In May, the British band Slowdive, a pioneer in the shoegaze genre, played a pair of shows at Brooklyn Steel in Williamsburg. Two months later, a wash of more muscular fuzz made its way up through the tiers of Terminal 5 as Ride took the stage at that Manhattan club. Both bands formed in England in the late 1980s, achieved critical acclaim in the 1990s, reunited in 2014 and released new albums in the past few months that have reverberated on both sides of the Atlantic.

As with many reboots of acts from the ’90s, attention from radio or streaming services isn’t a concern: Plenty of fans matured into adults with expendable income who can sustain a live-music nostalgia industry.

Shoegaze — named for its players’ tendency to stare down at complex warrens of effects pedals, or stompboxes — was born out of a young British population so numbed by successive Conservative governments that it turned to sonic immolation. By the early 1990s, the guitar had covered a lot of ground since Hendrix: the prog-rock splatter of the late ’70s; the crisp arpeggiations of the Smiths’ Johnny Marr; the shimmer of the Cocteau Twins; the clean lines of New Order and the Cure. But across the ocean, America became seized by grunge’s fuzzed-out rage, and when that sound bounced back to Britain, one logical progression was shoegaze — heavenly clouds of distortion under soft, androgynous vocals. Those effects pedals became crucial; from those new circuits sprang the sounds of resignation.