Photo by Graham Bell
A new genre is quietly building momentum, some call it “countrygaze,” others “dirtgaze.” It’s a fresh blend where younger bands fuse the dreamy textures of ‘90s shoegaze and slowcore with the earthy spirit of Americana and alt-country. Pedal steel amplifies the country influence, while fuzzy, reverb-soaked guitars evoke shoegaze’s signature sound. Slowcore’s presence is felt in the unhurried tempos and understated vocals that gently shape the mood.
While Wednesday and MJ Lenderman aren’t the genre’s originators, their success has become a touchstone for emerging acts. The movement isn’t tied to a single location, but Asheville, North Carolina, especially Alex Farrar and his studio (Drop of Sun), has become a creative hub with numerous bands booking time to capture this evolving sound.
Shallowater, though inspired by the current scene and Asheville’s energy, traces its roots to Texas. The band’s sound is shaped more by the vastness and solitude of West Texas – openness, desert, loneliness – than by any single trend. Their debut, There is a Well, released on December 30, 2023 without major label support or publicity, still found its audience and earned critical acclaim from fans and journalists alike. It was a remarkable first effort from a group formed just before the pandemic, including a member new to band life. As their confidence and experience grew, Shallowater’s music evolved into a distinctive style. 2025’s God’s Gonna Give You A Million Dollars built on that momentum, earning Stereogum’s “Album of the Week” honors. While the band isn’t shrouded in mystery, information remains scarce. Despite my hesitation to ask the obvious, I couldn’t resist inquiring about their origin and name. Thankfully, Blake Skipper (singer-guitarist) and Tristan Kelly (bassist) – Ryan Faulkenberry (drummer) rounds out the band – haven’t had to answer those questions often enough to be tired of them.
Stereogum named God’s Gonna Give You a Million Dollars the album of the week. That was my discovery of Shallowater.
TRISTAN: I’m so glad to know that getting these reviews done by any of these publications actually reaches people in that way. That’s amazing to hear. Our booking agent found out about us through an article in Brooklyn Vegan.
Because I haven’t read a lot about you, I’m going to resort to asking you some questions that I typically don’t ask. How did you guys meet? How did the band start?
TRISTAN: I met Blake in about 2018 at a house show venue called the Gypsy House. It was kind of the one place for alternative stuff to happen in Lubbock, Texas. There were no bars or anything like that that catered to the kind of stuff that we were into. It was just a place you could go see a show in Lubbock, Texas.
I met Blake, and I thought he looked crazy, and I was going to South by Southwest the next week. I was looking for more friends, and I invited him to come to South by Southwest with us. We went, and everyone said that we looked like we were in a band, and Blake had the idea that when we got back, we’d start a band.
At that point, I had never played any music at all. Out of the six people that came to South by Southwest with us, I was the only one that showed up for band practice. I learned the basics of being in a band and playing music with Blake over the course of a year, but then I moved away, and Blake stayed to finish school. Then the pandemic hit, and I came back.
Shortly thereafter, I met Ryan at a buddy’s house. He was playing drums, and I invited him to come play with me and Blake. We just kept showing up and kept practicing, and I think 2021 is when we really formed the band and gave it a name.
Did you guys use that time during the pandemic to spend time practicing, learning your stuff, writing songs?
BLAKE: Definitely. Tristan and I played around in little local projects with some different friends around Lubbock, but Shallowater itself didn’t form until we met Ryan in 2020. He came around, and we finally had ourselves a good drummer. Then we were able to get together, and all three of us lock down some original songs, and create new music.
TRISTAN: I think the thing that sealed the deal was that Blake had written the original riff for the song “Spin Me to Sleep” off our first album. We had asked a couple drummer buddies of ours if they could come in and help us out, and Ryan showed up and was like, “Oh, it’s in 5/4,” and played a 5/4 beat immediately. That’s when we were just like, “Yeah, that’s the guy.”
BLAKE: We didn’t really know about time signatures and all that.
