Curve - Cuckoo

If Doppelgänger introduced Curve’s collision of shoegaze atmosphere and electronic aggression, Cuckoo pushed it into darker, heavier, and more claustrophobic territory.

Originally released in 1993, Curve’s second album found Toni Halliday and Dean Garcia expanding the dense hybrid they had established across their early EPs and debut. Guitars are buried beneath layers of distortion and effects, programmed rhythms hit with industrial force, and electronic textures pulse through songs that can feel simultaneously seductive and threatening.

Halliday’s vocals provide the crucial contrast. Cool, intimate, and often eerily calm, her voice floats above Garcia’s enormous basslines and the record’s turbulent walls of sound. “Missing Link” is among Curve’s most ferocious tracks, driven by grinding guitars and a relentless electronic pulse, while “Superblaster” and “Crystal” demonstrate how effortlessly the duo could bury strong pop melodies inside overwhelming production. The title track reveals another side entirely, allowing space and atmosphere to take precedence over sheer impact.

Cuckoo arrived at an interesting intersection in early-’90s alternative music. Shoegaze, industrial rock, electronic dance music, and alternative rock were developing along largely separate paths, yet Curve seemed determined to collapse those distinctions. The result feels less like a conventional shoegaze record than a darker, more physical mutation of the form, one whose fusion of guitars and electronics would prove increasingly prescient as the decade progressed.

This 2017 Music On Vinyl reissue returns Cuckoo to vinyl more than two decades after its original release, offering another chance to hear one of Curve’s most immersive and uncompromising albums in the format.

Dense, sensual, and beautifully abrasive, Cuckoo captures Curve at their most formidable, turning shoegaze’s wall of sound into something built as much for the body as the imagination.