My Bloody Valentine’s ‘m b v’ Turns 10

By 2013, the legend of Loveless had amassed impossible weight. My Bloody Valentine’s sophomore album had long since been codified as one of the masterpieces of the ’90s, one of the masterpieces of alternative music period. A singular vision that begat legions of copycats, a whole genre. Twenty-two years after its release, countless words and breathless accolades had established it as one of those classics that could never be repeated. During my last semester of college in the first half of 2013, a music writer some 15 years my senior visited our pop culture criticism class and told us that when he’s cut he bleeds the color of the Loveless cover. This was hallowed territory. My Bloody Valentine had made an album that reoriented what seemed possible with sound, with the limits of guitar-based rock music, and then they had never followed it up. Because, of course, how could you?

Part of the legend was how Loveless itself barely made it out into the world. What Creation Records originally thought could take days took three years. The lore says that the album’s seemingly tortured genesis nearly bankrupted Creation, prompting Alan McGee to drop the band soon after its release; Kevin Shields has always claimed that wasn’t true. Part of the legend is what happened after — MBV going to the majors with Island, spending some chunk of the ’90s trying to produce a successor to Loveless. The band dissolved over the course of the mid-’90s, Shields says he went a bit crazy, In 2001, Island sued Shields because he hadn’t released any music in the 10 years their deal had existed.

All of this fuels a particular, well-worn trope, the idea that Shields was one of those difficult, mercurial, reclusive artists. In many interviews from more recent times, the writers still seem surprised to report that he’s a relatively normal and fluent conversationalist, if bearing a somewhat idiosyncratic definition of time’s passage. But even along the way, he was never out of sight for too long — touring with Primal Scream, occasionally collaborating with other artists, making music for Lost In Translation. Once My Bloody Valentine regrouped for their infamously blistering 2008 tour, there was talk of new music. But everyone had bought the legend by then. No matter how much you saw Shields reappear, no matter the band being present onstage, we had accepted there would likely never be another My Bloody Valentine album. They had given us Loveless, after all. That was enough. How could you follow up an album of that stature, an experience so life-altering? It made sense to not even bother.

In January of 2013, Shields went on the internet and claimed the new My Bloody Valentine album would be out in a matter of days. He’d talked about new music at various points in the ’00s, and at this point, it was hard to believe him. But then, suddenly, in the middle of the night on Feb. 2, it was true. Ten years ago today, m b v arrived on the band’s site and promptly crashed it as fans swarmed to download it. The thing nobody thought would ever happen was real. After 22 years, there was, somehow, a My Bloody Valentine album after Loveless.

m b v was one of those collective musical experiences that, in the ’10s, primarily came from surprise releases from major artists. There was something I could never admit at the time: When I first clicked play, seated in my girlfriend’s dorm, I was just a bit… disappointed. The hum and sludge of “She Found Now” was a hazy whisper of a reintroduction; I couldn’t appreciate it then, in that moment, because somewhere in me I expected the long-awaited sequel to Loveless to have that earth-shattering upheaval of reality I felt the first time I heard “Only Shallow.” Anecdotally, it seemed like I was in the minority, particularly when you considered the writers reviewing m b v at the time. Many who were around when Loveless had arrived immediately viewed this as the second coming that was promised, and thus were appropriately rapt.