The Nineties are big, fashion-wise, up to Y2K. I guess it makes sense to be nostalgic for an era where there could still be a future. My daughter, 14, dresses like a 90s/Y2K kid a lot of the time, she watches Friends, she likes modern music but also the Cranberries. Deftones got the reaction at Coachella that Blur were looking for; a while ago a teacher I know reported that the kids were into Deftones and the Smashing Pumpkins. I thought it was a joke at first, but then I started nooticing. Pop punk bands are on nostalgia tours, the surviving grunge bands have been doing it for a while. The Smashing Pumpkins, Green Day, and Rancid are all touring together. So it’s not much surprise that the new wave of shoegaze has come directly from Gen Z, who picked up these sounds over the years and now, as the final wave of Zoomers come to high school, have started incorporating it into their own bands. I’m not complaining in the slightest; lord knows people could be into far worse influences than shoegaze and grunge-pop.

julie, a band that has developed some buzz over the last five years, lays the Nineties vibe on heavily on their debut record, my anti-aircraft friend. I recently gave the last of my CD collection to my daughter. She decided to pick up CDs as an aesthetic; if I’d known, I would have kept more. There are a number of, say, ‘local artists’ in that collection. If you were a music nerd in the day, you know the type: CDs you got from your friends bands, or your cousin’s band, or you were handed by family members because they thought you might be able to spread the word. There’s a lot of pop punk, one-man industrial bands, bubblegrunge. I swear, though, that one of them sounds pretty much like my anti-aircraft friend. It gives off all the vibes of being the recorded-wherever CD that bands playing the local community center opening up for the local scene band put on their merch table. You listen to it a couple of times, think that these guys could really go somewhere, and then revisit it five years later, wondering at first where the hell you picked this one up. It’s loud grunge guitars, but delivered in knotty, gnarled ways, as befitting your buddy Tom’s shoegaze band, the one who were purer than everyone else in the scene. Their fans were weird, but kind of cool. They never fit in, though; they missed Loveless by eight years, they weren’t nu metal enough for the Battle of the Bands, they listened to bands you didn’t know at the time.

At any rate, Nirvana played arenas after Black Flag played filthy punk clubs. julie is signed to Atlantic Records while your buddy Tom’s band played their last show some time around the start of the Second Gulf War. Tom’s an insurance salesman now, and he thinks julie is fine, thanks, but derivative as hell. Not that it’s a bad thing, when bands wear their influences on their sleeves, but it won’t shake the world. Unless, of course, there happened to be a global resurgence in forms like shoegaze, grunge, and weird post-genre meldings. Then, maybe. Maybe.