Slowdive released Souvlaki on 1 June 1993 through Creation Records, and the British press mostly shrugged. Melody Maker's Dave Simpson wrote that he would rather drown in a bath of porridge than hear it again. Richey Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers reportedly said he hated Slowdive more than Hitler, which is the kind of thing a person says when they want to be quoted. Britpop was cresting, and a record this slow, this soft, this stubbornly interior had no obvious home in the conversation. The album peaked at number 51 on the UK Albums Chart. None of this is the interesting part.
The interesting part is how the album actually got made, and why its fractured, multi-sourced construction is precisely what gives it the emotional range that later listeners found so devastating. Souvlaki came from a band in three different studios, a rejected first draft of roughly forty songs, a label boss who told them everything they had written was rubbish, and a fortnight Neil Halstead spent alone in a rented cottage in rural Wales. The album sounds like all of that, if you know where to listen.
The recording sessions began in 1992, and the early material went nowhere useful. According to Halstead, those early songs were influenced by Joy Division and David Bowie's Berlin Trilogy. Alan McGee, then running Creation Records, listened to the first batch and rejected it outright, though he subsequently gave the band full creative control over whatever came next. Around the same time, after a May 1992 US tour, Halstead and Rachel Goswell ended their romantic relationship. Halstead had been the band's chief songwriter; now he was writing alone, and the songs were turning inward. At his manager's suggestion, he left the sessions entirely in the summer of 1992 and spent around two weeks in a cottage in Wales. Nick Chaplin and Christian Savill stayed behind and, by Savill's own account, mostly recorded joke songs. When Halstead came back, he had a new batch of songs he later described as "stark and much more personal," including "Dagger," which would close the album. The isolation did something to his writing that the studio hadn't.
Before those Wales-born songs were tracked, the band had managed a few days of recording with Brian Eno, who had declined Halstead's invitation to produce the whole record but agreed to come in and work. Out of those sessions came "Sing" and "Here She Comes." Eno co-wrote "Sing" with Halstead and contributed keyboards to both tracks, with "Sing" co-published by EMI Music and Eno's Opal Music label. The Eno sessions appear to have shifted Halstead's frame of reference; after them, he began pulling from ambient music, citing Aphex Twin, dub, and early drum and bass as touchstones, influences that surface most clearly in the delay architecture of "Souvlaki Space Station." The album's most celebrated production moment, that song's layered echo, belongs entirely to Slowdive, not Eno. It says something that the most remarkable production on an album featuring Brian Eno is the track Eno had nothing to do with.
The logistics of the sessions are worth tracing because they map directly onto the album's texture. The record was cut across three locations: Protocol Studios in London handled tracks one, three, four, five, and ten, meaning "Alison," "40 Days," "Sing," "Here She Comes," and "Dagger." The Courtyard Studio in Sutton Courtenay took tracks two, six, and eight: "Machine Gun," "Souvlaki Space Station," and "Altogether." The White House Studio in Weston Super Mare is where tracks seven and nine were recorded: "When the Sun Hits" and "Melon Yellow." Engineers Andy Wilkinson and Guy Fixsen worked the Protocol sessions; Chris Hufford took the Courtyard tracks; Martin Nichols handled the White House material. Ed Buller, who had previously worked with Suede and Spiritualized, mixed the whole thing, with the band credited alongside him. Slowdive produced the album themselves. What you hear across the ten tracks is the result of those different rooms, different engineers, and a songwriter who was in three different emotional states across the course of the year.
That structural looseness is what the consensus reading of Souvlaki tends to flatten. The album gets filed under "shoegaze breakup record," which is accurate but incomplete. Goswell and Halstead's split does run through the songs, most plainly in "Dagger," the hushed acoustic ballad that closes the album at Protocol Studios, and in "40 Days," a song about post-breakup disorientation where the wordless chorus carries more weight than any lyric could. But the record also contains "Souvlaki Space Station," which is something else entirely, a nearly six-minute drift into what Halstead was absorbing from electronic music, with Simon Scott's drumming pushing against the delay-saturated guitars in a way that feels almost confrontational. And it contains "Alison," the opener, which is as close to a pop song as the band had written, Halstead's vocals sitting forward in the mix over guitars that shimmer rather than swarm. The album moves between these registers without apology, because it was made by people who were in different places at different times, and the record holds all of those places simultaneously.
Ivo Watts-Russell, who ran 4AD, was enamoured of "Dagger" and recorded a cover with his post-Mortal Coil project the Hope Blister, released in 1998. He had also signed the remaining Slowdive members as Mojave 3 after Creation dropped them following the ambient left-turn of Pygmalion in 1995. That is a tidy piece of symmetry: the song Halstead wrote alone in a cottage in Wales, the one that closes the album with an acoustic guitar and almost nothing else, became the track that kept several of them employed afterward. Souvlaki peaked at 51 on release. By 2016, Pitchfork had ranked it the second best shoegaze album of all time. The press that dismissed it in 1993 had moved on to other things. The record stayed exactly where it was.
