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Still in a Dream: Shoegaze, Slackers, and the Reinvention of Rock, 1984-1994
Not yet published
Expected 12 Jan 27The definitive story of the slackers and shoegazers who reinvented rock.
Twenty years after his acclaimed postpunk best-seller, Rip It Up and Start Again, Simon Reynolds tells the tale of what happened the underground explosion of noisepop, shoegaze, slacker rock and grunge that reverberated through the late Eighties into the early Nineties.
Capturing the musical exhilaration of the era along with the alienation of youth during a period of ascendant conservative politics and glitzy mainstream pop, Still in a Dream celebrates a golden age of guitar reinvention, a second psychedelia of mind-blowing sounds pioneered by bands like My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth. In Britain, groups like Cocteau Twins and Slowdive escaped into shimmering dreamworlds while American underground rockers like Dinosaur Jr. and Pavement blended apathy and urgency into thrilling noise.
A propulsive and personal account from a journalist who covered this music in real time from the frontlines, Still in a Dream vividly recreates a period that was the last blast for the analogue culture of vinyl records and music papers, before the Internet changed everything.
Twenty years after his acclaimed postpunk best-seller, Rip It Up and Start Again, Simon Reynolds tells the tale of what happened the underground explosion of noisepop, shoegaze, slacker rock and grunge that reverberated through the late Eighties into the early Nineties.
Capturing the musical exhilaration of the era along with the alienation of youth during a period of ascendant conservative politics and glitzy mainstream pop, Still in a Dream celebrates a golden age of guitar reinvention, a second psychedelia of mind-blowing sounds pioneered by bands like My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth. In Britain, groups like Cocteau Twins and Slowdive escaped into shimmering dreamworlds while American underground rockers like Dinosaur Jr. and Pavement blended apathy and urgency into thrilling noise.
A propulsive and personal account from a journalist who covered this music in real time from the frontlines, Still in a Dream vividly recreates a period that was the last blast for the analogue culture of vinyl records and music papers, before the Internet changed everything.
- GenresMusicNonfictionHistory
464 pages, Paperback
First published June 18, 2026
About the author
Simon Reynolds
54 books519 followersSimon Reynolds is one of the most respected music journalists working today, and his writing is both influential and polarizing. He draws on an impressive range of knowledge, and writes with a fluid, engaging style. His books Rip it Up and Start Again and Generation Ecstasy are well-regarded works about their respective genres, and RETROMANIA may be his most broadly appealing book yet. It makes an argument about art, nostalgia, and technology that has implications for all readerswhether diehard music fans or not. Its an important and provocative look at the present and future of culture and innovation."
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
Want to Read
February 5, 2026good to know that simon reynolds' writing irreversibly changed me as a teenager and will continue to do so as a 25 year old
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
I was very excited when I saw that this was coming out, so I immediately emailed the publisher to say that I wanted to host a launch event for it. They told me that Reynolds lived in the USA and they weren't sure if he was coming over for the publication, but a few weeks later they confirmed he was so we set one up. A few years ago I read and loved Rip It Up and Start Again, on postpunk, and Retromania on the conservatism of backward looking music which was similarly brilliant. I was already a huge postpunk lover, but that book introduced me to several obscure bands that I went on to listen to and love. I am a huge fan of this period of indie rock music (84 - 94), so I was looking forward to repeating my previous experience.
I was born in 1981 so Rip It Up and Start Again explored the musical era I was born in, and so when I started discovering this music when I was about 17 onwards it was all in the distant past. The period that this book covers coincides with me being more aware of the music happening around me, but as a 3 - 13 year old I wasn't paying attention to this kind of stuff, until the book gets to Grunge. I loved Michael Jackson as a kid, but it wasn't until I was 11 and I discovered Nirvana and the Prodigy that I really fell in love with music. After discovering these groups I moved to Harlesden in London, made friends with a big group of black boys my age, and we exclusively listen to Rap, Jungle or Ragga, and it wasn't until after I was 16 that I started paying attention to Rock music again. I gradually began to discover some of the groups in this book. Somehow I discovered the Velvet Underground, which led me down a pathway of discovering all of their inheritors like The Pixies, Sonic Youth, The Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, Pavement etc... I managed to see all of these bands live at some point in the 2000's, though they were all past their glory days and I was there to hear the music from the 80's - early 90's.
