I’ve harped on about shoegazing a couple of times, but I’ve never actually shown a concrete example. So it’s time to rectify that shortcoming with Ride, a (now defunct) group who were certainly a prominent purveyor of that crazily named style.
If you like your alternative rock to contain a huge amount of effect driven guitars, coupled with lucid vocalisations and a general feeling of grandness set in outer space, then welcome to shoegazing and please enjoy your stay! Wikipedia tells me that the genre label itself comes from “musicians in these bands [standing] relatively still during live performances in a detached, introspective, non-confrontational state, hence the idea that they were gazing at their shoes”. Makes sense to me.