Mogwai
📅 1996
🌍 Glasgow, Scotland
🎵 Post-Rock
Mogwai were formed in Glasgow in 1995 by Stuart Braithwaite and Dominic Aitchison, who had known each other since 1991, along with childhood friend Martin Bulloch on drums. The name is taken from the creatures in the film Gremlins — Braithwaite has admitted it means nothing in particular, and that they always intended to find a better one but never got around to it. After a string of singles that quickly caught the attention of the British music press, debut album Mogwai Young Team arrived in 1997 — a record that landed like a bomb in the post-rock landscape and is still regarded as a milestone in the genre. With Barry Burns on guitar, piano and synth from second album Come On Die Young (1999), the classic line-up was in place. Eleven studio albums later — from Rock Action (2001) and Mr Beast (2006) to As the Love Continues, which in 2021 reached number one on the UK Albums Chart — Mogwai are one of the most influential and enduring bands in modern instrumental rock. They have also composed music for film and television, including the soundtrack to the French series Les Revenants and the documentary Atomic.
The music operates in the space between the barely audible and the deafening. Mogwai build long, predominantly instrumental compositions where melodic bass lines and fragile guitar landscapes slowly grow towards massive walls of distortion and noise — only to pull back again. The influences range from Slint, My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth to Kraftwerk, Aphex Twin and Philip Glass, but the result is unmistakably their own. It is music that can be bleakly beautiful one moment and brain-crushingly brutal the next, often within the same song. The band themselves have called it “serious guitar music”, and it is a description that holds.
Live, Mogwai are an overwhelming experience. The volume is legendary — this is a band that plays so loud it is felt physically in the body — but it is never noise for noise’s sake. The dynamic shifts that define the records become even more dramatic in a concert hall, and a piece like “Mogwai Fear Satan” can grow into something that feels equal parts transcendent and devastating. After three decades, they remain one of the most spectacular live bands in the world.
