Goggles changed everything.

Saturday mornings weren’t always the essential hours of purging the week’s venom. Once, they were filled with the stale taste of chlorine-addled swimming lessons. At seven, after years of learning to float, it was a real kick in the teeth to have to learn to sink- to chase a garish neon baton into the depths. Not even the lure of those miniature cans of pop from Woolworths on the high street could convince me that if I threw myself into the closed-eyed water I’d ever emerge to enjoy them.

But then the goggles. Below the surface, light bended, twisted and collapsed upon me. The familiar sounds of the room were no longer so certain; they vibrated and pulsed through my vacant skull. Seconds and minutes and years became synonyms; I would sit as long as possible at the bottom, ear to the marble floor, feeding on the noise, crushed by the weight of the pool, desperately trying to not give in to my lungs. Not to sink back to the surface.

Until the surprise release of mbv, barely a scrap of music had been released by Dublin’s My Bloody Valentine since 1991’s Loveless. The shoegaze genre’s pinnacle, the influence of Kevin Shield’s magnum opus has coursed through rock music ever since; whether it be the raspberry swirl at the core of Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream or the fuzzy syrup that drenches School of Seven Bells. mbv picks up exactly from where the last whir of Loveless left off.

Without aplomb, the tape hisses into life with opener ‘She Found Now’, an arcane ballad draped in loving blankets of feedback. This murky mess of noise is illuminated by Shields’ saccharine, ebbing vocals. It feels like driving alone at night on barely lit roads with the radio stuck between stations. ‘New You’ is not only the album’s highlight, but a contender for the most serene sounds the band have released. Bilinda Butcher’s woozy voice drifts over and under the noise, unaffected, unassuming. Shields’ skill has always come from sounding entirely powerless, as if his instrumentation will march on regardless of the vocals as if he barely has his sweating hand on the wheel.

‘Is This And Yes’ is a stark change to the rest of the white noise filled album,. A stark erosion of the white noise cloud that surrounds their catalogue, it consists of a solitary organ beamed in from a faraway satellite and a haunting vocal. Shields’ skill has always been the colours he conjures, constantly changing, always disintegrating. ‘Wonder 2’ is the closest this album comes to new horizons, an astonishingly successful mixture of drum ‘n’ bass and shoegaze. Dominated by the horrific whir of what sounds like a jet engine, it’s frantic, chaotic and totally trippy; it’s the band’s ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. mbv’s lack of innovation is actually a delight; the songs could have been torn from Loveless itself.

mbv needs to be listened to on the floor, carpet between one’s creeping fingers. It’s an album that takes several spins, each time submerging deeper into it until one’s nose finally sink s below the water, crushed by the music’s weight, pushed deeper into the slowly bending floorboards. Kevin Shields has recreated the magic of his previous work. This is a record to slowly, effortlessly, perfectly drown in.