Throughout the history of shoegaze, bands have tried hundreds of different techniques to create the huge blissful walls of sound the genre calls for. Of course there’s gliding, the method developed by Kevin Shields and aped by ever other shoegaze guitarist ever (guilty), but bands have also tried everything from walls of amps to layering dozens of takes of the guitar parts to more guitar pedals than one person should be able to understand.

Brisbane Australia’s Deafcult employ a novel method that’s genius in its simplicity: they just have four guitarists.

It’s an elegant, if obvious, solution and the results speak for themselves on the hazy, crushing atmospheres on Auras. 

Usually, you’d expect four guitarists to sound cluttered, everyone bumping into eachother’s parts in a bad way. But shoegaze thrives on this sort of sonic maximalism. The resulting wall of sound is truly a wall: every possible corner of the frequency range is flooded with sound. But with four separate guitarists (and the bassist, of course) acting as aural masons, the imposing monoliths they build make most of their contemporaries look monochrome.

Amazingly, each guitar part ends up being distinct among the others. This is especially demonstrated on “Indigo Children:” an acoustic guitar jangles through the chord progression, an electric rhythm guitar augmenting or mirroring the part as needed. Of the two leads, one plays a classic Kevin Shields style fuzz line while the other soars high above the rest of the band with enough reverb and delay to break out of orbit. The dreamy opener “Lemonade Beauty” is another great example, the bouncing clean leads of the intro all exploding into Technicolor fuzz for the verses.

It’s a simple enough trick, but it doesn’t get old. Rock and roll was built on explosivity and volume. Ever since Sister Rosetta Tharpe plugged in her cream-colored Gibson SG, musicians have trying to play louder and more powerfully. Jesus and Mary Chain took the same quest for loudness and applied it to dreamy pop songs, and the whole of the shoegaze scene followed suit, each act trying to outdo one another with amp volume and effects pedals, trying to divorce the electric guitar from its six strings and turn it into something otherworldly.

And in that respect, Deafcult definitely understood the assignment. Auras offers up some of the most impressive tsunami-esque sonics I’ve ever heard, all set to truly catchy pop songs (see: the bouncing “Summertime” or the synth-tinged “Echoes,” which might have been a top 40 style synthpop track if the vocals weren’t buried under all this guitar noise).

And I know, I listen to a lot of shoegaze. And I’ll admit that not all of it is the most inventive stuff in the world. In fact, some of my favorite shoegaze acts just keep churning out book reports on Loveless, now more than thirty years after its release (not that “Here Be Death” doesn’t sound just like “Soon“). And while the spirit of what Deafcult is doing is nothing unique, Auras sounds incredibly fresh even to my ears. And more than anything, that is a testament to the intricate tapestries they weave with their arsenal of guitars.