Haven’t you heard? Shoegaze is having an unprecedented moment right now. So much is happening all at once, but one major storyline is that the genre is sounding more digital. The breakcore-infused cyclones of They Are Gutting a Body of Water and their Julia’s War comrades are ruling the American underground. The grungy MIDI beats popularized by Wisp, Novulent, and Trxy! are inescapable on TikTok. And somewhere out in the ether, unmoored from any one app or region, a growing number of expats from the hard-to-pinpoint subgenre of internet rap known as digicore are finding their way to shoegaze’s lapping shores. 

At the beginning of the pandemic, shoegaze and digicore weren’t related in any way. Typified by fidgety sine waves, deafening 808s, pitched-up rap chirps, and glitchy production with an amateurish charm, digicore is hype music that somehow feels wrong to hear outside of a bluescreen-lit bedroom. Forged by teenagers at a time when social distancing precluded live music and local scenes, digicore was both a creative outlet for pent-up angst and ennui and a crash course in digital music production. It taught these precocious musicians how to build a genre from their bedroom. In 2020, it sounded like the future of music, and by the end of 2021, it felt like it was over. 

“There was a certain vibe at the end of 2021,” remembers Zazie Bae, an artist manager and musician who formerly collaborated with twikipedia and Fax Gang. “People had to pivot to be taken seriously.”

The best of the digicore pack have had no trouble adapting to shoegaze. Having come of age at a time when the boundaries between rock and electronic music were more fluid than ever, jane remover and quannnic were as fluent in guitar music as they were internet rap and EDM. (jane remover notably pioneered the memey Jersey Club offshoot dariacore—and then swiftly moved on.) Compared to the three-minute pop nuggets on jane remover’s digicore capstone Teen Week, her 2021 noise-pop flashbang frailty moves like a post-rock album, unwinding into glittering surges and then clenching back up into brittle emo strums. Explosions of digital noise detonate loudly and colorfully, and then burn out quick like a basket of grocery store fireworks. 

However, if your definition of shoegaze necessitates caterwauling guitar, then frailty might not qualify. The circuit-fried spangles in “movies for guys,” the redlining bursts in “eye off the wheel, I’m a star,” and the bit-crushed screams of “can you tell?” all summon shoegaze’s euphonious dissonance without actually using its trademark processed guitars. In 2021, Frailty reminded me of the emerging cadre of digi-rock miscreants being dubbed fifth-wave emo. Now, looking back at the way shoegaze has developed over the last three years, frailty feels more situated in that world—and jane remover’s next album even moreso. 

On the thornier, rawkier census designated, the digicore remnants of frailty—instant-gratification beat thumps and candied Auto-Tune—are replaced with smoldering guitar riffs and searching ambiance. They Are Gutting a Body of Water’s Doug Dulgarian played on six of its songs, formally wedding jane remover to shoegaze and naturally complementing the dark, oaky tone of quannnic’s Stepdream, released a few weeks after census designated on the same label, deadAir Records (home to fellow digicore vets dazegxd and kuru).

quannnic’s first album, kenopsia, which imagines a timeline where Deftones came up on Sweet Trip and is best known for its fiber-optic nu-gaze hit, “life imitates life,” is more traditionally shoegaze than frailty. The woozy verse of “sorry days” sounds like listening to Japanese shoegaze greats Walrus via a bad pirate radio signal. The long trails of mournful glide-guitar cut in and out, and when the song abruptly bursts into staticky synths and glitchy bass, it sounds like a channel switch to volcanic digicore. On a Stepdream cut like “Comatose,” the only digicore residue is the deep-fried crispiness of its overblown drums. Otherwise, quannnic’s wailing vocals and wind-knocking guitar riffs blaze with a kinetic fury that could only come from outside of a DAW file.

jane remover and quannnic’s depressive, knotty music isn’t exactly easy listening, especially compared to the euphoric pop of twikipedia’s for the rest of your life. Hailing from Rio De Janeiro, the 20-year-old served time in the digicore collective Helix Tears alongside other mainstays like quinn, d0llywood1, and kuru. She was still doing that sound on 2022’s Chronic, but then had an epiphanic experience with the music of Parannoul, a Korean shoegaze enigma whose heralded 2021 album, To See the Next Part of the Dream, normalized VSTi—virtual studio instrument—made shoegaze in a way that likely changed the genre forever. The album that resulted from that influence is for the rest of your life, a mixture of breezy indie-pop, crunchy emo, and sandy shoegaze. Whereas her peers’ music flits between analog clarity and digital fizziness, twikipedia coated her whole album with a grainy varnish that gives even the squeakiest synths and honeyed coos a sandpapery shoegaze texture. So far, it’s the catchiest album made within this milieu. 

