentine

Irish shoegaze band

Dublin, Ireland · Formed 1983

My Bloody Valentine is a music group from Dublin, Ireland, active since 1983. Their discography on Gatefold includes 20 records.

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Albums tracked

334

In collections

1983

Since

Biography

Kevin Shields kept his strumming hand glued to the tremolo arm of a Fender Jazzmaster, running through backwards reverb until the guitar didn't sound like wood or wire anymore. That was the whole breakthrough. Before that trick in 1988, they were a mediocre post-punk band stumbling around London and Berlin trying to sound like the Cramps and the Birthday Party. Once Dave Conway bailed and Bilinda Butcher joined, Shields stopped writing riffs and started bending pitch until everyone in the room felt motion sick. The Creation Records lore is half bullshit and half true nightmare. Shields blew through nineteen studios and ran Alan McGee into massive debt making Loveless, but he delivered a record with practically zero digital processing—just pure analog tape manipulation, open tunings, and Colm Ó Cíosóig's drum loops pieced together while he was sick as hell. Then the band famously vanished for two decades into a haze of scrapped tapes and half-built home studios. When they finally dropped m b v in 2013 on their own site, it crashed their servers instantly because nobody else had managed to replicate that vacuum-cleaner guitar roar in the twenty-two years they were gone.

Bio from The Clerk

The Arc of My Bloody Valentine

The pivots — what forced My Bloody Valentine to reinvent.

The Goth-C86 Wilderness
Between 1985 and 1987, the band wandered through Berlin and London sounding like a garage outfit that couldn't pick a lane. Dave Conway shrieked over derivative Cramps knockoffs on Geek! and This Is Your Bloody Valentine before illness and burnout forced him to walk away. Bilinda Butcher took the mic, Debbie Googe locked down the low end, and the band suddenly swerved into jangly, twee C86 pop on Strawberry Wine. It was polite, derivative, and barely hinted at what was lurking under the floorboards.
The Glide-Guitar Breakthrough
Everything detonated in the summer of 1988 when Shields figured out how to strum while holding the whammy bar loose on a Jazzmaster. The You Made Me Realise EP and the Isn't Anything LP turned guitar music upside down overnight by drowning bubblegum melodies in deafening white noise. They tracked the album in Wales on almost no sleep, letting pure physical exhaustion dictate the vocal dynamics. You hear the switch instantly on 'Feed Me With Your Kiss'—the drums hit like a dry sledgehammer while the guitars warp around the chords.
The Loveless Money Pit
From 1989 to 1991, Shields drove Creation Records to the edge of bankruptcy across nineteen different recording studios. Engineers kept quitting because Shields would spend days obsessing over a single snare sample or vocal track sung in a hushed whisper at four in the morning. The resulting record, Loveless, abandoned standard rock rhythm tracks for warped analog loops and dense, detuned guitars that functioned like an orchestra. It nearly destroyed the label, and it effectively froze the band in place for the next two decades.
The Analog Resurrection
After twenty-two years of mythical unreleased tapes and half-started sessions, Shields quietly finished the follow-up using vintage two-inch tape machines and no computer screens. They self-released m b v in February 2013 without a standard label push, instantly crashing their own web servers under the global traffic. The record picks up right where 1991 left off, right down to the jet-engine drum breaks on 'Wonder 2' and Butcher's submerged vocals. It proved their sound was never a studio trick you could automate with plugins.

Influences

Cocteau Twins — Shields has consistently pointed to Robin Guthrie's dense, shimmering guitar washes and open tunings as the foundation that made him rethink the instrument entirely. You hear that debt on the Strawberry Wine and Ecstasy EPs before MBV turned Guthrie's dreampop textures into blunt-force volume. It showed them a song could float entirely on texture instead of a traditional chord sequence.
The Jesus and Mary Chain — The Reid brothers blew open the UK indie scene in 1985 by wrapping girl-group vocal hooks in unrelenting screeching feedback on Psychocandy. That exact friction between whisper-quiet pop melody and extreme volume became the core structural formula for MBV on Isn't Anything. Shields took their static screech and figured out how to make it melodic.
The Velvet Underground — The drone-heavy rhythm guitar work and primitive pulse of 'Sister Ray' served as the blueprint for MBV's infamous live noise section during 'You Made Me Realise.' You can draw a straight line from Lou Reed's raw two-chord white noise marathons to Shields treating volume as physical endurance. It is where MBV learned to turn repetition into a weapon.
Sonic Youth — My Bloody Valentine toured as Sonic Youth's support act in Europe in 1988, and Shields watched Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo abuse alternative tunings and cheap offsets every night. Seeing Sonic Youth treat cheap guitars as tools to be bent and detuned directly sparked Shields to modify his own Jazzmasters. You hear the dirty, dissonant crunch all over 1988's Feed Me With Your Kiss.
The Cramps — The entire first phase of My Bloody Valentine with original singer Dave Conway was an overt homage to the swampy rockabilly-punk coming out of the Cramps. Tracks on 1985's Geek! show Conway imitating Lux Interior's vocal hiccup while the band chugs through psychobilly riffs. They had to get that bad derivative garage noise out of their system before discovering the glide guitar.