Fourteen-year-old Finn Wolfhard, perhaps best known as Mike Wheeler on Netflix’s smash hit Stranger Thing also has a love of music, appearing in a couple of music videos for punk legends PUP and covering Mac DeMarco. He even plays in a garage rock band called Calpurnia, named after Atticus Finch’s housekeeper in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.
However, in a recent New York Times profile on the young actor that followed him as he shopped for vinyl at the Brooklyn branch of Rough Trade, it was revealed that the star of the hit horror film IT, and “pop-music fanatic” is unfamiliar with the genre shoegaze:
He came across the album Loveless by the British rock group My Bloody Valentine, whom he had never heard before. He was also unfamiliar with the genre it was filed under: Indie-Rock/Shoegaze.
“What does that even mean?” Finn said. A reporter informed him that “shoegaze” refers to bands known to stand still and stare at their shoes on stage. Their popularity peaked two decades ago. “So, are they dad rock?” he said.
The profile mentions that Wolfhard’s favorite artists are Chicago’s Twin Peaks and Mac DeMarco, whose respective latest efforts were among those that Wolfhard picked up on his trip to Rough Trade. That said, hopefully Wolfhard also picked up that copy of Loveless and gave it a spin, nice and loud.
