Saturday, 22 November 2025

Traces of excitement around Dublin in the days before My Bloody Valentine’s tour kickoff were small but palpable, resembling something like the clues for a scavenger hunt. A paper sign next to a busker on Grafton Street appeared with the scrawled words ‘Shoegaze started here in 1983’. Rogue flashes of ‘Loveless’ merchandise could be glimpsed underneath a passerby’s coat, a blur of red and pink on a hoodie, Bilinda Butcher’s faded face on someone’s t-shirt. I’d booked the tickets as a surprise for my dad almost a year ago, after a morning spent shakily scouring Reddit for the presale code. Now, we walked around the city in barely contained anticipation, trying to gauge the conditions of the place that had delivered such a beguiling band to the world. We both came up empty. No street or alley felt immense enough to lay claim to such an unearthly sound.

I don’t remember the first time I listened to MBV, only that it quickly escalated into obsession. I do remember the stages of becoming obsessed; the steadily growing intrigue at such a dense wash of sound hissing over syrupy vocals, followed by full-blown infatuation with the aesthetics that accompanied them: the cream, pink and blue glow of each of their four album covers, the ravings of an ever-accumulating cult fanbase, Kevin Shield’s broken silence on the vaporous soundtrack of Coppola’s ‘Lost in Translation’ (2003). Underneath the surface of this obsession was the melancholy that what I had stumbled across was at present no more than a spectre; they’d performed once in sixteen years and had all but stopped releasing music. So, to find myself sat in Dublin’s 3Arena with the gauzy colours of ‘Loveless’ lighting the stage felt like bearing witness to a ghost. 

It was instantly clear why there had been two industrial-sized boxes of ear-plugs posted at the entrance. Shouting into each other’s ears and flinching at each other’s breath (we’d arrived at the venue at 18:00 and hadn’t had dinner) my dad and I agreed that we were experiencing sound in a way neither of us had ever done. It became an embryonic sack, emptying you of your contents until you were nothing more than skin, vibrating. There were moments when the music occupied the air so fully that it was almost nauseating, and then the murmured thread of a melody would pull your soul back into your body. This was especially potent in the bridge of ‘Off Your Face’, which felt like being repeatedly pulled against the elastic of a catapult, and then gently set down again. In their final track, they played around ten minutes of raw, unbridled sound. I wasn’t sure if the world was ending or beginning. 

There was one solitary strip of confetti that stayed in the air for the entire set, sustained by the sheer force of the sound’s vibrations. At first glance, I’d mistaken it for a butterfly, but soon realised it was testimony to something much rarer. An artistry so deeply affecting, so sensorial, that it transcended the aural. 

Words by Leila Edelsztein Satz