My Bloody Valentine spent more than two and a half years and hundreds of thousands of dollars recording their 1991 classic, Loveless — legendarily nearly bankrupting their label at the time, Creation Records — the result of Kevin Shields’ obsessive perfectionism. Still, no one could have expected it would take the band 22 years to complete a follow-up, and certainly no one could have expected that follow-up to arrive without fanfare on a Saturday night in February. And on the subject of expectations: While lots of us expected the album to be good, did any of us expect anything this good? Did any of us know what to expect at all? From its release to its cover art to its title, m b v appeared on the surface to be a shrinking, shy album — a reluctant entity that hoped to come and go unnoticed — but there was no chance of that: The only thing bigger than the occasion was the music. Like Loveless, m b v doesn’t sound like a worked-over project, edited and added-upon to achieve the specific vision of an exacting auteur; it sounds like the ocean floor or the yellow-red-gray clouds at sunset; it sounds like a life form that is itself the product of billions of years of evolution. Of course, nothing in My Bloody Valentine’s music sounds like what it sounded like when it entered this world: human voices, guitars, drums, are bent and reflected and refracted and filtered and magnified and mutilated, and what remains has more in common with abstract expressionism than what is commonly defined as pop music. Lots of bands have spent the last 22 years finding inspiration in Loveless and trying to steal those sounds, update them, own them. And some of those bands have done a pretty damn good job of it, too. But in 22 years, none of those bands made an album that sounds anything like m b v — and now that it’s here, m b v sounds like the only album that could ever have followed Loveless. And those 22 years sound like nothing at all. –Michael [LISTEN]