Everything is clearer through the distortion

In the decor of the spectacle, the eye meets only things and their prices.

Slogan graffitied on the walls during the Paris uprising of 1968

As exemplified by their graffiti, the Situationists saw capitalism and consumerism as forces that blinded people to the realities of their own lives, distracting them from their interests and replacing genuine experience with an endless procession of manufactured desires.

Clear eyes were needed.

They still are.

Into this world, Canadian shoegaze quintet Next Week’s Washing release the second single from their forthcoming Spiral EP and unleash a towering storm of noise, distorted guitars and plaintive vocals.

Clear Eyes represents a significant step forward from their self-titled debut release. With a settled line-up comes a more assured sound. The Britpop nuances remain, but here the band plunge headlong into the swirling sonic architecture of My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive, marrying their expansive walls of noise to the more structured songwriting sensibilities of Ride.

And somewhere in that collision, they find something distinctly their own.

Miles Duffy’s haunting vocals soar above hypnotic guitar riffs as they surge through the atmosphere, searching for ever greater spaces to inhabit. The guitars don’t so much accompany the melody as envelop it, building layer upon layer until the individual elements dissolve into something considerably larger than the sum of their parts.

It evokes endless highways cutting through the Canadian wilderness. Lakes. Mountains. Vast expanses of nothingness stretching towards an unreachable horizon.

But we are no longer tethered to the ground.

We are soaring.

Reaching ever more blazing heights.

Ever upwards.

The production allows the song to breathe even as the sound becomes increasingly monumental. Cascading power chords swell and retreat, melodies emerge from the distortion and disappear again, before everything falls away into an intimate spoken-word coda.

For a moment, the storm subsides.

Then the chorus returns.

One final, enormous surge of guitars and melody, rising and rising until the music seems barely capable of containing itself.

It’s a clever trick. Shoegaze has always dealt in contradictions: noise that becomes beautiful, distortion that creates clarity, music that sounds simultaneously claustrophobic and limitless. Clear Eyes embraces those contradictions, finding an unexpected sense of freedom within its dense, swirling sound.

The result is hypnotic, exhilarating and strangely uplifting.

A song that seems determined to escape the confines of its own recording.

Driving onwards over lakes and mountains, through vast landscapes and into a wilderness untethered.

This is not the sound of a band learning how to walk.

It’s the sound of a band sprinting towards the uplands.

Hitch a ride now.

Open your clear eyes.

Header image by Hayden Armstrong.

Clear Eyes is out now on all the best streaming platforms. Next Week’s Washing play regularly around the Toronto area and their second full EP Spiral is due for release in November.