Debut Record by No New Gaze Is First “No-Gaze” Record

FFO: Julie, Fleshwater, Trauma Ray

Combine a quartet of nineteen-year-old rock musicians with NO musical training and a visceral distaste for the shoegaze/nugaze scene and one can already hear the sonic ecstasy of No New Gaze’s freshman release: no-gazeno-gaze. Carved from the epic bluffs of La Crosse, Wisconsin; comprised of Jeffery Malbert, Sara Connelly, Abraham Krueger, and Sara Fries; No New Gaze — an allusion to the endlessly influential, Brian Eno-produced No New York album — explain their motives for starting the band in the album’s liner notes:

There was this guy in our school named Gerald. Gerald played in a shoegaze band. He was dumb. So we said, “Let’s make a band. We don’t know how to play instruments, but if Gerald can do it, so can we. So we bought the cheapest, used instruments we could find, got two distortion pedals, and starting playing.

The final, crushing result is a fifty-four minute and twenty-nine second record that disassembles the guitar, bass, and synth textures of superb modern shoegaze acts like Fleshwater, Julie, Narrowhead, and Trauma Ray and reconstructs a splendorous triumph of musical cacophony. Bass guitars sound more like drums, drums sound more like glockenspiels, guitars are picked and scraped with the innocence of a child, and keyboards follow pathless loops of dissonant arpeggios. Band members frequently — sometime in the middle of a song — switch instruments with lovely and exuberant results. There is a method to this gen-Z madness, though. The band does practice. They can — and do — replicate their songs live.

Songs are composed with a Dadaist approach based on feel rather than previous musical knowledge or technical ability. Fries, for instance, wavers over ethereal, atonal melodies at the keyboards upper register on the songs, “Death To Mr. Lies,” “The Renaissance,” and “Maybe She’ll Die;” whereas Malbert’s piano playing on the instrumental, “Everybody Loves Me,” relies on hammering the same highly distorted half-diminished chord. Krueger plays palm-muted guitar on the tracks, “I Think I Don’t Know” and “Come Inside.” Connelly’s guitar, however, sounds more like twelve-tone serialist compositions of the mid-twentieth century rehearsed on the high E. These differences in style are immediately perceivable, giving the audience a rare insight into how self-taught musicians at the advent of their artistic infancy sound.

Vocal duties are shared, as well. Lyrics are whispered, mumbled, babbled, garbled, and often times resemble nothing short of lexical nonsense. Random phrases, baby talk, and hushed wails ignite each song, the highlight being the nine-minute a cappella ballad, “Sweetheart,” which might be about a man and a horse.

no-gazeno-gaze delights and surprises. Nearly psychedelic, nearly shoegaze, nearly Teenage Jesus and the Jerks; No New Gaze is sure to inspire all artists of all mediums to never let a lack of training or education stop you from creating.

no-gazeno-gaze by No New Gaze will be released on June 23, 2026 on JDowDow Records, Inc.