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i have ended up a shoegaze purist by accident, because all the shoegaze i have been exposed to is from friends who are purists, and it all had two essential qualities:
• an unstoppable wave of noise that drowns you whether you like it or not
• a deep well of pain
and so when i hear stuff random people think is shoegaze but isn't shoegaze, i'm like, the music isn't drowning me and it doesn't have the pathos, this isn't shoegaze, it's not even beginning to be shoegaze, i don't even understand where you are coming from
there's some stuff from like two decades ago that does a bit of the drowning thing with a different more optimistic kind of pathos, and that's not really shoegaze either, but i can enjoy it as its own adjacent thing. when it's neither of these things i just feel… sad
i think shoegaze is fundamentally an emotion and not an æsthetic to me, i think i could write shoegaze even without any real literacy in it, because i know how it needs to feel