We are in peak reissue/reunion culture for people who are afraid that the new will never be as good as the old. A similar fear reverberated around the world on February 2, when My Bloody Valentine let loose their first new album in 22 years. You remember where you were. You remember the 403 errors. The desperation: “hi can someone pls DM me a working link thx.” It’s just 10 months later, and the very act of downloading mbv feels nostalgic. That’s how fast things move now. Not for Kevin Shields, of course. That’s not his tempo.

For a generation raised, drugged, and sexed on Loveless, the stakes were pretty high; for those who came into Loveless retroactively, there was a secret hope that mbv could be their own Loveless—a long shot. Because Loveless in 2013 is just a simulacrum, and the Gen-X’ers know that. They were there in '91 and lord that patina of authenticity over the latecomers. There’s an imprecise feeling for all who missed the introverted bliss of Loveless, and the entire microculture of shoegaze that went with it. Kids can co-opt the vibe of the 90s, but the genuine article will always be absent, drowned in the wake of time.

In an unprecedented occasion, mbv connected the old and the new. At first, the album seemed to exist only in reference to the band’s heyday, with its monogrammed title, entirely analog recording, and mythical arrival. From the opening flourish of “She Found Now” it sounded just like a proper My Bloody Valentine record: those dropped tunings, that gated reverb, those heartbeat drums, Kevin Shields and Belinda Butcher cast once again as Ghost Who Sings 1 and Ghost Who Sings 2. But then mbv started to bend into the present, revealing that it wasn’t a continuation of Loveless at all. This album is for the kid who’s home on a Friday night blowing smoke through a dryer sheet in a dorm room and the parent who’s doing the same in their home office because their child is sleeping.

It’s a new blueprint for making a sexy, druggy, rock'n'roll record. These are how guitars work: They hang like tendrils for Shields and Butcher to float through, they drone imprecisely around a pitch like a bagpipe, they make harmonics that floss your equilibrium. And these are how songs go: They shift around from chord to unrelated chord just to make you dizzy, or sometimes they do nothing for three-and-a-half minutes except get a little bit louder. In just nine songs, they manage to detach from the 90s and float in the ether, there for any generation to claim as their own. —Jeremy D. Larson

My Bloody Valentine: "Only Tomorrow"