The Telescopes

From the mid-1980s onward, the Telescopes established an extended, quietly influential, and persistently low-profile trajectory. They launched as a noise rock outfit before shifting into shoegaze, then moved toward dream pop and eventually explored electronics laced with avant-garde leanings. This restless drive yielded a string of albums that seldom resembled one another, veering from the subdued acoustic wistfulness and paisley-patterned rock of the 1992 self-titled release to the shadowy, hypnotic psychedelia of 2023’s Of Tomorrow. Their steady productivity also surfaced archival material such as the 2024 album Growing Eyes Becoming String, which drew on 2013 recordings once presumed irretrievably lost. Fresh output continued at a regular pace, including the psychedelic space blues of 2024’s Halo Moon.

The original Telescopes lineup featured singer/guitarist Stephen Lawrie, guitarist/singer Jo Doran, lead guitarist David Fitzgerald, bassist Robert Brookes, and drummer Dominic Dillon. In 1988 the group placed their first track, “Forever Close Your Eyes,” on a split flexi-disc with Loop issued by Cheree to mark the two bands’ shared New Year’s Eve show. Their official debut single, “Kick the Wall,” arrived the following year; its feedback-saturated trance rock drew critical parallels to the Jesus and Mary Chain and Spacemen 3. “7th # Disaster” surfaced that spring, and by summer 1989 the band delivered their first release for the American indie label What Goes On with the breakthrough single “The Perfect Needle.” The Telescopes’ debut LP, Taste, wrapped up the year, while the Fierce label put out a live album, Trade Mark of Quality, in 1990.

After What Goes On folded, the Telescopes moved to Alan McGee’s Creation imprint, where the white-noise intensity of their early work gave way to a more ethereal, layered style on 1991’s Celeste. Following the luminous “Flying,” which peaked at number 79 on the U.K. pop charts, they issued their first Creation album, The Telescopes, a defining release built from shimmering guitars, sinuous basslines, and soulful rhythms that stands as a shoegaze classic. Yet that very success precipitated the group’s unraveling; after supplying a version of “The Good’s Gone” to the Who tribute album Who Covers Who, the Telescopes disbanded in 1994, attributing the split to creative differences.

Lawrie and Doran reconvened in 1996 with the kindred project Unisex, issuing “TV Cowboy”—one side of a split single with Good Morning Canada—in mid-1997. An EP, Deadlock, and the full-length Stratosfear appeared on the U.S. indie Double Agent before the pair revived the Telescopes moniker for 2002’s Third Wave and 2005’s #4, both of which extended their growing interest in electronic music. Doran had left by the time of 2006’s Hungry Audio Tapes, with Bridget Hayden stepping in. Two years later Infinite Suns emerged on the Textile label. In 2010 Lawrie enlisted members of fellow travelers One Unique Signal as his backing band for Telescopes concerts, an evolution captured on the live album Live. Aftertaste.

The ensuing years involved steady gigging and single releases before the band returned with their seventh album, HARM, captured in a single take without overdubs and with every instrument tuned to 444 Hz to heighten the noise. Having pushed their sound to its outer limits, the Telescopes issued Hidden Fields on the German label Tapete in 2015, their most song-oriented effort in some time and one brimming with rampaging shoegaze and noise pop. Consistent with the group’s occasional contrariness, the next album marked a total turn toward less song-based material that was darker and immersed in harshly droning guitar noise. Recorded with assistance from Scottish band St Deluxe, As Light Return appeared on Tapete in July 2017. They closed a prolific year with a second album, Stone Tape. Lawrie then worked alone in the studio for 2019’s drone-based, space blues-influenced Exploding Head Syndrome. Original lead guitarist David Fitzgerald died on December 17, 2020, following a battle with cancer; he was 54. The band’s 12th studio album, Songs of Love & Revolution, arrived in February 2021 as a collection of heavy, sometimes droning spectral dirges. Although the Telescopes had maintained a fairly consistent level of activity across their history, output accelerated in the 2020s. Songs of Love & Revolution was followed just months later in 2021 by Absence Presence, a set of acoustic reinterpretations of the noise-swaddled intensity found on its predecessor. Alongside a reissue of their 2005 album #4 featuring new artwork, 2022 brought fwrd/rvrs, an extended and experimental live document released on limited-edition cassette. In February 2023 the Telescopes’ 14th album, Experimental Health, appeared, comprising tracks constructed largely on broken instruments and inexpensive synthesizers and containing no guitars whatsoever. Their 15th album, Of Tomorrow, followed three months later, returning to the band’s more customary rock instrumentation and spaced-out textures while introducing fresh dynamic range to their characteristic unrelenting throb. The songs on Of Tomorrow could stretch into vast, powerful statements or recede into hushed passages bearing the same bleary shimmer as the third Velvet Underground album. In 2024 the group released Growing Eyes Becoming String, an album of material originally tracked in 2013. The songs were captured across two separate sessions—one in Berlin at the Brian Jonestown Massacre studio with engineer Fabien Leseure, the other in Leeds with producer Richard Formby—then salvaged from a compromised hard drive, rescued from apparent oblivion, and assembled into a drony, melodic, noise-saturated whole that only the Telescopes could produce. That same year they unveiled a collection of brand-new tracks with their spaced-out, darkly blissful 17th album Halo Moon.