loveless

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In a 2017 interview with Pitchfork, composer, lyricist, guitarist, and vocalist Kevin Shields spoke on his relationship with Loveless:

At the time when I made Loveless I was extremely focused. I knew what I wanted achieve because the feel of it was in my imagination. Not the reality of it, exactly—I knew what parts needed to be, but I didn’t know exactly what they were and how they sounded until I did them…It just had to be a certain way. It wasn’t about trying to make it sound correct compared to other records. I know why I did everything. It couldn’t be done differently. Without getting pretentious, it’s a bit like I made a painting and I just got it right. I achieved what I was trying to achieve at the time.

In a 2018 interview with NPR, Shield’s spoke on the album’s cutting and mixing process:

We had a lot of trial and error in the whole process of trying to cut it. Isn’t Anything wasn’t so hard but Loveless was a nightmare… It used all our money up and put us in a very not-good place when we should have been recording this album… Until the past couple of years when I really suddenly [felt] like this is nearly never ending.

In a 2017 Rolling Stone Magazine article, Shields said of the remastering process:

When we started, I was borrowing money from myself when I should have been paying tax bills. Instead, I was like, ‘No, let’s do this. It will only take six months.'

Within the same article, he briefly touched on the album’s production cost, saying:

Plenty of other bands on the label spent a lot, and all bands on major labels spent double the amount. To me, all the financial details seemed to overshadow the record’s artistic qualities. Why is that an issue? Do you know how much the Beatles’ and Pink Floyd’s records cost? You’d be shocked.

Later in the article, Shield’s continued by saying:

A lot of people think Loveless was this long period of experimenting, messing around and going off in the wrong direction and starting again and all that,” Shields says. “It wasn’t like that. It was very focused from the very beginning. We just had this extremely bad support network at the time. We had literally no money, and I was literally homeless, ’cause we lived in a squat and we got kicked out. There wasn’t even 300 pounds available for [Creation] to get a deposit for a bed or something.

In a 2017 Rolling Stone Magazine article, Kevin Shields said that groups like Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, and Public Enemy were major influences. He added on by saying:

The sound on the first two Public Enemy records were very mid-rangey. They weren’t hi-fi hip-hop records. It wasn’t music that was designed for an arena, and I loved up-frontness of that sound and the lack of attempting to pacify the listener with prettiness.

Loveless placed #73 in Rolling Stone magazine’s 2020 list of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time.”

This vague, shimmering, gorgeous album reportedly cost as much as $500,000 to make and nearly bankrupted the band’s U.K. label. It was worth it. Forget the lyrics, which are buried in the mix and incomprehensible, and focus on Kevin Shields’ and Bilinda Butcher’s guitars, which build entire noise symphonies out of tremolo effects and pitch bending. Highlights like “Only Shallow” and “I Only Said” use sampling technology to build a distorted, shifting sound that is wholly original and ecstatically beautiful. It’s like being serenaded by ghosts. Generations of shoegaze bands were born in its shadow.

Apple Music features an animated artwork for this release.