My Anti-Aircraft Friend: A Shoegaze Renaissance

Shoegaze is a subgenre of alternative rock characterized by ethereal vocals and distorted guitar sounds, named for the tendency of its drummers to gaze down at their shoes as they hit the pedals. This genre from the ‘90s has experienced an unprecedented surge in popularity over the last couple of years, a phenomenon due to bands like Wisp trending online and long-awaited releases from classic shoegaze bands, such as the Jesus and Mary Chain and Slowdive. The dreamy vocals and fuzzy instrumentals are slowly but surely picking up in the corners of the alternative music world, and at the very forefront of this genre’s revival is Julie. 

Julie is a small indie rock band from Orange County, New Jersey, composed of Keyan Pourzand (singer and guitarist), Dillon Lee (drummer), and Alex Brady (singer and bassist). Though they had their beginnings in 2019, it was during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic that the band truly rose to fame with their single “Flutter.” Julie continues to draw inspiration from a variety of alternative rock and grunge subgenres, although they are mainly classified as a shoegaze band. While they have already released their fair share of viral singles and EPs, My Anti-Aircraft Friend (2024) is their first official album, marking their shift from amateur experimentation to honed mastery and solidification of their style. My Anti-Aircraft Friend explores how a person is transformed by their love for and connection to others, and it will surely be the first step in establishing Julie as a household shoegaze name. 

The album’s opener, “Catalogue,” immediately launches listeners into a whirlwind of emotions, effectively setting the scene for the rest of the album. The intro’s fast-paced drums and sharp electric guitar strums contribute to a sense of barely suppressed anger, building up and finally simmering to a boiling point with an explosion of cymbals and aggressive guitar. This potency serves as a direct contrast to the consistent volume of Pourzand’s vocals. However, just as quickly as “Catalogue” heightens the tension with its fast-paced beat, it diminishes it as well, alternating between screechy feedback and gentle riffs to match Pourzand’s alternating tone as she looks back on her relationship with an unnamed partner. She details the toll that the aftermath has had on her, no longer feeling “sexy” or “amused” but rather unable to “feel anything now,” even as the sounds clashing around her suggest otherwise. The contrasting tempos within each song are meant to drag the listener along on this trail of fluctuating emotions that Pourzand herself is working through.

This pattern of fluctuation in the strength of the instrumentals permeates the entirety of My Anti-Aircraft Friend, leaning into classic shoegaze characteristics of heavy reverb and distortion while providing elements of originality and unpredictability. However, each track is differentiated by the vocals paired with it, not its individual instrumentation, culminating in a pleasant, albeit slightly monotonous, experience. Deviating from their traditional fuzzy and monotonous vocals, Julie chooses to embrace more vocal clarity this time around. This is best seen in “Very Little Effort,” in which Pourzand and Brady take on a delicate, cynical tone. The combination of their voices with softened cymbals highlights the frustration and fatigue that comes with caring for another person. 

Though Julie’s main focus is on their music, it has always been their intention to be multifaceted as they engage in a variety of art forms, building up a community with their stylistic image rather than limiting themselves as a band. It’s a charming characteristic of theirs reflected in many of their song covers and Instagram posts, in which they embrace their uncanny aesthetic and diverse collection of ideas with artful photoshoots and collages designed by Lee. Julie leans into this again with their music video for “Clairbourne Practice,” amateur footage consisting of close-ups of the band members’ faces and shots of them dancing in a dark room. This bleeds into their songs as well, in the sense that rather than putting any clear meaning behind their lyrics, their main prerogative was to experiment with the music and invoke emotion, the lyrics merely an accessory to sound cool. 

The lyrics of My Anti-Aircraft Friend are as choppy as the music, often one line or word and above all cryptic, to the point where listeners have to strain themselves to understand the plot, but a story has nonetheless taken shape. Listeners understand the narrative through “Tenebrist,” when it’s implied that because of a lack of communication over the personal issues Brady’s partner is facing, she’s no longer able to understand them. Brady sings to her partner that the problem “wears your head / you lost me now” and it’s even started to bleed into her own life, as the “smoke-filled room / it brings me down.” It’s not for lack of trying that their relationship had soured, though, as depicted in “Thread, Stitch” when Pourzand says she’ll count “thread, stitch, and all that will mend you,” if it means things will work out.

In “Clairbourne Practice,” the central theme of My Anti-Aircraft Friend finally makes an appearance. The cynical, spiteful tone from “Very Little Effort” is brought back as Julie exhibits a bitter longing for the past. Brady and Pourzand wish for their partner to return to how they used to be, missing the “things [they] do and all [they] say,” so they could at least pretend to feel the same kind of happiness. They’ll even sacrifice themselves for another chance at returning to this time, as heard in “Piano Instrumental” when Brady says to forget “what I’d like / make me all the things you would like.” However, Pourzand and Brady simultaneously realize they have to separate themselves from the toxicity, claiming they’ll “cut [their] hair a different way” so as to finally move on from their “tormentors.” This is emphasized again in “Feminine Adornments” when Pourzand attempts to shut them out of her life once and for all, claiming her partner’s absence is “heavy off my insides” and she’ll be “clean / I’ll be mean and raw” once their relationship is scrubbed clean from her life. 

Julie closes the album with “Stuck in a Car with Angels,” a slow end to the album that’s just spent all its time indecisively wavering between its own instrumentals. Unlike the previous tracks of the album, this song steps away from the drama of the relationship, focusing solely on Pourzand as she returns to normality. The track highlights the mundanity of her life—blowing wind, the passing of spoons, and the molding of bread—but even as time goes by she still wants to “follow you home,” repeating it like a mantra. It’s a wonderful ending to the narrative that My Anti-Aircraft Friend has weaved together for the listeners, a final immersion into the anger and suffocating sadness this album has triumphed in evoking. My Anti-Aircraft Friend is nothing if not an affirmation of how far Julie has come as a band, underlining their musical proficiency while giving the listeners a taste of what’s to come as they continue to develop their lyrical and storytelling capabilities. Though Julie is still new to the shoegaze scene, their continued experimentation should be seen as a strength rather than a means to an end, as their unique perspective on where music and other art forms collide continues to draw in and introduce young audiences to an underrated genre.