Still in a Dream (Shoegaze, Slackers, and the Reinvention of Rock, 1984-1994)

The thrilling story of underground rock in the late 1980s and early 1990s, tracing the emergence of shoegaze and grunge as the era’s defining sounds, from acclaimed music writer Simon Reynolds, author of Rip It Up and Start Again.

Twenty years after his celebrated postpunk best-seller, Rip It Up and Start Again, Simon Reynolds tells the tale of what happened next: 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 analog culture of vinyl records and music papers, before the Internet changed everything.