This book is very personal for Reynolds, because he was just starting out in music journalism in this period of time. He began a fanzine, and managed to get a staff position at Melody Maker, so he has a symbiotic relationship with this music scene, having interviewed, watched, reviewed and encouraged many of the bands. He suggests that in some ways this was the last gasp of Rock music before it was superseded by the rise of electronic music and hip hop. I tend to agree with him. There are good rock bands after this period, but I don't think that there has been a really exciting or innovative rock scene since then. Grunge and Britpop were the last major rock scenes (both covered in this book), and both of them are kind of backward looking and retro. What do you get after this? Nu-Metal? Shite. Pop Punk/Emo? Shite. Indie Sleaze? Some good stuff but all of it is derivative.
Reynolds' music criticism is intelligent and insightful. He argues that Postpunk became exhausted and the music he writes about here arose as a dialectical response to what came before. Postpunk was about tension, intensity, politics, anti-rockist instrumentation, repudiating the music of the 60s and 70s. The music that follows re-introduces influences from the 60s and 70s, brings the guitar back to the forefront, revels in emotion and feeling and texture, and moves away from overt politics towards individual experience and feelings. It creates a neo-psychedelia. Reagan was elected twice, followed by George HW Bush, and Thatcher was elected three times followed by John Major in this period. Many young people became depressed and apathetic about politics because it seemed that there was no way to overcome this reactionary politics. This helps to explain why so many bands turned inwards and why music became more spiritual, erotic or driven by psychology. Intelligent, meaningful lyrics had been a central part of Postpunk. Groups like Cocteau Twins, REM or My Bloody Valentine sang, murmured or whispered words or nonsense, and were using the voice as part of the music texture rather than putting it front and centre.
When I read Rip it Up and Start Again I was already a fan of groups like Wire, The Fall, Joy Division and the Talking Heads. But I learned about groups like Flipper, Chrome, Swell Maps, This Heat and Young Marble Giants from that book. Reading this, I was familiar with most of the bands but I have been listening to groups like Felt, Loop, Main, Dif Juz and Lush whilst reading this group. I have come away with lots to explore and discover.
I was born in 1981 so Rip It Up and Start Again explored the musical era I was born in, and so when I started discovering this music when I was about 17 onwards it was all in the distant past. The period that this book covers coincides with me being more aware of the music happening around me, but as a 3 - 13 year old I wasn't paying attention to this kind of stuff, until the book gets to Grunge. I loved Michael Jackson as a kid, but it wasn't until I was 11 and I discovered Nirvana and the Prodigy that I really fell in love with music. After discovering these groups I moved to Harlesden in London, made friends with a big group of black boys my age, and we exclusively listen to Rap, Jungle or Ragga, and it wasn't until after I was 16 that I started paying attention to Rock music again. I gradually began to discover some of the groups in this book. Somehow I discovered the Velvet Underground, which led me down a pathway of discovering all of their inheritors like The Pixies, Sonic Youth, The Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, Pavement etc... I managed to see all of these bands live at some point in the 2000's, though they were all past their glory days and I was there to hear the music from the 80's - early 90's.
This book is very personal for Reynolds, because he was just starting out in music journalism in this period of time. He began a fanzine, and managed to get a staff position at Melody Maker, so he has a symbiotic relationship with this music scene, having interviewed, watched, reviewed and encouraged many of the bands. He suggests that in some ways this was the last gasp of Rock music before it was superseded by the rise of electronic music and hip hop. I tend to agree with him. There are good rock bands after this period, but I don't think that there has been a really exciting or innovative rock scene since then. Grunge and Britpop were the last major rock scenes (both covered in this book), and both of them are kind of backward looking and retro. What do you get after this? Nu-Metal? Shite. Pop Punk/Emo? Shite. Indie Sleaze? Some good stuff but all of it is derivative.
Reynolds' music criticism is intelligent and insightful. He argues that Postpunk became exhausted and the music he writes about here arose as a dialectical response to what came before. Postpunk was about tension, intensity, politics, anti-rockist instrumentation, repudiating the music of the 60s and 70s. The music that follows re-introduces influences from the 60s and 70s, brings the guitar back to the forefront, revels in emotion and feeling and texture, and moves away from overt politics towards individual experience and feelings. It creates a neo-psychedelia. Reagan was elected twice, followed by George HW Bush, and Thatcher was elected three times followed by John Major in this period. Many young people became depressed and apathetic about politics because it seemed that there was no way to overcome this reactionary politics. This helps to explain why so many bands turned inwards and why music became more spiritual, erotic or driven by psychology. Intelligent, meaningful lyrics had been a central part of Postpunk. Groups like Cocteau Twins, REM or My Bloody Valentine sang, murmured or whispered words or nonsense, and were using the voice as part of the music texture rather than putting it front and centre.
