Rest your aching shoegaze hearts: My Bloody Valentine have played their first show in seven years.
Billed as an “Isn’t Anything warm-up show,” the shoegaze legends returned on Wednesday evening (November 19th) at Dublin’s The National Stadium. The performance marked their first concert since appearing at California’s Desert Daze festival in 2018.
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The 19-song setlist featured a number of standouts, most notably the live debut of “Off Your Face” from 1990’s Glider EP. The rest of the set included “Come in Alone,” “Soon,” “Cigarette in Your Bed,” “Thorn,” and “Only Shallow” before a closing rendition of “You Made Me Realise.”
As BrooklynVegan points out, the show was originally intended for a more intimate club setting before popular demand led to it be relocated to the 2,000-seat arena. As you might expect from any band’s first show in nearly a decade, MBV’s return did have its share of issues. According to Instagram user kealy_j, there were “equipment problems, under-powered volume, missed cues, bad vibes, and abandoned songs.” And as BrooklynVegan notes, the venue had problems with its ticket scanners, which meant that most attendees couldn’t enter until 9 p.m. local time.
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The performance actually supersedes MBV’s originally planned return date on Saturday, November 22nd at Dublin’s 3Arena. (That will mark MBV’s first Irish headlining gig since 1992, FYI.) After that concert, the band’s next shows are November 24th in Manchester, November 25th in London, and November 27th in Glasgow. They’ll then head to Asia for a string of shows, including a festival appearance at Clockenflap in Hong Kong. And come next June, they’ll appear at Barcelona’s Primavera Sound.
After forming in the late ’70s/early ’80s, My Bloody Valentine built a name across their native UK and Ireland. The band came to true fame with 1991’s Loveless, which went on to become a defining record of the shoegaze genre (and ’90s alternative rock in general). After breaking up in 1999 for various creative and professional reasons, the band returned in 2007 with a series of early shows followed by a more extensive tour in summer/fall 2008. From there, they released their third album, m b v, in 2013 (which followed 2012’s EP’s 1988–1991 compilation). MBV had reportedly set to work on even more new material (what could be their fourth LP) as early as 2017.
More recently, frontman Kevin Shields secretly released new music in 2023 (burnt to a flash drive included with a fuzz pedal he produced alongside Fender). He also joined Dinosaur Jr. later that year to cover The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven” during a London concert.
Check out the fan-capture footage of the show and the setlist below, followed by MBV’s upcoming tour dates.
My Bloody Valentine Setlist:
I Only Said
When You Sleep
New You
You Never Should
Honey Power
Cigarette in Your Bed
Only Tomorrow
Come in Alone
Only Shallow
Off Your Face (live debut)
Thorn
Nothing Much to Lose
Who Sees You
To Here Knows When
Slow
Soon
Wonder 2
Feed Me With Your Kiss
You Made Me Realise
My Bloody Valentine 2025-2026 Tour Dates:
11/22 – Dublin, IE @ 3Arena
11/24 – Manchester, UK @ Aviva Studios
11/25 – London, UK @ OVO Wembley Arena
11/27 – Glasgow, UK @ OVO Hydro
12/07 – Hong Kong @ Clockenflap
02/03 – Osaka, Japan @ Namba Hatch
02/04 – Osaka, Japan @ Zepp Namba
02/06 – Koto City, Japan @ Tokyo Garden Theater
02/09 – Koto City, Japan @ Tokyo Garden Theater
06/06 – Barcelona, Spain @ Primavera Sound