TRISTAN: No, not at all. But once we got Ryan in there, we were practicing every day. I still don’t think we were good coming out of the pandemic, but all we had was time, and we would just jam for two hours straight, no stops, just completely formless. I think that made us all learn a lot about each other. Since it was just completely aimless, we figured out what we didn’t want to do, since we did everything. And we finally landed on all the stuff that we did want to do, and that’s what became Shallowater.
I went to South by Southwest a few times in the early 2000s. I would describe it to friends as Mardi Gras meets Heaven. It’s just non-stop partying and watching live music. Is it still that way?
BLAKE: That’s how it was for me. It was my first real experience going to anything like that. I’m from a smaller town than Lubbock, so seeing the house shows in Lubbock blew my mind, and then this guy took me to South by Southwest, and it was mind-blowing.
TRISTAN: We played there last year. I would say it’s pretty much the same, except the barrier to entry has gone up quite a bit. It costs way too much money to go down there and do it now for the average person. That makes it a lot less cool. But, if you’re a band that is invited to play, it’s a pretty awesome week, for sure.
My friend would always have to remind me that it’s a marathon, not a sprint. We would tend to go hard on the first day and then pay for it on the second day.
BLAKE: It was rough.
TRISTAN: I think we packed in nine shows over three or four days that we played at South By. We weren’t even drinking that much because we were just playing shows, and oh my god, we were dragging ourselves to that last show.
Was there one particular show out of those nine that you’re just like, “This is the one that we’ll remember”?
TRISTAN: I think it was the night that we played at Mohawk. We played on the indoor stage at Mohawk. I think it was on the Friday of that week. We were beat down, but also because of that, we just didn’t care anymore when we went up on stage. Before South By, I think we were completely different players in a live sense compared to what we were after, and at that point, I just was like, “You know, we’re just gonna go up there, whatever happens, happens.” And I think that was the best set we may have ever played.
BLAKE: As tired as you get, it does feel nice whenever it just starts to feel natural. It’s muscle memory, and you don’t get as many nerves when you’re just so beat down from being tired.
TRISTAN: I think that was the first time I ever met a British person, and they came up, and they were like, “Oh my god, you guys are like Mogwai.” That made my whole week.
I hate asking this question but where did the band name come from?
TRISTAN: We changed the name every performance we had in Lubbock because it didn’t really matter. We were just playing our friends’ living rooms, or our own living room. And then our really good friend, Hayden Pedigo, got signed to Mexican Summer while he was living in Lubbock, and he had some money for a music video. We were invited to just be on set, hang out, and we ended up being in the music video for “Letting Go.” It was all shot in Shallowater, Texas, which is right next to Lubbock, Texas.
We were at a gas station in Shallowater, and we saw this old sign from the ‘50s or ‘60s that, in really nice, bold script, said “Shallowater.” I liked the way it looked, and I’d grown up seeing the exit to Shallowater my whole life, and it never really clicked for me until that moment. It looks good spelled out that way. It’s an interesting thing, and I think that’s a unique thing. It places us somewhere on the map. It sounds cool and looks cool, and we just decided that night that we were gonna be Shallowater.
We played a show a couple weeks later in Lubbock, and everyone was asking, “Is it in Lubbock, or is it in Shallowater?” That was our biggest concern at the time: people would think that all of our shows were in Shallowater. But, it just kind of stuck. I think the music that we make is very much from the place that we’re from. To me, it is West Texas music, and I think the name fits.
And now you guys are in Houston?
BLAKE: We are, yeah.
TRISTAN: I’m actually in Austin right now. I’m in my car, and I’m about to see Tortoise in a couple hours.
In Lubbock, in Shallowater, in Houston, are there other bands like you in those cities that you’re pals and peers with, or are you sort of the anomaly?
TRISTAN: Most of the bands that we saw at the house shows were either 2008 indie rock or 2008 psych rock. A lot of bands wanted to be the Osees, a lot of bands wanted to be Mac DeMarco. I think we were somewhat of an anomaly at the time.
