As recently as three years ago, the prospect of being a shoegaze rockstar would’ve been seen as laughably ridiculous. In 2025, who the fuck knows what’s possible.

This year, TikTok shoegaze breakout Wisp will tour with System Of A Down and Deftones, two of the biggest rock bands in the world. Novulent and Julie, other beneficiaries of the once-marginal genre’s Gen-Z internet renaissance, have singles with more Spotify streams than many Charli XCX fan-favorites. Whirr, the once-canceled vanguards of 2010s shoegaze, are gearing up to play their first shows in a decade to sold-out crowds in 4,000-capacity venues. The unprecedented buzz around shoegaze that first reached a fever pitch in late 2023 has been sustained, and noisy, ethereal guitar music is no longer chained beneath indie-rock’s modest ceiling for success. For an-up-and-coming band like Glixen, one of the best shoegaze groups of the 2020s, it’s now realistic to want more than just small club tours and respect among a niche audience of pedalboard picture-takers.

“I’ve been wanting to be a star since I was nine years old,” Glixen singer-guitarist Aislinn Ritchie tells Stereogum. “Something we’d want to do is tour with [bands] like System Of A Down, Deftones, or Smashing Pumpkins. Those are our dreams and aspirations.”

For now, those are just fantasies for Glixen (though they will play Coachella this spring). But the band already have what they’ll need if a viral takeoff — or, even better, steady, organic growth — ever comes their way. As far as shoegaze bands go, Glixen are the full package. They have a recognizable sound replete with rich, colorful guitar textures and noggin-sticking melodies. A dark, sultry look that’s unabashedly bringing sexy back to a genre that’s long overdue for some more of My Bloody Valentine’s “slow, slow suck.” A fucking powerhouse live show — properly loud, beguiling to watch, and actually effective at translating the decadent layers of noise that fill out their recorded material. And best of all, while some of their peers are already bottoming out, Glixen keep getting better.

Their new EP, Quiet Pleasures, is a remarkable step up from their last one, 2023’s also-great She Only Said. Produced by Sonny Diperri (My Bloody Valentine, DIIV, M83), the new songs are heavier and sharper, with more sophisticated musicianship, chunkier riffs, and more intricate vocal interplay between Ritchie and her founding co-guitarist, Esteban Santana. The singles Glixen dribbled out in 2024 (especially “lust” and “sick silent”) pointed in a grungier, Hum-ier direction than the brisk indie-pop tunes that sparkled beneath the fuzz on She Only Said. Indeed, that’s where Glixen ended up on Quiet Pleasures — though, thankfully, not at the expense of their dazzling melodic appeal.

“How do we make this even more abrasive, even darker?” Santana says of their plan for the new songs. “But still playful, catchy, pretty, ethereal.”

That sonic and temperamental overhaul isn’t merely the result of changing tastes within the band. The graver, grittier sound is a reflection of how Glixen’s own members were feeling during the most “negatively emotional” year in the band’s short history. With all of their achievements come the increased pressures and stressors of trying to make a touring indie band sustainable, and at a time when that’s arguably more materially difficult than ever. The conflicting emotions of living out their dreams — opening Nothing’s Slide Away festival in Philly last spring still makes Ritchie’s eyes well up with pride, and touring with DIIV was “insane” — while simultaneously trying to make ends meet with music has been tough on Ritchie’s psyche.

“It’s just crazy, this life,” Ritchie says, giggling awkwardly. “I’m just dealing with my own personal things…It’s just hard touring and trying to do all this while trying to pay the bills. It’s just a lot, and it feels like a lot more than it did three years ago. Like, it feels harder for some reason, life in general. Besides music.”

Glixen are a Phoenix band, even though only one of their members, bassist Sonia Garcia, is originally from there. Santana spent his early years in L.A., drummer Keire Johnson is an Illinois native, and Ritchie moved from Tucson to Arizona’s capital as a teen. For now at least, braving the oppressive heat is a worthy tradeoff for the cheaper rent, relative to L.A. or New York. Though, being far outside of the coastal bubble has its own isolating effects.

“Everything just takes so much longer [here],” Ritchie says. “In the summer, it’s like 123 degrees. We just have to get through the summer and survive.”

While the desert might seem like an unnatural habitat for a genre that began in the dank, dreary UK, Arizona was one of the first major shoegaze outposts in the US. In the early ’90s, the “Beautiful Noise” scene, as it was sometimes called, spawned around bands like Alison’s Halo, Half String, Six String Malfunction, and, for a brief time, Loveliescrushing — the ambient-gaze gods who Glixen got their namesake from. By the time Glixen’s members came of age in the 2010s, that scene was more than 20 years in the rearview and the only modern torchbearer was a local band called Draa, who Ritchie saw live when she was 16, exposing her to shoegaze for the first time.

