No one can tear TikTok scrollers away from their cherished dust bunny shoegaze—not fatigue, not the U.S. Senate. Gen Z loves the ashen ’90s rock subgenre as dearly as a worn pair of Uggs, and through TikTok, they’ve helped facilitate its contemporary revival. But if every teen were suited to spreading the good word, there’d be fewer paintings of Joan of Arc. Not everyone can have the reach of 19-year-old Natalie Lu, known as Wisp, whose 2023 debut single “Your face” led to thousands of TikTok plays and, now, Interscope releasing her first EP, Pandora.
For a while, “Your face” inspired people to post sullen slideshows demanding romance and videos lusting after pink supermarket cookies. The song, currently approaching 50 million Spotify streams, is a spring storm; its vocals sound soaked and distant like a lost dove or Deftones, and its guitar parts are made of chilled spiderwebs or Souvlaki. The months passed. Wisp assured fans that she was “a broke college student,” not an industry plant, and then she got signed. Now her TikTok and Instagram are full of shades of blue and angel wings—world-building for Pandora, which includes “Your face” and other delicate acts of shoegaze worship. But Pandora never becomes more interesting than that.
So every song on Pandora expertly fries its wistful melodies and Lu’s breathy voice hangs over them like a snowdrop. “See you soon” starts with the sound of the whistling wind and ends with Lu swearing, “I’d give all the stars to see you soon.” It creaks and stings—it does feel good to listen to. The most attractive aspect of shoegaze is how it takes shiny, sexy things—sports car guitar riffs, thunderclap drums, Kazu Makino’s singing voice—and covers them in pond scum. The point of this sopping-wet distortion is to make you believe you have an anonymous valentine: You don’t need the glamor of rock’n’roll, because restraint is more impressive.
But shapeless repetition… not so much. That’s the issue with a cotton-ball wall of sound like “Enough for you,” which follows “Your face” and is generally indistinguishable from it. Like the rest of Pandora, “Enough for you” floats on Lu’s windchime vocals and a loose guitar loop; it sounds like untwisting a Twizzler, and that’s about as deep as it goes. “Your eyes gaze into mine/But sparks don’t seem to fly,” Lu exhales like she’s sleep-talking. Another sweet nothing on an EP frosted with them.
But what about the other things—the painful things, the rejection, the dark nights and sinister crows—that Wisp’s favorite references, bands like Have a Nice Life and Whirr, turn into unforgettable art? Pandora doesn’t touch them. The EP has a filter on, reusing only the prettiest parts of shoegaze without expanding on it. That’s the point of a lot of music on TikTok, to be fair—to luxuriate in evocation. It won’t progress a genre or your life, but few things do. No need to quit your daydream. There’s love in it, at least.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
