Still in a Dream (2026)

This book tells the definitive story of the slackers and shoegazers who reinvented rock. Twenty years after his acclaimed post-punk bestseller Rip It Up and Start Again, Simon Reynolds explores what happened next: the underground explosion of noise pop, shoegaze, slacker rock and grunge that reverberated from the mid-1980s into the early 1990s. Capturing both the era’s musical exhilaration and the alienation of young people during a period of rising conservative politics and glossy mainstream pop, Still in a Dream celebrates a golden age of guitar reinvention and a second psychedelia of mind-expanding sounds pioneered by bands such as My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth. In Britain, groups including Cocteau Twins and Slowdive escaped into shimmering dream worlds, while American underground rockers such as Dinosaur Jr. and Pavement combined apathy and urgency into thrilling noise. Written by a journalist who covered this music in real time from the frontlines, it vividly recreates a period that marked the final burst of the analogue culture of vinyl records and music papers before the Internet changed everything.