The Mermaid in the Black Hole: my bloody valentine’s 2025 reunion is a deafening triumph
The band return to Manchester.
Photo: Press
In the 2014 BBC documentary The Joy of the Guitar Riff, deadpan rock journalist John Duran had this to say about my bloody valentine: “When you hear my bloody valentine for the first time, nothing prepares you for it. […] It’s like a mermaid falling into a blackhole.”
On the Dublin shoegaze group’s hotly anticipated first tour of the post-COVID age, the mermaid once again falls into the blackhole, live and in the flesh/scales.
my bloody valentine are one of those bands that seem to exist in their own plane. Their own swirling, whirling, curling plane. Despite being very much in the defining whirlpool of what we now know as shoegaze, the quartet have always had that indescribable otherworldliness, something that people can’t touch, yet have never stopped reaching out towards in flailed, fanatic motion… and you can feel it when arriving at Aviva Studios.
I’m not sure I’ve ever felt such palpable anticipation as I have waiting in that venue foyer before my bloody valentine’s Manchester show. It’s intoxicating. Potent. Eyeliner-draped couples weighing up the prices of loveless merchandise, BBC6 Music dads checking the Sports app since they’ve made the difficult choice to come to the show rather than keep up with Monday Night Football, and veteran Kool-Aid acid-testers, greyed yet no less gleeful, debating whether to ‘cheat’ (wear earplugs).
To earplug or not to earplug, that is the question. Unlike the fictitious Prince of Denmark’s, this question has an easy answer. my bloody valentine’s noise stretches out in a vicious recoil, delightfully vengeful. It hits like a fist. Distortion maestro Kevin Shields’ jenga-like stack of guitar amplifiers sears the venue as the band launch into the acidic rippling i only said. There are glimmers of smiles around the audience, knowing looks shared… ‘it is as loud as we’d heard it was going to be’.
Let’s get this out of the way now. There’s a never-ending debate around noise whenever my bloody valentine resurface out of their Winterly (well, seven-year) hibernation. Should the band play that loud? Why do they have to? Don’t they care about fans’ ears? Is volume integral to the sound? There are always these echoing questions of the artist’s responsibility to public health, and of the artist’s responsibility to their own artistry.
To go back to the initial question posed — yes. Yes, the band should play that loud. They have to play that loud. It’s built into the spine of the music. Seminal single when you sleep, when played quietly, sounds like a muddied, blurred attempt at a synth-pop song. When played at max volume (to paraphrase the back sleeve of old RCA Bowie records), the track twists out of its snappy pop song format into a noisy, mindless contortion. It’s bubblegum pop — but distortion fractures the form into a John Carpenter-like monstrosity.
my bloody valentine continue to be as important than ever, down to this very tension: between vulnerability and aggression, between love and hate, between outwardness and inwardness. The band have made a career out of making melancholy introspection as ear-splitting as it can unfeasibly be.
The group rattles through their star-studded set — new you ethereally bounces in a buoyant groove owing to Cocteau Twins’ peak of poppyness, only tomorrow morphs into a dizzy outro, turbulent with vertigo and only shallow is nothing less than pure distorted bliss. Few words are shared in between these bursts of clangour. The band’s curious leader, Kevin Shields — probably the only leader to ‘lead’ through mainly being alone in a room full of Fender Jazzmasters and reverse reverb pedals — responds dryly to attempted front-row bantering:
“What? What? Seriously, I can’t hear you. I’m deaf as fuck.”
Guitarist/vocalist Bilinda Butcher — the angelic, sparkly half of my bloody valentine’s sonic matrimony — similarly has little to add. “Thanks for coming,” she says in a hushed tone. Then, after more ear-drum bashing, she adds with a sort of squirrelly wisdom, “Thanks for coming… and thanks for staying.” The near-silence in between the songs feels almost deafening in its own right.
my bloody valentine are the epitome of letting the music do the talking. There are countless artists who are wonderful orators, artists who use their ‘mid-set chat’ almost like prologues to the novels found in their songs (a recent example being Duboyne’s indie-darling-turned-starlet CMAT, for instance). Kevin Shields, Bilinda Butcher, Debbie Googe and Colm Ó Cíosóig are not those sorts of artists. And that’s wonderful, too, in its own right. They are, I suppose, simply vessels for their music. Softly spoken bastions of the deafening dream. They appear humble, despite the infinitum of guitar-tech riches behind them, just pleased that people still want to share the distortion with them. The ten-minute ‘noise section’ in you made me realise stretches on into a void, a temporal rift of sorts. Planet lifespans are lived and shed. And yet, we stay to share the noise.
It’s odd that behind such noise are people so quiet. At the same time, it makes so much sense.
my bloody valentine’s 2025 show is really like nothing I’ve ever heard before. The group’s two-hour set is a testament to their mammoth influence over anyone who’s wanted to make guitars sound like they’re crying.
Go out and see them if you can. Wear your earplugs, and try to catch some of the scales as the mermaid falls once again into the blackhole.