But Amarillo has a lot of really great musicians. There was three hours in between Amarillo and Lubbock, so the scenes didn’t really cross very much, but they did sometimes. Hayden Pedigo makes music that is very different from us, but I think it comes from the same kind of ethos. I think he really captures that area of the country in the same way that we’re trying to do. I feel like there’s a lot of musicians out there that are trying to capture West Texas, and I feel a kindred spirit more with those people than the actual other bands from around the area.
BLAKE: Lubbock is pretty cyclical, it being a college town. There’s a lot of kids from everywhere that would come in and start up bands, and so you’d get a blend of everything. I’d have to go back in time to those house shows to really listen again, but a lot of it didn’t scream West Texas or anything. It was good stuff, but it didn’t feel coherent to the other bands.
TRISTAN: Texas Tech was mainly just a bunch of kids from Houston and Dallas, really. You got cycled out every four years, and most of the time, the bands just ended whenever one member graduated. I’d say there weren’t that many people trying to make West Texas music. Just kids from Dallas a lot of the time.
You recorded in Asheville, North Carolina which is such a hot bed right now. There’s a bunch of bands that live in the same universe as MJ Lenderman. You mentioned a West Texas sound and I thought you sort of have that Asheville sound. Would you say West Texas and Asheville sounds are similar?
TRISTAN: I would say it’s comparable, the blend of shoegaze and alternative music with country. There’s a microscope over Asheville, and there just seems to be new bands in that genre popping up every day. I do think we’re working with the same ingredients, but I’d like to think that there’s something more Texas about what we do.
BLAKE: I think the difference, at least in my mind—I don’t know how well it is translated to the average person listening—is that’s Southern, and this is Texan.
TRISTAN: I love MJ Lenderman, and I love Wednesday. I’ve been a fan of them for quite a bit of time. It’s amazing to see what all they’re doing now. We decided to go with Alex Farrar in Asheville because it just seemed that he knew how to make that style of music. He’s made a huge reputation for himself working with those bands. I definitely agree that we do live in the same world as them, but I think as we figure things out with making more music, maybe we can really settle in on what makes us different, because I still think that we’re a newer band. It feels like we’re just now starting.
TRISTAN: Our first album came out on the last day of 2023, or the first day of 2024, and we had another album this year, but I still think there’s just so much room for us to grow. Wednesday and MJ Lenderman have been doing this for a very, very long time, and it’s a very, very established sound that they’ve landed on. It’s something that definitely keeps me up at night.
The names that I see in reviews of your music are Codeine, Slint, Hum and Jason Molina. Those are all ‘90s artists. Are those names even familiar to you?
TRISTAN: Hum and Codeine, for sure. Jason Molina is something that I kind of discovered later. I had found Mark Kozelek and Sun Kil Moon and Red House Painters, and I got lost in that world for a really long time. That’s what introduced me to slowcore, and through that, I found Codeine and a lot of those bands on Numero Group. I used to listen to them on YouTube when I was 19. I loved that style of music so much, and it absolutely is a major influence on what we do.
As you were starting out and trying to figure out what the Shallowater sound would be, did you go through a period where you sounded like, say, Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin and then refine and evolve your sound?
BLAKE: I think it’s step-by-step. We definitely never used to sound like Led Zeppelin or anything. On some of the earlier tracks, I think it was a bigger division between “This is kind of our shoegaze one” and “This is our more country one.” As we’ve gone on, we’ve learned how to toy with bringing both of those together. Also, we don’t want to limit it just to that. We want to figure out what to do next. We’re constantly trying to become better musicians, and who knows where that’s gonna lead.
As I listened to the first song on the album, the title track, it starts off as this slowcore, Americana-folk song. It speeds up a little as the song goes on but, I’ll admit, I was completely caught off guard by the thunderous fuzzy noise that drops into the track at the 2:45 mark. Was that always part of the song or were like, “This song is missing something, let’s give this a try?”
BLAKE: We went off a riff that Tristan had on bass. It was the last song we wrote on the new album. We built it off of what he had laid down, and just kind of put it together piece by piece. He threw in parts, and I threw in parts, and then we had put this puzzle together and try to make it nice to listen to.
