Shoegaze by any other name
Quebec-based alt-rock (shoegaze? is this what the kids call shoegaze?) act Fleeting Colors have, in their new single, Autumn, a piece of music demonstrating, if anything, an eye for atmosphere. There’s a completeness to the sound here (and on their other work, I had to peek) that reminds me of bands like Tame Impala, Sufjan Stevens, Mumford and Sons, Dawes, or Talking Heads. You’ll notice a complete lack of sonic singularity, there, and that’s by design. I don’t mean Fleeting Colors sound like these bands—I mean that in the same way that if you were walking around in a mall or a club and one of these songs came on, you wouldn’t have a hard time identifying them. Hard to pull off in 2026.
One of the subthemes in my reviews here is a long running mostly-a-joke about how I don’t really know what shoegaze is. One of my problems with the moniker is it’s hard to tell to what extent heavy use of effects and ambient elements makes something shoegaze verses just a song with interesting guitar/synth setups. Maybe it’s because the worst examples of the genre muddy the sense of what makes it unique? I don’t know.
Back to Autumn, there’s a hairy kind of filter-pad thing going on in the intro to this tune that grabbed me immediately, there’s not mud here so much as density. I listened several times just to have a grasp of what the hell was happening (complimentary).
And, unlike the worst offenders of tenniseye music, the heavy saturated effects and that growly electric guitar know when to leave the room and make space for what’s next, be it a drum change from section to section, opening up for a chorus, etc.
I don’t know if Fleeting Colors would call themselves shoegaze, as their website doesn’t say anything in particular about genre (which is fine, honestly. Music isn’t small-parts machinery, we don’t need perfect little boxes for everything. The song is great, and if these folks ever come down to Georgia from Canada, there’ll be one more person in the crowd.
Written by Willow Stonebeck
