Loveless is the second studio album by the Irish rock band My Bloody Valentine, released on 4 November 1991 in the United Kingdom by Creation Records and in the United States by Sire Records. It was recorded between February 1989 and September 1991, with vocalist and guitarist Kevin Shields leading sessions and experimenting with glide guitar technique, non-standard tunings, digital sampling, and meticulous production methods. The band recorded at nineteen different studios and hired several engineers during the album's prolonged recording, with its final production cost rumoured to have reached £250,000 (equivalent to £580,000 in October 2025), though this number is disputed by Shields.
Preceded by the EPs Glider (1990) and Tremolo (1991), Loveless reached number 24 on the UK Albums Chart and was widely praised by critics for its sonic innovations and Shields' "virtual reinvention of the guitar". However, after its release, Creation owner Alan McGee dropped the band from the label as he found Shields too difficult to work with, a factor alleged to have contributed to the label having to sign a co-ownership deal with Sony Music to stay financially afloat. My Bloody Valentine struggled to record a follow-up to the album and broke up in 1997, making Loveless their last full-length release until their eventual reunited effort m b v in 2013.
Since its release, Loveless has been widely cited by critics as one of the greatest albums of all time, a landmark work of the shoegaze subgenre, and a significant influence on various subsequent artists.
Recording
My Bloody Valentine were scheduled to record at Blackwing Studios in Southwark, London for February 1989, and intended to conceptualise a new, more studio-based sound for their second album. Guitarist Kevin Shields said their label Creation Records believed the album could be recorded in five days. According to Shields, "when it became clear that wasn't going to happen, they freaked". After several unproductive months, the band relocated in September to the basement studio The Elephant in Wapping, where they spent eight unproductive weeks. In-house engineer Nick Robbins said Shields made it clear from the outset that Robbins "was just there to press the buttons". Robbins was quickly replaced by Harold Burgon, but according to Shields, Burgon's main contribution was to show the group how to use the in-studio computer. According to Shields, the session tapes were "confiscated" by the studio "three or four times" due to lack of payment.
Burgon and Shields spent three weeks at the Woodcray studio in Berkshire working on the Glider EP, which Shields and Creation owner Alan McGee agreed would be released in advance of the album. Alan Moulder was hired to mix the Glider song "Soon" at Trident2 studio in Victoria; the song later appeared as the closing track on Loveless. Shields said of Moulder, "As soon as we worked with him we realized we'd love to some more!" When the group returned to work on the album, Moulder was the sole engineer Shields trusted to perform tasks such as micing the amplifiers; all the other credited engineers were told "We're so on top of this you don't even have to come to work." Shields said that "these engineerswith the exception of Alan Moulder and later Anjali Duttwere all just the people who came with the studio... everything we wanted to do was wrong, according to them." The band gave credit on the album sleeve to all present during the recordings, "even if all they did was fix tea", according to Shields.
During the spring of 1990, Anjali Dutt was hired to replace Moulder, who had left to work with the bands Shakespears Sister and Ride. Dutt assisted in the recording of vocals and several guitar tracks. During this period, the band recorded in various studios, often spending a single day at a studio before deciding it was unsuitable. In May 1990, My Bloody Valentine settled on Protocol in Holloway as their primary location, and work began in earnest on the album, as well as a second EP titled Tremolo. Like Glider, Tremolo contained a song"To Here Knows When"that later appeared on Loveless. The band stopped recording during the summer of 1990 to tour in support of the release of Glider. When Moulder returned to the project in August, he was surprised by how little work had been completed. By that point, Creation was concerned by how much the album was costing. Moulder left again in March 1991 to work for the Jesus and Mary Chain. In an interview with Select, Shields explained the stop-start nature of his recording, using "When You Sleep" as an example:
The vocals were taped in Britannia Row and Protocol studios between May and June 1991, the first time vocalist Bilinda Butcher was involved in the recording. Shields and Butcher hung curtains on the window between the studio control room and the vocal booth, and communicated with the engineers only when they would acknowledge a good take by opening the curtain and waving. According to engineer Guy Fixsen, "We weren't allowed to listen while either of them were doing a vocal. You'd have to watch the meters on the tape machine to see if anyone was singing. If it stopped, you knew you had to stop the tape and take it back to the top." On most days, the couple arrived without having written the lyrics for the song they were to record. Dutt recalled: "Kevin would sing a track, and then Bilinda would get the tape and write down words she thought he might have sung".