TRISTAN: Yeah, it was a riff that we had kicking around for a long time, and I knew I wanted it to have this really sudden, like, “wakes you up” kind of thing, like going really fast, and then you hit a wall. I wanted it have that kind of feeling to it. I had that riff, but just that riff by itself is kind of worthless, so we had to figure out what we could do around it.
I think that’s how a lot of the songs are written. You have this great one-liner, but without something around it, it would fall flat. I think that’s how a lot of our songs are built.
I watched the Beatles Get Back documentary during the pandemic and was fascinated how they took bits of a few different songs that they were working on and put them together in a brand new song. It sounds like maybe you were doing that too, taking a few different things you had written that didn’t have a home and putting them together.
TRISTAN: 100%. When we’re making these nine-minute long tracks, I think both me and Blake are neurotic by nature. There are lots of great nine-minute long tracks that are just one loop, one riff the whole time, but I think that it would kill us if we went up there and did that. So these nine-minute long tracks are constantly moving. Once we recorded them and everything’s sent back to us, and we’re listening to it for the first time, it just kind of hit me. I was like, “Man, that definitely could have been like three different songs.” And it kind of was, but we just wanted to see, “Well, if that’s a whole idea, and we have this song, and we have this piece in the same tuning, what could we do to connect them?” You have to earn the riff that you want to put in the song. It’s like, “If you want to put this riff in there, you gotta have that piece that leads up to it, or the piece that puts it in context where it makes sense.” That’s a lot of how it came to be.
BLAKE: One of the most cathartic things that I find in making music is whenever you have two things and you don’t really know what to do with them, you find out that they can go together and it sounds really nice. It’s like two different ideas for maybe two different songs, but when they come together, that’s a great feeling.
Do you think the songs are chapters in an overall book, or would you consider each song to be its own unique short story?
TRISTAN: I don’t think it’s anything that any of us have ever really talked about. I will say, after all of the songs were recorded, I imagined each song being its own little room in a house and the memories of what has happened in each of those rooms is how I make sense of it.
A lot of the songs are about things that never happened mixed in with things that really happened. It’s writing a myth, you know? There’s something to it, but just reading the lyrics, I don’t think you’re gonna get the meaning out of it.
Is it easy for you guys to go out on tour, or do you have commitments—day jobs, or family commitments—that make you pick and choose what you do?
BLAKE: Ryan is in grad school; he’s getting his doctorate, so that’s the biggest tie-down. Tristan and I have worked jobs in between, but nothing we aren’t willing to drop. We all moved out to Houston to do this. Other than just getting out of Lubbock, that was the driving reason.
TRISTAN: Yeah, we moved to Houston to make it in music.
BLAKE: Not a whole lot of people you’ll hear of doing that, but it’s a nice way to not break the bank, and Houston has been nothing but good to us.
We’ve only just recently got into actually touring. We’ve done some little Texas runs last year several times, but this year was the first time we ever had a real tour where our really good buddies in World’s Worst took us on the road. We actually went up to the Midwest, and then out to Canada, and then down the East Coast. It was really nice to actually get our feet wet doing that. That’s what we wanted to do ever since we left Lubbock.
TRISTAN: We dreamed about that moment for a long time. We will do anything we possibly can to make sure that we’re there for every good opportunity that comes our way. But we do have to be selective and make sure it is a good opportunity for Ryan to take time off of getting his electrical engineering degree.
Your touring this year has been incredibly diverse, sharing stages with bands like The Raveonettes, Teethe, and Agriculture, and also playing a major event like ACL. I’m not sure any of those bands share a fanbase. Did you feel you were successfully winning over new fans, or was it often a struggle to engage crowds primarily there for the headliners?
TRISTAN: The Raveonettes tour definitely felt like that, but I think by the end of the set, everyone there was happy that they saw us rather than not. A lot of people that were initially skeptical of us came up to us after shows and were really supportive. When we go out with someone like Teethe or Horse Jumper of Love, their fans are our fans, and if they don’t know about us, they’re going to go home and they’re going to listen to us.