“I didn’t know what that genre was at all,” she says, remembering the show. “I had no idea what it was called. And I’m like, ‘Oh my god, that’s what I’m gonna do.'”

Ritchie never had trouble carving her own path. Her parents didn’t listen to music in the house, but she got the bug for performing at a young age, developing a love for 2000s pop stars like Christina Aguilera while also taking a strong interest in fashion. “My mom never dressed me,” she says. “I was five or six years old shopping for myself. I wanted to choose my clothes.”

After a stint in high-school acting like “kind of a little shit,” which involved sneaking out and being a “crazy girl,” Ritchie left the suburbs after high school and joined her first band, a dream-pop group called Dovi. At that time, Santana, who grew up listening to metal with his hesher cousins, was playing in a grungier local band around Phoenix called Alma. “Just some Phoenix shit,” he shrugs. Santana ended up joining Dovi once COVID hit, but by that point, the band was rife with internal conflicts and didn’t make it to the other side of lockdown. Instead, the guitarists began writing music for Glixen, with the intention of taking the new band far beyond their desert city limits.

“We’re going to do this,” Ritchie told her bandmates at the group’s inception. “I want to take it all the way, as far as I can. Are you guys down?”

Things moved quickly. Glixen played their first-ever show to a sold-out, 275-person crowd in fall of 2021. Then, their debut single, “Sugarcube,” caught the ear of They Are Gutting A Body Of Water frontman Doug Dulgarian, who released She Only Said on his Philly-based Julia’s War label in early 2023. A co-sign from the Creation Records of American shoegaze, right in the midst of the genre’s unprecedented resurgence, was huge for Glixen.

“I was totally blown away,” Dulgarian says of the first time he heard “Sugarcube.” “Phoenix seemed like such foreign territory for me, and the fact that such good, true-to-form ‘shoegaze’ was still being created in 2021 was thrilling to me.'”

In an era when young ‘gazers like Julie are signed to Atlantic Records and Slowdive are playing to thousands each night, you’d think that industry bigwigs would’ve been all over Glixen by now. Surprisingly, the band are still technically free agents (Quiet Pleasures is being distributed by AWAL and the vinyl is out via Wichita, but they aren’t signed to either label). In fact, despite still sounding like a true-to-form shoegaze band, Glixen currently think of themselves as misfits who don’t slot neatly into any one particular niche.

“I feel like people don’t know where to put us,” Ritchie says. “Because they see how we look and how we do things, and it’s very different from a typical shoegaze band.”

Glixen undoubtedly have a look. Ritchie and bassist Garcia have been best friends since they were 16, when they met working at American Apparel. To this day, fashion is still a core part of their lives, and a crucial component of Glixen’s presentation is how the two women express themselves with their choice of clothing.

“I want to be, like, a hot rocker chick,” Ritchie says of her aesthetic. “Where is the hot rocker chick that likes Deftones?”

Shoegaze pioneers like My Bloody Valentine, Lush, and even Cocteau Twins made music that was outwardly sensual, but most of the biggest shoegazers of the last couple decades have, for whatever reason, downplayed the genre’s aphrodisiac character (Cigarettes After Sex’s H&M-dressing-room eroticism aside). Between the members’s often-revealing outfits — Ritchie’s childhood hero, X-Tina, remains her fashion inspo — and songs titled “lust” and “all tied up,” Glixen aren’t timid about embracing shoegaze’s innate sensuality. Disappointingly, though not unexpectedly, that’s earned the band their fair share of nasty comments on Reddit and YouTube, where people have disparaged them merely for having a defined look that doesn’t conform to indie-rock’s modest uniform — strays that all-male shoegaze bands almost never catch.

“That’s just me being myself,” Ritchie says of how she dresses for Glixen. “I want to not think about what anyone else thinks, and just, if I feel sensual, hot, sexy — or mysterious, or not any of those things — I want to be able to do whatever I want. I don’t want to be put in a box, basically.”

Glixen don’t want to be boxed in in any regard. Ritchie was drawn to making music as a form of escapism (“I always wanted to be in a different world”), and she has big plans for how to build out Glixen’s live show into a fantastical performance art spectacle — a visual rendering of the “very specific texture” Glixen’s music evokes in her: “chrome and silver with, like, ribbons.” Recently, a friend took her to see pop star Kim Petras perform, and Ritchie was absolutely smitten by the whole charade: dancers, lights, fake snow. She started imagining what a Glixen show at that scale might look like. Less shoegazing, more stargazing.

“I want to have that budget and be able to do that with our music,” she says. “Shoegaze bands usually just have visuals, but I want more. I want light direction…” She trails off, the chipper excitement in her voice recalibrating to a measured acknowledgment of reality. “It’s just gonna take time. It takes a lot of people. It takes a lot of money. Right now, we need to focus on writing music to get there.”

Quiet Pleasures is out now digitally and 3/7 physically via AWAL/Wichita.