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"We tried to sorta marry punk rock and psychedelia, that’s what we were really trying to do," said Alan McGee, co-founder of Creation Records, in the 2014 documentary Beautiful Noise. "It’s no more complicated than that, to be honest."

Perhaps the aural mist of '80s and '90s shoegaze obscures what is, by McGee’s estimation, a simple 1+1=2 scenario of genre fusion. But it leaves out nuanced characteristics (My Bloody Valentine’s churning sensuality, 4AD band Cocteau Twins’ fluid faerie tales and more). In the last few years, a growing number of legacy shoegaze acts have gotten those nuances re-evaluated in the finer light of reunions, tours, re-releases and/or comeback records (mbv in 2013 and Slowdive’s live dates last year, just naming a few).

It’s gone all out this year, too: Swervedriver’s first new record in 17 years, Lush’s forthcoming reissues (with a live reunion scheduled for 2016) and the Jesus and Mary Chain’s world tour behind the Psychocandy anniversary. But most of 2015 has belonged to Ride. The Oxford-born shoegaze foursome has been booked solid with dates worldwide since February, culminating with dates in Asia and in its landmark 1990 debut Nowhere getting a grand reissue next month, marking its 25th anniversary. But it’s the stateside dates—punctuated by festival sets at Coachella in April and next month’s Fun Fun Fun Fest—that have meant the most to the band.

-=-=-=-"I always felt—in the last 20 years, it has passed in a flash—that no one gave a shit about Ride," quips Andy Bell, who founded the band with Mark Gardener in 1988. "I definitely credit America and American fans... for giving the music its own life. This reunion, I think, has been powered by the love from America."

Bell paralleled it to how fans in England discovered '70s German Krautrock in the '90s, referencing UK critic Julian Cope and his 1995 book Krautrocksampler.

"Sometimes it takes a different country to appreciate what another country's done," he said. "Which is kind of a sweet thought, really."

Los Angeles producer Justin Meldal-Johnsen (Beck, Nine Inch Nails) played bass in the latter days of Medicine, America’s first sweet thought and major entry of shoegaze in 1990, when Nowhere was released.

"Anytime I'd read any kind of retrospective piece in the British press about that [shoegaze] era, it was always something quite dismissive about it," Meldal-Johnsen said. Richey Edwards of Manic Street Preachers didn’t bother waiting. "We will always hate Slowdive more than we hate Adolf Hitler," Edwards said infamously to NME in 1991. Ian Gittins’ oral history of shoegaze cited NME’s satirization of shoegaze.

"I’ve spent so much time in the UK and U.S. in the past 25 years and I see that," Meldal-Johnsen said. "And it’s a bummer… Ride, Slowdive, Chapterhouse, Lush, they all seem to get more respect in the States for their merits rather than being trendy. It’s a matter of perspective."

The western shift of culture, time, and place to a new generation has enhanced the genre. It’s resonated beyond just a transatlantic exchange as well, with shoegaze’s influence writ large in Japan and around the world. Sonic Cathedral Records’ Nathaniel Cramp cites the soundtrack of the Tokyo-set Lost in Translation as introducing a new generation worldwide to Kevin Shields, My Bloody Valentine, and "Just Like Honey", intermingling on the OST with dreamy Japanese folk-rock band Happy End. Shoegaze’s most recent example of globetrotting is Indonesian label Gerpfast Kolektif’s and Welsh/Canadian label Raphalite Records’ release of Revolution - The Shoegaze Revival, a compilation of shoegaze acts from 30 bands in 16 countries released this year.