An announcement drenched in distortion, fuzz and feedback! I won't put you through it, but that's what these shoegaze icons do deserve.

It took My Bloody Valentine twenty-one long, quiet years to create a successor to the masterly ‘Loveless’, they disappeared from the musical planet for a while between the mid 90's and mid 2000's partly due to the ramblings of Yo La Tengo, Primal Scream and Dinosaur Jr. 'Loveless' was an album that was ubiquitously praised and considered to be one of the best albums of the 90’s, glorious hell-raising melodious noise (it is possible!) draped over the airy voice of Kevin Shields and the ever ravishing Belinda Butcher…

Following up a masterpiece (from which various new musical tendancies like post-rock, dream pop and even emo-rock originated) is always a precarious undertaking but MBV succeeded in blowing the world away once more with a hard-hitting third album: ‘m b v’. When the British-Irish collective launched their new album on Saturday 2 February 2013 their website crashed under the enormous interest and it didn't take long before the good reviews began to pile up:

“The songs on m b v are more melodically complex, intriguing and often pleasing than anything he has written before.” (The Guardian)
“It sounds amazing, and represents an astounding return.” (BBC Music)
“M b v is a successful return.” (The Wire)
“This, finally, is the stuff people have been waiting a young lifetime to hear.” (The Observer)
“MBV is not really an album at all, but an oeuvre in fast-forward.” (NME)

Even the ever critical Pitchfork crowned the long-awaited long-player with a distinguished 9.1 out of 10. The shoegazers step into the twenty-first century with a slightly bleaker sound and, in one song, a small drum-‘n-bass experiment, but their trademark – airy vocals and distorted layers of guitar – remains, fortunately, intact.
In 2009 they thundered over the meadows of Pukkelpop with a deafening, but sublime set full of “glorious sound of damnation from a guitar” according to Humo. The weekly mag. added that “this is the stuff that we do it for” and “guitars choked, whined, growled: a well-aimed attack.”

It has been years since that My Bloody Valentine appeared in a Belgian venue, the last time in AB was in –wait for it, we're getting old- April ’92. That it will be loud is certain, that it will be fantastic is too. Certainties can make life so wonderfully simple!