I love Agriculture so much, and they were coming to Houston. They didn’t have an opener announced, and I just was like, “I need to do it. I need to do it.” I love that band so much.
I don’t know them that well but I’ve been listening to the new record a lot. It’s necessarily a style of music that I listen to often, but the album’s so good.
TRISTAN: It’s the best live show you could possibly see. I think I’ve cried at every show I’ve ever attended that they’ve played. That’s not something I think black metal does for a lot of people.
Have you ever played a Halloween show where you covered a band like The Ramones, The Sex Pistols, The Rolling Stones?
TRISTAN: I think one of our very first shows ever was a house show that we threw at our house, and we went and got a keg so people would show up. I think the original plan was for this other band to do The Smiths, and we were gonna do The Cure. But then we thought that was too much work, and we just played our own songs. But this year, we are gonna be playing “Wonderwall” by Oasis.
Would The Cure still be a band that you’d want to do a cover set of in the future for a Halloween show?
TRISTAN: I think at the time when we were first starting, yes, but I think now I would choose Codeine or Red House Painters.
BLAKE: I’d just do country songs.
TRISTAN: Yeah, or any old country artist. I think that would be really fun to do.
What sort of expectations do you have for this album and for the band? Is there anything that seems just out of reach that you might call an unrealistic expectation but something that, with some luck, you might be able to achieve?
TRISTAN: I think the realistic expectation that I really want to see come through is to tour Europe. Going and doing a run of shows in the UK and maybe a little bit of mainland Europe. I’ve only been out of the country once, and it was to play a show in Canada, and I think it’s not that far off that we could do something like that. Maybe it’ll take a little bit, but I do think that’s something we can do.
What about the thing that you think won’t happen, but with some luck could?
BLAKE: Opening for Oasis.
TRISTAN: The longest tour we’ve ever been on was a three-week tour with a band that’s kind of of similar size with us. I really, really want to open up for a really well-established band. An unrealistic expectation is that we open up for Geese on tour. but I think everyone and their dog wants to open up for Geese now.
For sure. When you guys played ACL, you were one of the earlier bands on the bill?
TRISTAN: Yeah, we were the first band on the biggest stage there. It felt like an honor to be on the same stage that Pierce the Veil and The Strokes played on later in the day, but we were opening up.
BLAKE: I was just gonna say, as far as expectations go, we started off this thing thinking, like, “just till the wheels fall off, do it till it doesn’t make sense.” And I feel like we’ve already surpassed our unrealistic expectations. Everything from here on out’s a bonus.
What’s a song that evokes a specific memory?
TRISTAN: “Fascination Street” by The Cure. I bought Disintegration the same week that I got my first car when I was 16. I put the CD in there—it was a ’96 light blue Honda Civic—and it never came out, not because I didn’t want to pull it out or anything, it just got stuck in there. And so I was stuck listening to Disintegration the entire time I had that car. And “Fascination Street” became my favorite one, and I can just remember all my friends in my car listening to that song over and over and over again. That album was kind of always there for me. Whether I was happy or sad, or whatever was going on in my life, I kind of had no choice but Disintegration by The Cure. But “Fascination Street” was the one that woke me up out of the daze of that album that I found myself in. I can remember being 16 and driving to the movies, like I did every weekend, and listened to that on repeat the whole way there. There could be a lot worse CDs stuck in your car than that one. I lucked out.
At that point in time, when I was in high school, like, Chief Keef and Young Thug were the new things happening that all my friends were into. But they all knew if they got in my car, we’re listening to old goth rock, and that’s what you get. They were like, “We’re not listening to Chief Keef?” and I’m like, “We can’t. We’re all gonna listen to The Cure.”
BLAKE: For me, it’s “Old Friends” by Pinegrove. I remember Lubbock in the fall, just driving around, probably like 2017 or so, and feeling pretty melancholy in life in general, you know, just some angsty stuff. And that song seemed to fit it pretty well. I just found that song, and I liked it a lot. I hadn’t heard anything of that style, that kind country-ish rock and roll type thing. It meant a lot to me at the time, and I still like it a lot.