In July 1991, Creation agreed to relocate the production to Eastcote studio, following unexplained complaints from Shields. However, the cash-poor Creation Records was unable to pay the bill for their time at Britannia Row, and the studio refused to return the band's equipment. Dutt recalled, "I don't know what excuse Kevin gave them for leaving. He had to raise the money himself to get the gear out." Shields' unpredictable behavior, the constant delays, and studio changes were having a material effect on Creation's finances and the health of their staff. Dutt later said she had been desperate to leave the project, while Creation's second-in-command Dick Green had a nervous breakdown. Green recalled, "It was two years into the album, and I phoned Shields up in tears. I was going 'You have to deliver me this record.'"
Shields and Butcher became afflicted with tinnitus, and had to delay recording for further weeks while they recovered. Concerned friends and band members suggested this was a result of the unusually loud volumes the group played at their shows, which Shields dismissed as "ill-informed hysteria". Although Alan McGee was still positive about his investment, the 29-year-old Green, who by this time was opening the label's morning post "shaking with fear", became a concern to his co-workers. Publicist Laurence Verfaillie, aware of the label's inability to cover further studio bills, recalled Green's hair turning grey overnight, which she attributed to the album.
With the vocal tracks completed, a final mix of the album was undertaken with engineers Dick Meaney (the Jesus and Mary Chain) and Darren Allison (Spiritualized) at the Church in Crouch End, the nineteenth studio in which Loveless had been worked on. The album was edited on an aged machine that had been used to cut together dialog for movies in the 1970s; its computer threw the entire album out of phase. Shields was able to put it back together from memory, but took thirteen days to master the album rather than the usual one, to Creation's dismay.
As the previously prolific band were unusually quiet, the British music press began to speculate. Melody Maker calculated that the total recording cost had come close to £250,000; however, McGee, Green, and Shields dispute this. Shields argued that the estimated cost and Creation's near-bankruptcy were a myth exaggerated by McGee. According to Shields, "the amount we spent nobody knows because we never counted. But we worked it out ourselves just by working out how much the studios cost and how much all the engineers cost. £160,000 was the most we could come to as the actual money that was spent". In Green's opinion, the estimate made by Melody Maker was understated by £20,000, and that "once you'd even got it recorded and mixed, the very act of compiling, EQ-ing, et cetera took weeks on its own". In December 1991, Shields said that most of the money claimed to have been spent on the album was simply "money to live on" over three years, with the album itself costing only "a few thousand". He also claimed that the album represented only four months' work over two years. He said that most of the money spent came from the band's own funds, while "Creation probably spent fifteen to twenty thousand pounds of their own money on it, and that's it. They never showed us any accounts, and then they got bought out by Sony".
Music
The music of Loveless has been described as shoegaze,The following sources have described Loveless as shoegaze: noise pop, dream pop,The following sources have described Loveless as dream pop: avant-rock, neo-psychedelia, and noise rock. While Butcher contributed about a third of its lyrics, most of the music on Loveless was written and performed by Shields; according to Shields, he is the only musician on the album's songs apart from "Touched". Shields assumed Butcher's guitarist duties during the recording process; Butcher said she had not minded because she felt she "was never a great guitarist". Bassist Debbie Googe did not perform on the album, though she received a credit. Googe said, "At the beginning I used to go down [to the studio] most days but after a while I began to feel pretty superfluous so I went down less." Butcher explained, "for Kevin to actually translate to Debbie what he had in his head and play it right would have been an agonizing process." Moulder said "It wasn't collaborative at all... Kevin had a clear view of what he wanted, but he never explained it."
Loveless was largely recorded in mono sound, as Shields felt it important that the album's sound consisted of "the guitar smack bang in the middle and no chorus, no modulation effect". Shields wavers his guitar's tremolo bar as he strums, which contributes to the band's distinctive sound. This techniquenicknamed "glide guitar"bends the guitar strings slightly in and out of tune. Shields said, "People were thinking it's hundreds of guitars, when it's actually got less guitar tracks than most people's demo tapes have." Unlike other bands of the shoegazing movement of the early 1990s, My Bloody Valentine did not use chorus or flanger pedals; Shields said, "No other band played that guitar like me [...] We did everything solely with the tremolo arm."
Shields aimed to use "very simple minimal effects", which often were the result of involved studio work. He stated, "The songs are really simply structured. A lot of them are purposely like that. That way you can get away with a lot more when you mess around with the contents." In a 1992 Guitar World interview, Shields described how he achieved a sound akin to a wah-wah pedal on "I Only Said" by playing his guitar through an amplifier with a graphic equaliser preamp. After recording the track, he bounced it to another track through a parametric equaliser while he adjusted the EQ levels manually. Asked if he could have achieved the effect more easily using a wah-wah pedal, Shields said, "In attitude toward sound, yes. But not in approach."