My Bloody Valentine Review: Shoegaze's Pioneers Reaffirm Their Profound Pertinence

OVO Arena, Wembley

"It's an age thing..."

Shoegaze’s laconic deities re-emerge; aged, unhurried, unpolished, and still unmatched in their commitment to sensory obliteration.

Thirty-plus years since Loveless rewired alternative music’s circuitry, My Bloody Valentine returned to London this evening with an atmosphere closer to pilgrimage than gig. Wembley—sold out, undulating with anticipation; welcomed a band whose mythology has only deepened during their recent seven-year absence.

The visual environment tonight proves immediately intoxicating: a dense haze of diffused light, with a vast backdrop of pink and red hues swirling and bleeding into one another, rendering the musicians little more than silhouettes. It’s a stage design that mirrors the band’s core aesthetic; edges blurred, identities dissolved, everything submerged in a kind of chromatic dream-state.

Without ceremony, guitarist Shields steps forward and ignites 'I Only Said'; impact seethes instantaneously and raptures the crowd of seismic proportions. A monumental wall-of-sound; thick, abrasive, all-consuming—surges across the arena, yet within it, high, glassy synth lines glide with unexpected delicacy. Shields’ breath-thin vocals hover in the upper air, ghostlike and half-buried, exactly as they should be. The mix is characteristically submerged; the voice becomes another instrument dissolving into tonight's abyss.

'When You Sleep' ushers in the evening’s first collective lift. A slight uptick in tempo coaxes Wembley to its feet, transforming the arena into a swaying, diaphanous mass. It’s one of the night’s true peaks: that perfect tension between grungy abrasion and dreamlike sensuality, still as hypnotic and intoxicating as it was in their yesteryear.

A brief false start ushers 'New You' into existence, but once they settle, its gentler contours suit the cavernous space beautifully. The sea of red haze softens, Shields and Butcher’s voices melting into one another with a delicacy that now feels prophetic; heralding a dream-pop resurgence they unwittingly seeded decades ago.

'Only Tomorrow' also briefly falters, collapsing twice before the band regain their footing. Shields breaks character just once: “It’s an age thing,” he deadpans, prompting a warm ripple of laughter from a laconic group of musicians. Then a shift: the room begins to vibrate at the structural level. 'Come in Alone' and 'Only Shallow' erupt with feral intensity. Butcher’s vocals—thin silver threads weaving through the storm; contrast sharply with the band’s punishing low-end and, for a few glorious minutes, Loveless feels less like an art form and more like a force of nature invoked anew.

Short-lived respites, 'Off Your Face', 'Thorn', offer glimmers of the band’s pre-shoegaze DNA. But the entourage indulge clarity only fleetingly. 'To Here Knows When' tests the audience’s endurance: a drifting, amorphous five-minute haze in which melody dissolves, time blurs, and patience thins. 'Soon' ignites ó Cíosóig’s breakbeat drumming and Googe's brooding basslines; slicing through the fog with surgical precision, anchoring the swirling chaos. The backdrop pulses in saturated pink-red bursts as Shields murmurs his brooding lines (“Wake up, don’t fear…”) with an almost liturgical calm.

The home stretch arrives with the ferocity of their earliest work, channelling the band’s late-’80s post-punk snarl, a concise and cathartic jolt before the inevitable closer. 'You Made Me Realise' unfurls with its traditional six-minute noise section; an ecstatic, disorienting blizzard of distortion and strobe. The entire arena hangs in suspended animation until the group snap back into the final chorus with brutal finality. A single understated “thank you,” and they dissolve into the dark as quickly as they appeared.

What remains is the unmistakable afterglow of a performance that is cataclysmic, all-enveloping and defiantly singular. The hazy, silhouette-driven staging proves a perfect visual metaphor for their sonic philosophy: ambiguity as power, distortion as emotional language. Scattered sections of the set collapse into homogeneity yet their brilliance lies in the disorienting beauty of losing definition; a reaffirmation of shoegaze's pertinent pioneers reverberating to this day.

8/10

My Bloody Valentine are currently on tour, tickets for their shows can be found here.

Photo is courtesy of Isaac Watson.