Cold Gawd + Soft Blue Shimmer

Cold Gawd

Cold Gawd is the flag under which California-based multi-instrumentalist Matt Wainwright creates stormy, wounded shoegaze music born of open tunings and R&B melodies. Inspired by these sounds, Cold Gawd presents a refined, modernized take on the genre.

Wainwright cites the thematic common ground between shoegaze and R&B as a central muse, both obsessively fixated on love, lust, and longing, in forms alternately grandiose and minor key.Lyrically, 2022’s album “God Get Me The Fuck Out Of Here” sways between oblique and desperate, yearning and resigned – with the exception of “Comfort Thug,” a brooding, largely improvised spoken word piece inspired by the notable lack of black musicians in shoegaze.

In 2024, Cold Gawd returns to Dais Records with their second and most supreme suite of crushing downer bliss: “I’ll Drown On This Earth.” From the defiant scream that kicks off “Gorgeous,” the album rips in what singer and songwriter Matthew Wainwright describes as “go for it” mode – holding back nothing, wasting no time. Written in 2022 but recorded in March 2024, the album's hooks, heaviness, and haze were finely honed.

It’s rare a band name directly encapsulates its sound, but Soft Blue Shimmer couldn’t be more fitting for the trio out of Los Angeles. On their newest album Love Lives in the Body, released in November 2022 on Other People Records, the group’s floaty and hazy instrumentation glistens alongside emotionally-charged lyrics.

First formed in 2018, the band released their debut EP, Nothing Happens Here in 2019, followed by the moodier full-length, Heaven Inches Away in 2020. Love Lives in the Body serves as not only a natural growth from their past material, but also an outlet for lyricist Charlie Crowley to be their most vulnerable yet.