Exploding Head

[EDIT: 83 - 87 As of 10/07/2025].
I re-listened to this today and... wow. Honestly, everything on here is just brilliant. I was constantly repeating the songs "Exploding Head" and the closer. So I thought 'what's the harm in re-visiting this project? I enjoyed it quite thoroughly first listen'. Exploding head (The album) is a beautiful amalgamation of gothic rock with boisterous noise rock and shoegaze. Every beat and guitarmony on here is insanely pleasurable. This is certainly within the top 2 best shoegaze projects I have ever heard. It's criminally underrated. No reactions on YouTube, no mentions of this album in online discourse. This deserves so much more. Oh, and that final track is fucking perfect, no other way to put it.

-Original review-
I was worried this would be just another run-of-the-mill shoegaze project, consisting of all the same elements every shoegaze project has, and looking at the reviews — often making comparisons to MBV and The Cure — I was entering this with a fair bit of pessimism. MBV's Loveless is a highly overrated project in my opinion, and The Cure really just isn't for me. The odds were stacked against APTBS's Exploding Head...

Which is why I'm pleased to say that this was a great listen, and also a rare occasion where the second leg was actually better than the first. "It Is Nothing" starts off very strong: brilliant noise rock elements with dreamy, reverberated drums. "In Your Heart" and "Lost Feeling" evolve more into this depicted 'Cure' aesthetic, which I still did find pleasant, even though it did not compare to the debut track. From track five onwards, a more aggressive and sharper tone becomes more prominent, giving a more high-octane atmosphere. The LP easily peaks at the last three tracks: the brilliantly catchy "Everything Always Goes Wrong", the Just Like Heaven-inspired title track, and the absolutely fantastic closer — one of the best and most suitable closers I have heard. Incredible energy persists throughout the second half, refusing to let up and creating an incredible last impression on the overall project. I would pay a lot of money to hear that song live.

While I do think this LP is superb, there's often a hard cap for what I rate shoegaze and adjacent genre projects. While I do like listening to shoegaze, a whole LP often becomes too repetitive for me. There really is a rather limited capacity to what you can do within such a coherent genre. Slowdive's Souvlaki will always, to me, be the standout true-blue shoegaze rock project, and other shoegaze albums that score higher, such as M83's debut, rank higher because they adapt the genre to create a new sound while still successfully maintaining emotion. Exploding Head is a very strong shoegaze project that sticks to the typical sound (perhaps with slight punk rock inspiration), and it's one of the best I've heard from the genre. I'd easily recommend this to any shoegaze fan — it honestly deserves more attention.