“I remember my first time listening to shoegaze and realizing it was shoegaze,” Sheeka Martin recalls. “I kept thinking, why do I feel so nostalgic for a time I wasn’t a part of?”
Martin is an organizer with the Loveless Collective — a youth-led, DIY music and arts organization based in Toronto (no relation to The Loveless Cafe). The 23-year-old is among a new generation of youth driving the global revival of shoegaze, a subgenre of alternative rock that briefly took over the music scene in the early and mid-90s.
On July 25 and 26, the collective will bring an international lineup of shoegaze and scene-adjacent bands to the city for the second year of Loveless Festival, taking place at the Monarch Tavern, Sneaky Dee’s, and St. Stephen-in-the-Fields.
Initially used as a pejorative by a skeptical UK music press, the term “shoegaze” was coined as a way to describe an emerging wave of alt rock bands known for their extensive guitar pedal collections. Eventually, the term became synonymous with a subgenre characterized by lush, immersive soundscapes, ethereal vocals and dreamy melodies — a scene led by bands like Slowdive, Ride and My Blood Valentine.
Shoegaze was eventually eclipsed by the rise of Britpop and grunge, and the scene quickly fizzled out. But thirty years later, the genre is experiencing an unexpected resurgence, driven by TikTok trends and curated playlists on streaming platforms that have brought previously undercelebrated acts into sharper focus. And it’s not just legacy acts that are being celebrated.
In recent years, a new generation of shoegaze bands like Jane Remover and Quannic have emerged, experimenting with a combination of hyperpop, shoegaze, and elements of the internet electronic microgenre HexD in what writer Harvey Solomon-Brady has dubbed zoomergaze.
The Loveless Collective — a nod to the landmark 1991 album from Irish shoegazers My Bloody Valentine — was formed in response to the rising interest in the now expansive genre among young people like Martin.
The youngest of five children, Martin, was raised on hand-me-downs, she tells The Grind. “I grew up with a lot of millennial culture and whatever my sisters used to listen to.” Gen Z’s interest in the gauzy, wall-of-reverb sound of shoegaze, she suggests, is a symptom of a kind of cultural meta-nostalgia — a sort of “longing for nostalgia” itself.
Martin was wrapping up an undergraduate degree in English at Toronto Metropolitan University when she met Ginny Kim, a guitarist and singer in the local shoegaze ensemble the neverminds. Kim founded Loveless as a concert series in the fall of 2024. By the end of the winter semester, the collective had organized a handful of shows, including a neverminds tour, under the Loveless Club banner.
“We realized there was a little shoegaze community happening, and it was starting to grow,” Martin says.
In 2025, the collective launched the inaugural Loveless Festival, a two-day smorgasbord of live music held at the Monarch Tavern, Sneaky Dees, and the Collective Arts Taproom.
Advance ticket sales for the festival were so popular that the group had to limit advance sales to save space for walkups at the door, but even then, they found themselves turning guests away.
“It was nice that we had multiple venues because we could send people to another venue if that had more space,” Martin says. On day two, all of the venues sold out. “We didn’t expect that to happen at all.”
Behind the scenes, though, planning the first Loveless Festival “was really stressful,” Martin says. In addition to playing in bands and going on tour, several collective members were finishing degrees, and the impromptu nature of the collective meant responsibilities weren’t always clear.
“We didn’t have any roles or anything,” she says. “We just wanted to help out because it sounded like a fun idea to put on shows.”
Since then, Loveless has developed into a regular concert series, and the group of friends that launched the 11-person collective have now assumed formal titles and responsibilities. neverminds bassist Vinny Hau leads the tech department, while guitarists Nick Mokrzewski (Whisper Gang) and Michael Schifanelli (Luster Dust) assist with outreach.
This 2026 edition of Loveless Festival includes headlining sets from Seattle dream pop duo Bubble Tea and Cigarettes and Philadelphia emo-gazers Bleary Eyed, and also features Brooklyn’s Laveda and Winnipeg’s sundayclub. SEAVER, Shallow, and Somet will trek in from Montreal, while Guelph’s Bonnie Trash, Hamilton acts Basement Revolver and sullen, London’s closeout, and St. Catharines’s Deer Fang will join a long list of locals like PONY, Tijuana Taxi, and Velvet Beach.
Prior to that, a Loveless-branded showcase featuring the neverminds, Laveda, and sundayclub will fly its flag beyond Toronto, touring through Quebec City, Montreal, Ottawa, and Hamilton before returning home for the main event.
But the festival is only part of the collective’s growing ambitions. Between shows, Loveless maintains an active online community through a public Discord server where members can share music, artwork, recommendations and start conversations.
Offline, Loveless held its first social event at pop-up tattoo shop Zero Studio in May.
For Martin, that Loveless is creating spaces where concertgoers “can meet up and find friends and community” between shows is one of its greatest successes.
As they prepare for Loveless Festival’s second year, what began as a loose network of friends putting on concerts has become an important hub for a growing subculture.
Martin believes the appeal is simpler than that.
“I like to think of it as a group of introverts just being together.”