When I read Rip it Up and Start Again I was already a fan of groups like Wire, The Fall, Joy Division and the Talking Heads. But I learned about groups like Flipper, Chrome, Swell Maps, This Heat and Young Marble Giants from that book. Reading this, I was familiar with most of the bands but I have been listening to groups like Felt, Loop, Main, Dif Juz and Lush whilst reading this group. I have come away with lots to explore and discover.
June 19, 2026
I've never dropped everything so fast to read a book immediately after receiving my pre-order. Rip It Up and Start Again changed my life, but is largely about bands I intellectually admire more than actually listen to. Still in a Dream is about music I put on regularly, or grew up with, or spent hours being pretentious about in student bars. It's about a scene that exhausted itself a decade before I was old enough to personally participate in it, but still suffused all the spaces a historically-minded art scavenger like teenage me explored in search of identity. It's about the music I discovered as a student through excitingly smart friends and Gregg Araki movies and became obnoxiously pseudo-intellectual about. It talks about Murmur and Zen Arcade. It even takes the time to rhapsodize Throwing Muses' Chains Changed EP, which I must have listened to 10,000 times over the last few decades, and might have been genuinely life-saving on some level.
It's a good book. It met my sky-high expectations. It refuses to valorise or mythologise any of the usual suspects. It threatens to talk about Felt as much as Rip It Up and Start Again pushed Scritti Politti. It's a bit autobiographical. If it doesn't contain as much illuminating social context as that latter book, or such a sense of mission, or so many gargantuan personalities, that's a symptom of the subject rather than the book - a period of rock retreating from a sense of social purpose and mission into a kind of womblike interiority. Sometimes the spaces under examination feel monastic. J Mascis wasn't the least verbally articulate person on the scene.
Reading this I was frequently reminded of the rise of the mystery cult movement in the later Roman era. As people lost their political agency and hope for material change under the increasingly sclerotic and authoritarian Empire, the heart of culture moved from the public forums to hidden spaces under domestic dwellings - spaces of mysticism and personal withdrawal. Something similar seems to be happening here, but with more fuzzy guitars. I'm not sure what to do with that thought, except maybe retreat into a dark room and gaze at my shoes.
It's a good book. It met my sky-high expectations. It refuses to valorise or mythologise any of the usual suspects. It threatens to talk about Felt as much as Rip It Up and Start Again pushed Scritti Politti. It's a bit autobiographical. If it doesn't contain as much illuminating social context as that latter book, or such a sense of mission, or so many gargantuan personalities, that's a symptom of the subject rather than the book - a period of rock retreating from a sense of social purpose and mission into a kind of womblike interiority. Sometimes the spaces under examination feel monastic. J Mascis wasn't the least verbally articulate person on the scene.
Reading this I was frequently reminded of the rise of the mystery cult movement in the later Roman era. As people lost their political agency and hope for material change under the increasingly sclerotic and authoritarian Empire, the heart of culture moved from the public forums to hidden spaces under domestic dwellings - spaces of mysticism and personal withdrawal. Something similar seems to be happening here, but with more fuzzy guitars. I'm not sure what to do with that thought, except maybe retreat into a dark room and gaze at my shoes.
June 28, 2026
Rip it Up and Start Again is easily one of my favorite rock criticism books, so I was very excited for Reynolds’ exploration of the 80s-00’s. While Rip it Up felt like a feverish dive into Reynolds’ mixtapes, this one is much more reflective and personal. So many of the artists and albums are connected to the author’s experiences as a Melody Maker critic, which makes it feel more like reading his journals than listening to a mixtape. The range of bands covered here is wide and idiosyncratic: shoegaze, British indie, noise, grunge, post-rock…but this one doesn’t hit the same heights as Rip It up.
*my version included a bonus ‘zine with additional recommendations not included in the book!
*my version included a bonus ‘zine with additional recommendations not included in the book!
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews