Zoomergaze

Zoomergaze is a loosely-defined style of electronic music and nu-gaze characterized by Generation Z musicians experimenting with the boundaries of shoegaze. The genre is a merger of shoegaze with

Etymology#

“Zoomergaze” is a portmanteau of “shoegaze” and “zoomer” (meaning Generation Z). In a 2024 article for WhyNow, writer Harvey Solomon-Brady used the term to refer to the fusion of hyperpop and shoegaze. In a 2024 article for Nina Protocol, music blogger Eli Enis called the style “VSTi-gaze” and “compu-gaze”. Writing for Pitchfork, Kieran Press-Reynolds attributed the term “cloud-rock”, popularized by Nina Protocol as a “progeny of shoegaze”. He later defined a “Post-Pandemic Alt-Rock” scene which overlapped with cloud rock, citing groups who arose alongside Bar Italia, blending influences from the Cure, Dean Blunt, Blur, Pavement, trip hop and shoegaze.

Characteristics#

These musicians incorporated elements of digicore with shoegaze’s atmospheric textures and grunge’s energy. In particular, merging shoegaze instrumental elements alongside electronic elements including vocals that are effected by pitch shifting, autotune and formant editing, as well as glitches and entirely electronic segments. while others shunned physical guitars entirely, dealing only in MIDI and sampled instruments. PopMatters writer Ethan Stewart called it a subgenre of electronic music and noted the influence of grungegaze and soft grunge upon artists including Wisp and Quannnic. Common influences upon artists in the style were traditional shoegaze artists Whirr, Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine; as well as newer, experimental takes on the genre such as the vocaloid shoegaze album Mikgazer vol. 1 (2012); and Parannoul’s album To See the Next Part of the Dream (2021), which used MIDI instrumentation. Eli Enis cited Asian Glow as influencing the “DAW-designed digi-gaze” of Jane Remover, Twikipedia and Quannnic.

2010s: Precursors#

During the 2010s and early 2020s, there was an increased number of experimental takes on shoegaze, which would go on to inspire the sound of zoomergaze. Amongst zoomergaze musicians, Solomon-Brady noted the influence of vocaloid shoegaze album Mikgazer vol. 1 (2012); and Parannoul’s album To See the Next Part of the Dream (2021), which used MIDI instrumentation.

2020s: Origins#

In the early 2020s, a wave of practitioners of the electronic genres hyperpop and digicore began to experiment with rock elements. One major strain of this was artists who incorporated elements of shoegaze. As early as 2018, Strawberry Hospital’s album Grave Chimera was merging elements of shoegaze into hyperpop. Jane Remover experimented with a similar fusion on Frailty (2021), with Quannnic following with Kenopsia (2022). Both leaned further into their shoegaze influence on their subsequent albums Census Designated (2023) and Stepdream (2023). That same year, Pitchfork described the year as when “The Shoegaze Revival Hit Its Stride,” with the TikTok hashtag #slowdive reaching 235 million views as well as the hashtag #shoegaze reaching 730 million views. By 2024, writer Ryan Pinkard stated, “TikTok has done for Gen Z what MySpace did for millennials in the early 2000s”. Stereogum credited the platform with making shoegaze “bigger than ever,” while publications such as Vice noted that many teenagers were using shoegaze to soundtrack their “bleak, post-COVID world.” In 2024, in a review of Beabadoobee’s third studio album This Is How Tomorrow Moves published in The Guardian, British music critic Kitty Empire stated “Post, for one, takes a Taylor Swift–ish pop song and runs it through a ‘zoomergaze’ filter – zoomergaze being the latest iteration of My Bloody Valentine’s influence as refracted by the internet.” In 2025, Dork noted that Wisp was labelled as “the face of ‘zoomergaze and described her as a leading artist in Gen Z’s shoegaze revival. During 2026, many zoomergaze artists stopped playing the genre, instead moving towards emo. These included Flyingfish, Sweet Boy and Dead Calm. Similarly, zoomergaze pioneers Quannnic and Photographic Memory started the emo band Car Underwater.

Genre family: 2020s in music, 21st-century music genres, Internet music genres, Rock music genres