forever ☆

There’s been a groundswell of shoegaze over the last few years. Call it what you will — a TikTok effect or simply that the kids are gonna be all right — but it’s been a pervasive footprint on a new generation of indie. Kansas City’s been far outside of most of the circles touched by the haze, but the ever impossible to type forever ☆ has clearly been doing their homework alone in their enclave. Mixing both the bombast and bluster of the heaviest moments in the MVB and JAMC catalog, the band works their own wonderful alchemy in the way that only someone far enough removed from the true throws of nostalgia is able. They smelt the amp fuzz and walls of fury with the breathless snap of breakbeats, finding a middle ground where Tricky and The Prodigy were equal influences on a populace as Chapterhouse and Swervedriver. They posit the past as if Hackers was more document than figment, a household staple rather than a cult confection.

While I’m sure there were a few folks finding the connections at the time, the territoriality of the ‘90s almost makes it seems a bit quaint that there would have been a huge contingent digesting this cocktail regularly. The guardrails wouldn’t come off the playpen for a few years, well into when forever ☆’s members would just be waking to the world. While streaming’s algorithms seem to suffer increasingly homogeneous effects, the Pandora’s box of the digital age might well be lauded for at least offering the availability of an omnivorous diet to those with the time to dive. Dragging the algo out of the equation and living up to its everything-at-your-fingertips promise makes odd bedfellows seem like an impossibility when it comes to genre, given that the mouse is in the right hands. That approach is exactly what makes the bulk of Second Gen Dream tick.

The record pulses with the kind of hard drum n’ bass backbeat that pierced the skin of the end of the ‘90s and let Big Beat infect pop a few years later. The band makes the frantic anxiety of their undercurrent feel like a drug-raced heartbeat trapped under the glass of our own hazy senses. Their vocals and guitars swim in the tidal waters of murk, churning the maelstrom while slowing everything down in syrupy repose. Forever ☆ feel like the first band to ditch the pedestal of the past in favor of a glimpse of what could have been, an idealized ‘90s sound that acts as the soundtrack to the Mandela effect.

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