Isn't Anything is the debut studio album by Anglo-Irish rock band My Bloody Valentine, released on 21 November 1988 by Creation Records. Its innovative guitar and production techniques consolidated the experimentation of the band's preceding EPs and would make the album a pioneering work of the subgenre known as shoegazing. Upon its release, the album received rave critical reviews and reached #1 on the UK Independent Albums Chart. Background After the band's original vocalist Dave Conway left in 1987, replaced by Bilinda Butcher, the band at first continued in their previous noisy indie-pop style. Kevin Shields then desired to return to the band's avant-garde roots and began to explore the possibilities offered by the studio facilities available after having signed to Creation Records in 1988. The first fruit of this experimentation was the single/EP You Made Me Realise, released in August 1988, with Isn't Anything following later that year. Creation head Alan McGee recalled: "Kevin gave me 'You Made Me Realise', which was supposed to be a track on their first EP for us. I went, That's the single! He was shocked, cos they'd only done the track as a joke. Then they did stuff for their album, and I said, Go for more of the weirder stuff. So they went back and did stuff like 'Soft as Snow'. Those are the only suggestions I've ever given them." Most of the album was recorded in a studio in Wales over a period of two weeks, and the band members slept about two hours a night. Butcher described the effect of this: "Often, when we do the vocals, it's 7:30 in the morning: I've usually fallen asleep and have to be woken up to sing. Maybe that's why it's languorous. I'm usually trying to remember what I've been dreaming about when I'm singing." Music Q'''s Stuart Maconie wrote that the album "was the first full-length expression of this remarkable new sound: gossamer vocals and insinuating melodies glimpsed through sheets of blurred, opaque noise." Melody Maker described its sound as "swoon-songs, oblivious, languorous vocals and out-of-focus guitars which are like being taken to the brink of consciousness and held there." Taylor Parkes of The Quietus described the album as "livid, lurid and lucid," and called it "the shattering racket of the moment, an audio snapshot of the overwhelmed senses, a noise like nothing you've ever heard, but everything you've ever felt." In