m b v by My Bloody Valentine — The 22-Year Wait Was Worth It

On February 2, 2013, without warning, My Bloody Valentine released m b v — their first album in 22 years. The announcement crashed their website. Fans who had spent decades waiting for a follow-up to Loveless scrambled to download it. The question was enormous: could any album live up to two decades of anticipation?

The answer: yes, remarkably so.

The Long Silence

After Loveless, Kevin Shields essentially withdrew from public life. He contributed guitar to several Primal Scream albums, scored Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003), and occasionally appeared at music festivals. But the promised follow-up to Loveless never materialized, despite persistent rumors of ongoing recording sessions.

Shields later revealed that he had been working on new material intermittently throughout the entire period, recording at various studios and his own home setup. Some tracks dated back to sessions immediately following Loveless in the early 1990s; others were completed mere weeks before release. The album’s extended gestation gave it a unique quality — it sounds both timeless and out of time.

The Music

m b v is structured in three distinct sections, each pushing in a different sonic direction.

Tracks 1-3 are the most recognizably “My Bloody Valentine” in the Loveless tradition. “She Found Now” opens with a slow-motion wash of guitar that envelops the listener like fog. It is gentler than anything on Loveless, almost ambient in its unhurried beauty. “Only Tomorrow” is the album’s most immediate track — a driving rocker with Shields’s tremolo-bar guitar technique and a soaring, repetitive melody. “Who Sees You” blends treated vocals with layered guitars into a dreamy, mid-tempo piece.

Tracks 4-6 push into more experimental territory. “Is This and Yes” features Bilinda Butcher’s vocals over what sounds like a warped, sampled orchestral arrangement. “If I Am” introduces stuttering, glitchy rhythms that recall the drum-and-bass experiments Shields was reportedly pursuing in the late 1990s. “New You” is surprisingly pop-oriented — a catchy, upbeat track with clear vocals and a memorable melody.

Tracks 7-9 are the album’s most radical section. “In Another Way” builds a massive wall of distorted guitar over a shuffling beat, recalling Loveless at its most intense. “Nothing Is” layers what sounds like a live drum recording beneath increasingly dense waves of guitar noise, creating an almost industrial effect. “Wonder 2” closes the album with a tremolo-bar-manipulated guitar figure played over a drum-and-bass breakbeat — the collision of shoegaze and electronic music that Shields had apparently been pursuing for years.

Why It Works

m b v succeeds because it neither retreats to the safety of Loveless nor abandons what made My Bloody Valentine distinctive. Shields’s guitar technique is present throughout, but it is applied to new contexts — ambient passages, rhythmic experiments, pop melodies. The album feels like a natural evolution rather than either a rehash or a radical reinvention.

The production is characteristically dense but also more varied than Loveless. Quiet, spacious moments alternate with overwhelming noise. The stereo field is used imaginatively, with sounds appearing and disappearing at the edges of perception. Headphone listening reveals details that speakers miss.

Reception and Context

m b v was released independently through My Bloody Valentine’s own website, bypassing labels entirely. Critical reception was overwhelmingly positive, with many reviewers expressing genuine surprise that the album met expectations.

The timing was significant. By 2013, shoegaze had experienced a revival through bands like Deafheaven, Nothing, and A Place to Bury Strangers, all of whom cited Loveless as a foundational influence. m b v arrived into a landscape that it had helped create, and its new directions — particularly the electronic-influenced final tracks — suggested paths the genre had not yet explored.

For those interested in how Shields’s innovations influenced subsequent guitar music, see our history of shoegaze and dream pop and essential guitar pedals guide.

Key Takeaways

• m b v delivers a worthy follow-up to Loveless by evolving Shields’s sonic palette rather than repeating it
• The album’s three-section structure moves from familiar shoegaze through experimentation to radical guitar-meets-electronic hybrids
• Its independent digital release bypassed traditional label structures
• “Wonder 2” points toward unexplored intersections of shoegaze and electronic music

Rating: 8.5/10

A triumph of patience and perfectionism. m b v proves that some artists are worth waiting for, no matter how long.