Slowdive’s Album Began as a Solo Modular Synth Record
The record that took Slowdive into the top ten in four countries was not meant to be a Slowdive record at all. Neil Halstead wrote the songs in 2019 for a minimal electronic album he intended to make alone, on modular synthesizers.
everything is alive came out on Dead Oceans on 1 September 2023 instead, with all five members playing it, Halstead producing and Shawn Everett mixing in Los Angeles. It reached six on the UK Albums Chart, one on the UK independent chart, seven in Germany, four in the Netherlands, nine in Flanders and ten in New Zealand.
What the Band Did to It
Rachel Goswell has given the clearest account of why the solo version never happened, saying that Slowdive is very much the sum of its parts and that something unquantifiable happens when the five of them are in a room together.
Halstead’s own description of the transformation is more specific. He expected a dark record, and found that once the band got together some of the tunes became lighter. He has said outright that it would not have felt right to make a really dark record at that moment, and that the album is emotionally eclectic but hopeful.
That is a substantial change from the original brief. Modular synthesis is a solitary, patient discipline that rewards sitting with a patch for hours; a five-piece band playing the same material introduces disagreement, and Halstead’s stated test is that when everyone is happy with something it tends to be the stronger material.
Made Around Two Deaths
Sessions began in September 2020 after pandemic delays, and the record is dedicated to Goswell’s mother and Simon Scott’s father, both of whom died that year. Goswell has referred to profound personal shifts for some of the band during the making of it.
The album does not sound like a memorial, which is the point Halstead was making about lightness. Eight tracks run forty-one minutes: Shanty at nearly six, Prayer Remembered, Alife, the six-and-three-quarter-minute Andalucia Plays, Kisses, Skin in the Game, Chained to a Cloud at almost seven, and The Slab.
Three of the eight pass five minutes, which is what shoegaze is for. Kisses, the shortest thing here at under four, was released first in June 2023, and Halstead has admitted it struck him as too pop at first, which is a useful indication of where his instincts sit relative to his audience’s.
The Reception They Did Not Get in 1993
Metacritic settled at 82. Uncut gave nine out of ten and called it the Slowdive you have been waiting for. Louder Than War gave five stars and called it easily the best album of their career. Pitchfork gave 7.7, the Guardian and AllMusic four stars each, and the Guardian later placed it forty-fifth among the year’s best albums.
Set that against what happened the first time. Just for a Day in 1991 entered the UK indie top ten and was met by a press that had turned on shoegaze; Melody Maker’s Paul Lester called it a major letdown in considerably blunter language. Souvlaki in 1993, which had Brian Eno on two tracks, arrived as Britpop was forming and was savaged, with one reviewer writing that he would rather drown choking in a bath full of porridge than hear it again. Their American label pulled the tour funding partway through the supporting dates.
Pygmalion followed in 1995, minimal and ambient. Creation Records dropped the band one week after releasing it.
The Singles Were Released Backwards
Four singles preceded the album across ten weeks: Kisses on 20 June, Skin in the Game on 18 July, The Slab on 9 August and Alife on 30 August, two days before release. That is an unusually heavy campaign for a band with this history, and the sequencing is instructive.
Kisses and Skin in the Game are the two shortest and most direct songs on the record, and they went first. The Slab, at five minutes ten, came third. The long, slow pieces that make up most of the album, Andalucia Plays and Chained to a Cloud, were never released as singles at all.
Leading with the accessible material and holding back the seven-minute tracks is standard practice, but it means the two songs that best represent what the band actually does went unheard until the album arrived. It is also why Halstead’s reservation about Kisses being too pop matters: the track that opened the campaign was the one furthest from his instincts.
Twenty-Two Years Off
They formed in Reading in October 1989 around Halstead and Goswell, childhood friends, with Christian Savill, Nick Chaplin and eventually Simon Scott on drums. The name came from a Siouxsie and the Banshees song, and Goswell has said she was outvoted on it.
After the split Halstead and Goswell made country-inflected records as Mojave 3 for 4AD, Scott went into electronic music, and Savill kept the older sound going in Monster Movie. A Twitter account appeared in November 2013, and the band reformed to play Primavera Sound in 2014, which Halstead has described as the first official reunion offer they received. The plan was to do one show.
The self-titled album that followed in 2017 was their first in twenty-two years. It found audiences several times larger than anything they had played to in the nineties, which is the part of the story that makes the 2023 chart positions comprehensible.
Why It Worked the Second Time
The obvious explanation is that the music did not change and the listeners did. Shoegaze was dismissed in Britain for being insufficiently laddish at a moment when the press wanted guitar bands to have opinions and haircuts. Nothing about that judgement was about the records.
The less obvious explanation is streaming. A style built on texture and repetition, with vocals mixed in as another instrument, works far better on headphones and on autoplay than it did on a radio format designed around a chorus. An entire generation found Souvlaki without any of the context that had been used to bury it.
There is a third factor, which is that the band never attempted a rebrand. Mojave 3 and Monster Movie were different projects under different names rather than an updated Slowdive, so nothing in the catalogue muddied what the group was. When the reunion came there was no revisionist version to explain and no embarrassing late-period record to skip.
That matters commercially as well as artistically. A returning band whose back catalogue is coherent can be discovered in any order, which is precisely how streaming delivers listeners. Anyone who arrives at everything is alive first will find that Souvlaki sounds like the same group, thirty years apart.
Selling Out the Rooms
The touring for everything is alive ran from late September 2023 through mid-December, across North America, then the UK and Ireland, then South America, with many dates sold out. Most of the UK shows went before the album was released.
A band dropped by its label in 1995 selling out British venues in advance of a record thirty years later is an unusually complete reversal. It puts them alongside Camera Obscura returning after eleven years and taking number four in Scotland: two groups whose method never altered, waiting out a critical consensus that eventually moved on without them.
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