It’s the Parannoul sound, and even though I hear the same VSTi-gaze on Deep October’s 2023 emo-rap opus, The World Doesn’t Deserve You, the Korean maestro himself downplays his growing influence. Partially it’s because he’s humble. It’s also because Parannoul, like the digicore artists he influenced, is already onto a new artistic phase. “I've recently lost interest in modern shoegaze,” Parannoul admitted. When the multi-continental internet collective Fax Gang approached him with their “moonshot” idea to collaborate on Scattersun, Parannoul saw it as a great opportunity to branch out. “I just wanted to make something that was a big departure from my usual songs,” Parannoul said in an interview. “If I don’t change, I’ll be left behind.” 

Fax Gang were also vying for a reset. While the group, whose members are spread between the Philippines, Britain, and the U.S., collaborated with Helix Tears leader blackwinterwells during digicore’s peak, they more so occupied a neighboring genre known as hexD: an idiom of bit-crushed emo-rap with a crustier, more corroded veneer. Think cloud-rap where the clouds produce acid rain, or, as Fax Gang vocalist PK Shellboy describes their early sound, “applying a soul-enveloping crush of distortion to the Drain Gang blueprint.” In the way that the music’s oppressive distortion creates a downpour of noise that envelopes its bleary, surrealist vocals, a song like 2020’s “Centrifuge” always reminded me of shoegaze. The bit-crushed synth swells of “Jeopardy,” another tune from Fax Gang’s FxG3000, sound more like modern shoegazers Full Body 2 than Bladee. 

On Scattersun, Fax Gang and Parannoul mutually abandon what they're known for and rendezvous with geometric electronica, oblique synth-pop, and cirrostratus cloud-rap. Shoegaze still peaks through the cracks—the guitar-like jet engine whirrs on “Double Bind” nearly drown out the UK Garage beat below—and “Soliloquy” borrows digicore’s hallmark glitchiness to rattle the drum & bass instrumental until it shatters into a million colorful tidbits like a broken gumball machine. On Scattersun, the collaborators are more interested in exploiting the tension between digicore and shoegaze than finding harmony between the two styles. “I wanted to make an album that would be very awkward for existing listeners on both sides,” Parannoul said.

You could say the same about census designated, Stepdream, and for the rest of your life, all of which reduce the logical boundaries between “analog” and “digital” sounds, “internet” and “IRL” genres, and each arrive at their own variation of compu-gaze. Other figures might be joining this milieu soon enough. Former glaive collaborator aldn gestured toward shoegaze on his screamo-tinged new single, and digicore holdout Lostrushi (who Parannoul positively describes as “neon genesis shoegaze”) used the s-word to describe some forthcoming material. Hell, digicore pioneer d0llywood1 recently invoked My Bloody Valentine to explain the mosaic textures she wants to hear more of in trap. 

The most exciting part about this trend is that it’s not a genre. Each of these digicore adventurists are drifting in and out of shoegaze from different vantage points, retaining the sonic elasticity of the genre they came from. To PK Shellboy, it’s not so much their sound, but their generational spirit, that makes the digicore-to-shoegaze pipeline more than just a shared avenue. 

“With a lot of these artists in the post-digicore, post-shoegaze melting pot, one [commonality] is an earnest, hopeful sincerity,” PK Shellboy said. “Many of us grew up or blew up on an internet drowned in irony, and I can feel in the music that a lot of us are sick of it. I’m hopeful that every day, more people hear what’s being made by our generational cohort and recognize that it’s that pure sincerity, more than anything, that lets our music reach the places it does.”