Sparkler - Big Sonic Chill (2023)

For Sparkler, Big Sonic Chill is only a debut album, but they feel as if they've played the very noisy kind of shoegaze for a long time. This makes the Californian's album one of the best within the genre so far this year.

I love how the guitars sound in those compositions. They are not only fittingly distorted, they are wild and untamed. There's no negotiating with their pure energy and I appreciate it a lot. While the soft and genre-appropriate vocals balance their madness, there's no hiding it: the compositions here are, more often than not, ruled by the guitars' wildness. And it feels so good. Especially that they do sound like taken from the biggest icons of the genre, My Bloody Valentine (especially the ones in Around that could feature on Loveless and nobody would bat an eye). This means also that there's virtually no time for the listeners to have a pause: the pace is constantly as high as it can get (except for the title song that closes the debut album) and it makes the blood going, that's for sure. That said, the energy that the music transfers can't hide the fact that this is absolutely melancholic music. The melancholia drown in the high speed of life if you want.

Big Sonic Chill costs 7 USD.

Check: Around

Country: California, US

Genre: noisy shoegaze

Label: Flesh & Bone Records

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