By the Zonagirante.com team @spinning zone
Cover art by Zonagirante Studio
For Christmas, we can't think of better music than the endless variations of shoegaze. There's something about that blend of electric fog and melting melodies that fits the holidays better than any Christmas carol with a scarf. That's why we decided to put together a playlist with twenty representatives of the genre from Argentina, a country we've always identified—don't ask us why—as the perfect nation for this kind of sound. Maybe it's the emotional atmosphere, maybe it's the noise of its cities, or maybe it's that habit of staring at the ground while deep in thought. Whatever the reason, shoegaze flourishes there as if it were a native plant.
Shoegaze is a genre that lives in the corners where the light softens. It doesn't shout, but it fills everything. It moves like a tide that can't decide whether to break on the shore or lie there forever. Its guitars don't play, they sigh. The voices don't sing, they appear enveloped in vapor, as if they don't want to be looked at directly.
And yet, amidst that soft density lies a peculiar warmth. Something intimate, like a mid-afternoon conversation where both speakers prefer the weather to do the talking. Shoegaze invites you to remain still for a moment, to listen as the sound becomes a temporary home where everything is a little slower and a little deeper.
Argentina, for reasons no one can quite explain, understood it from day one. In their bands, the genre evaporates and falls back into place, taking on a unique form. There are guitars that sound like endless highways, bass lines that stalk like nocturnal animals, drums that resonate in rooms that never quite turn on the lights.
That's why we've chosen twenty songs that capture that feeling of being inside a snowy postcard, even if it's thirty degrees outside. Music to close out the year without rushing, to let your head float a few inches above your body, so that the holidays have more atmosphere than haste.
