My Bloody Valentine @ OVO Hydro, Glasgow, 27 Nov

To not-quite-quote David Byrne; how the fuck did we get here? My Bloody Valentine’s is a strange rise, a 40-year journey from also-ran-indie-band-turned-guitar-music-saving-critical-darling-turned-mythic-recluses to a band as big with TikTok teens as people who liked them first time around. Off the strength of just three albums and a handful of EPs, public consensus has shifted in recent years from them being one of the great bands of their time to one of the great bands of any time; a rare story of doing exactly what they want to increasing adoration, the kind of mass love that has them in the size of room more used to the wrestling or Peter Kay.

It’s deeply heartening in a way that’s kind of weird; when they open with the firestorm dreamscape of I Only Said it feels like reality has capsized, on the one hand because it’s music this strange and otherworldly being played to a room this big, but also because of the gravity-defying force they play at. It’s a testament to them as a live band that after decades of imitators they still blow them all out of the water. It’s not just a question of the arena-shaking volume; their walls of sound are so rich, so full of constantly shifting detail that you start to wonder if you’re imagining things in there, because how much can four instruments and two voices really be summoning?

For a band whose discography is so slim they don’t half have tunes in there as well. Take Only Shallow, for instance, the opening of which still resembles a truck jackknifing through spacetime, or Cigarette in Your Bed whose explosion from sleepy to supernova is ceiling-cracking and heart-bursting in equal measure. As much as is made of You Made Me Realise and its brain-mulching noise section, it remains one of the great indie singles ever made, as buoyantly joyous as it is pummelling, the sound of guitar music being remade forever.

Image: My Bloody Valentine @ OVO Hydro, Glasgow, 27 Nov by Isaac Watson

At times the gig can feel more like being at a planetarium, the audience hammered back into their seats and staring into this invisible behemoth of sound, but the sublime run of the shuffling Soon and out-and-out drum and bass of Wonder 2 fights against this. It acts as a reminder that despite, their whiter than white reputation, theirs is a sound that owes as much to hip-hop and dance music as it does their contemporaries in the guitar mangling world, an omnivorousness of taste in pursuit of transcendence that many of their imitators could bear to learn from.

It’s hardly a surprise they’re this good, but the fact that they can lose not a sliver of their idiosyncratic genius at this scale is honestly astonishing. There’s no indication of any new music on the horizon, and they may well hibernate again once their world tour is over, but they can go to earth with the knowledge that they’ve reminded us that they have been and remain one of the all-time greats.