“I’d rather do anything else than talk about shoegaze. Let’s just make good shoegaze.”
So says Homero Solis, bassist of Rio Grande Valley, Texas’ Glare, one of the fastest-rising bands leading the genre’s new generation and an unintended touchpoint for the terminally online. The numbers don’t lie: nearly a million monthly listeners on Spotify, and over 20,000 TikTok videos have used their song “Void in Blue” as a soundtrack.
“Just having a total normie friend from high school be like, ‘Yo, is this your song?’ Just sending us a random TikTok using our music [was crazy],” says Solis. “There’s no way these people should have been listening to us on their own.”
After getting delayed by the pandemic and their own perfectionist tendencies, Glare finally released their debut full-length, this year’s Sunset Funeral, a muscular set worthy of the momentum they’ve enjoyed until now. Single “Guts” sounds nostalgic yet extremely current, and it’s perfectly complemented with a genuinely gut-wrenching music video showing two lovers’ all-consuming devotion to the bitter end.
For Glare, vibes are central to everything, from guitar textures to album art to live performance. “Vibe is what fuels a song,” says Solis. “When we’re writing, it’s vibe-dependent. It’s trying to balance just a vibey feel and also write something that has a payoff, has moments. A well-rounded vibe.”
After playing a memorable set at L.A.’s Sound and Fury where they managed to get an audience of hardcore kids to crowdkill each other to delay pedal sounds, Glare make perfect sense for Dia De Los Deftones. Chino Moreno certainly thinks so. Glare are “carrying the torch of heavy guitar,” he says, “but that kind of warm heavy sound that’s not so brittle.”
The respect is mutual. “They do it all, they do it all in such a fucking cool way,” Solis enthuses of Deftones. Guitarist Toni Ordaz adds: “We kept getting compared to them when we started doing Glare, so I really dove in. Once we’re there [at Dia De Los Deftones], I feel like it’ll be a surreal experience, but right now I can’t fully grasp it.”