Blue Smiley

Blue Smiley — the project of Josh Robbins, who died in 2018 — is one of the most influential bedroom shoegaze artists of the last decade, which is a strange sentence to write about someone who barely released outside of Bandcamp in his lifetime. The influence happened after. The SoundCloud reuploads, the YouTube "sleep to" compilations, the Spotify algorithm that began surfacing his work to an audience that never got to see him play. His work is held now, correctly, as foundational for the shoegaze-revival and DIY dream-pop scenes that followed. The production was thin and warm in the specific way of a song recorded on a bedroom setup with whatever gear was available. The vocals were buried the way shoegaze vocals are supposed to be buried. The songs were short, emotional, and unfinished-feeling in a way that, for people of a certain temperament, registers as more honest than polish ever will. The afterlife of an artist like this is worth paying attention to. The work that gets held — that gets reuploaded, annotated, shared with a note — is almost always the work that was made for the right reasons. Blue Smiley's catalog passes that test. Nonesuch indexes Josh because the canon the industry doesn't tend is the canon we do.