The last two times I’ve reviewed a Blushing record, I talked a lot about the tightrope that shoegaze acts have to walk between capturing the archetypal early 90s sounds of the genre and finding their own voice. By their third full length, Blushing walks this balance so deftly that mentioning it would be a moot point.

Sugarcoat offers up the same sweet, dreamy songcraft that the group has made their career on, but there’s a palpable confidence here. They’re even more fluent, and the vocabulary sounds more comfortable in their mouths.

Blushing isn’t reinventing themselves anywhere here, and rightly they should not. They’ve already established themselves as formidable up and comers in the shoegaze scene, even finding themselves unwittingly meme-ified by an unwitting redditor who lumped them in with what he called “thirstgaze.”

But with this reputation, Possessions in particular rested heavy on their forebears, enlisting members of Ride and Lush to help make the record. Sugarcoat though feels more at ease. There is an effortlessness to the gauzy atmospheres and ever-present vocal harmonies. The band feels tighter, and they were feeling pretty dang tight to begin with. If it’s any signifier of their reputation, I hadn’t even listened to the singles when I ordered this record. Such is my confidence in Blushing.

And that confidence is not misplaced. From start to finish, Sugarcoat offers up some of the best shoegaze going today. Also I’d be remiss to mention that the record starts with a song called “Tamagatchi” and ends with a song called “Debt,” and if that isn’t the Millennial experience in a microcosm, I don’t know what is.