There’s never been another record like Loveless. But that hasn’t stopped anyone from trying. The sonic sea change that My Bloody Valentine’s seminal masterpiece ushered in was as singular as it was influential, with bands still looking to its rose-tinted soundscape of guitars for guidance on their own sounds

And while it famously took Kevin Shields twenty-two years to release its follow up, it took Lilys about a year.

Granted, empires have risen and fallen as the debate between inspiration and derivativeness has raged on. And if I’m honest, I’m not interested in continuing it. While In the Presence of Nothing owes most of its sonic palette to Loveless, replicating those sounds are a feat in itself. I would also feel much differently if these songs weren’t so dang good.

Loveless created a seismic shift in the alternative rock scene, and its ripples could be felt miles from the epicenter. While bands like Hum and Smashing Pumpkins took massive cues from its walls of sound, many bands in the original Scene That Celebrates Itself took it as a mark that the Mountain had been summited. It was such a defining release that most of their contemporaries started moving away from shoegaze. Chapterhouse started experimenting with electronica. Ride moved toward a more historical psychedelic rock. Lush folded into the Britpop movement. Cocteau Twins started writing more straightforward pop music. Of the original shoegaze pioneers, only Slowdive released a seminal release in the genre after Loveless.

But across the pond in Washington DC, Lilys weren’t as easily dissuaded, and they did what everyone else lacked the courage to do: they overtly copped My Bloody Valentine’s bag of tricks. It’s shameless, really, but bandleader Kurt Heasley managed to use these sounds to create an album that had its own voice.

You could probably easily convince someone that this was, after all, a My Bloody Valentine record. The guitars (likely all Jaguars and Jazzmasters) are transmuted through a similar array of fuzz and reverb pedals to create the same sort of monstrous guitar noise. The dual male-female vocals are similarly buried in the mix and obscured with vocal effects. The songwriting, despite the noisiness of the instruments, is rife with pop sensibilities that come through in even the most torrential sonic storms.

But with Heasley’s shamelessness comes an adventurousness that Shields  maybe lacked. It’s well known that Kevin Shields tortured himself over the minutia of every sound on the record, and then was gripped with anxiety at the impossibility of following it up. If Lilys had any of the same perfectionism in them, it doesn’t come across on the disc. Not to say that the record is sloppy, but there are some risks taken here that move a bit beyond their most obvious point of influence.

The most obvious risk  is “The Way the Snowflakes Fall,” a twelve-minute track devoid of lyrics or groove. The bass rings out a single chord and the drums keep some manner of time with a periodic, heartbeat-like tom pulse, all while the guitars explore the outer reaches of their sounds. Similarly adventurous but far more accessible is “Snowblinder,” which punctuates what could be a delicate acoustic track with blasts of molten guitar noise.

But for all the massive swings this record takes, they hit far more often than they miss. In fact, I’m not sure there’s anything on this record that I could even call a miss. Tracks like the swirling “Elizabeth Colour Wheel” or the punk-paced “Periscope” hit as close to shoegaze’s Platonic form as anyone not in My Bloody Valentine has gotten. Goth-tinged opener “There Is No Such Thing as Black Orchids” and the bouncing “Claire Hates Me” are shining examples of classic shoegaze.

But, much like My Bloody Valentine’s own peers, Lilys would stray away from shoegaze shortly after this. A few years later, they were playing more straightforward indie rock. And it makes sense that just like the band they were emulating, they too would fail to recapture their magic. With its gigantic sixty-six minute runtime, and a playful irreverence In the Presence of Nothing acts like it doesn’t take itself too seriously, but it is in fact a massive statement. While everyone was trying to figure out how Kevin Shields managed to get his guitar sound that huge, Lilys figured it out and created a satisfying record of their own.