Slowdive Album "Souvlaki" (Missing 1990s Tracks)

Souvlaki album art.

Released in 1993, Souvlaki is the second album by British shoegazing band Slowdive. It is often considered the band's best work and is a staple of the shoegazing movement. The album is also known for its troubled, dramatic production that could give My Bloody Valentine's 1991 disc Loveless a run for its money.

Production started after a tour supporting the band's first album, Just For a Day (also released in '91). Creation Records flubbed the album's promotion and blamed the band themselves, demanding that this next album be "full of hits". After a run-in with a toy train taking up the recording space (of which another shoegazing band, Spiritualized, left behind as a joke), the band had an unproductive recording session. They then returned to England where they recorded a reported 40 tracks, of which the band were proud. After allowing Creation head Alan McGee to listen to the tracks, he loudly declared "They're all shit!", causing the now understandably frustrated band to have to go back and record the tracks that would become Souvlaki.

Out of the 40 recorded, only 23 have surfaced on a bootleg that gets sparsely distributed by fans. Seeing as how Creation has a very strict holding policy on tracks, the rest probably will never see release. Despite the efforts of fans desperately searching for the unsurfaced 17 tracks, they remain missing. Even Slowdive co-founder Neil Halstead has stated that he doesn't have the master tapes and is hoping that the material gets released sometime in the future.