Detroit, MI shoegaze vanguards Majesty Crush will release a career-spanning double LP titled "Butterflies Don’t Go Away" on March 29, 2024 via The Numero Group. The compilation LP will feature their sole full length LP "Love 15" as LP 1 and a series of EPs and rare singles as LP 2. In the early 90’s, Majesty Crush broke shoegaze and dream pop into new territories, cementing the band on the forefront of Detroit’s rock scene and the burgeoning genre itself. Till this day, there’s still no easy way to outline their tangled and confounding trajectory, or to make sense of how they teetered perpetually on the verge of a breakthrough that seemed promised but never arrived. This wasn’t a band that never caught a break, nor were they a bunch of stage-frightened introverts who would’ve made it if they’d just been a little more willing to play the game.

Majesty Crush was popular in its own right, enjoying local commercial alt-radio play and opening big shows for national bands right out of the gate. They opened for bands like Chapterhouse, My Bloody Valentine, The Verve, Curve and the like, whenever they'd make it to the midwestern US. The band was signed to a subsidiary of a major label not terrifically long after starting out as one of many dreamy-eyed groups of the era that was self-releasing 7"s with smudged art on handmade covers. With close listening, the various shades of rawness that emerge in the lyrics, the sound, and the band’s ever-simmering overall energy begin to offer clues as to why the world wasn’t quite ready in the 90’s.

Not just a band from Detroit, Majesty Crush was distinctively a product of Detroit—one that mirrored their city’s complexity, singularity and cross-culture. The band’s frontman/vocalist David Stroughter, guitarist Mike Segal, bassist Hobey Echlin and drummer Odell Nails created a form of dream pop that was charged and uncompromising at a time when many were succeeding on an international level for merely recycling sounds originated by bigger bands. Instead of a Midwestern assimilation of a shoegaze movement evolving in real time all around them, Majesty Crush was a far stranger, impossibly individualized blur of personalities, experiences, and perspectives informed by the independent music badlands of the early ’90s, which played out in the unlit, unregulated corners of the Motor City.

Inspired in part by the emptiness of Detroit that surrounded them as a new decade began, Majesty Crush used their music to build a dreamscape of their own design from what felt at times like pervasive nothingness. Segal’s three-string guitar lines emanating wistful, spare melodies and drones, Nails’ dense, melodic drum beats and Echlin’s Joy Division-esque parts hammered out on a pawn shop bass formed a foundation for vocalist Stroughter’s psycho-sexual fantasy depictions that seethed and purred as if the world was ending in every breath. These were the primal elements that began Majesty Crush and set the tone of maximalist minimalism that would define their brief but prolific career.

If you're a fan of all things shoegaze and dream pop, and especially the sudden revival of all things 90s inspired guitar music, don't miss out on one of the overlooked originals with this retrospective release that was highly overlooked but deserves to be heard. Although these songs were released by 1993, they still sound relevant and current in todays crop of new music.