Nothing’s Domenic Palermo made the shoegaze festival for real heads

Domenic Palermo calls Slide Away, his cross-generational shoegaze festival, an “anti-festival” festival. On April 26-27, the Nothing frontman held the first N.Y.C. edition at Market Hotel and Brooklyn Paramount where a whopping 12 bands played over two days in a display of the genre's sonic breadth. Cloakroom’s doom-rock slowcore and Knifeplay’s experimental, ethereal dreampop closed out night one. Night two was headlined by Nothing and Whirr — a cult, heavy shoegaze band who hadn’t played live in 10 years — with additional performances by U.K.’s Swervedriver, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart playing their self-titled in full with their original lineup, her new knife, and Lucid Express in an evening that was emotional and transcendent. Tickets were $65 and the lineup was all handpicked by Palermo.

The festival was born out of Palermo’s desire to celebrate his love for the bands and community that take the genre of shoegaze, deconstruct it, and build on its DNA. Nothing’s 2014 album, Guilty of Everything, cross-bred elements of melodic shoegaze with the heavier, jugular influences of post-rock and slowcore. In its wake, Philly-based bands like Spirit of the Beehive and They Are Gutting a Body of Water have further pushed the bounds of what shoegaze music could sound and feel like. The inaugural Slide Away that took place in Philly in 2024 started as a 10-year anniversary celebration of Guilty of Everything; now, Palermo hopes to take it beyond the U.S. and to the U.K. and Japan. The FADER sat down with Palermo a few days before the festival to talk about the process of making a true D.I.Y. labor of love come to life.

DOMENIC “NICKY” PALERMO: My whole concept was to be the anti-festival festival. I’ve played a million festivals. I know what’s bad about them. I know what’s cool about them. My idea was to try to take the best aspects and interject it into this one. My favorite thing about Slide Away [is creating] that connection of following in greats and having the chance for newer [bands] to have their day.

I have a love/ hate relationship with music in general but Nothing means a lot to me, and that’s the reason I’ve put my body and life into this. It embodies me. Having something else to lean into, to abuse my creativity, is freeing. I’ve been burned out since Covid, and now I feel invigorated. I don’t ever want to be stagnant. I feel like that’s how you give up. Because the second I’m not moving, I’m dying.

When I say I do the work, I do the work. The contacting, cold-emailing. I’m hitting up Bandcamps, bands who haven’t been active in 30 years. I’ve been on phone calls between bands who aren’t speaking and try to be their therapist, get things fixed. I’m in the trenches, doing crazy shit. Maybe it’s invasive, but I don’t care. I want these bands to know people care. If you struggled in the 2000s, there’s an open door with a lot of younger people who want to see you. Things are different now. Let us be the platform for it. You don’t have to do nothing, just come and play some music.

We compiled the most insane band booking document. Marissa D’Elia, my brain, our manager, took my notes, which consists of 1,000 bands. She color coded it, put it by year, location, active or not. It’s the best present anyone’s ever got me.

We asked Pains [to play Slide Away] year one. I was like, “It’s time, Kip.” Kip [Berman]’s always been a big supporter of me. I’m a lifelong fan of that band. I tried to get him on last year and he was like, “dude, it’s never gonna fucking happen. We can’t get it together, you know?” So I had him DJ Union Transfer last year, and we were watching Swirlies together on the side stage and he was like, “I’m in next year.”

We only work with venues that do a 100% zero-merch cut. We keep the ticket pretty cheap, comparatively, to what’s going on. We want people to be able to afford to come. I want to make everything I do an experience. It gives me the power to send an awkward email to some 60-year-old dude with a Hotmail address. But at the end of the day, I might pull one of my favorite bands in and have everybody else share in it, too.

My biggest struggle is that it’s an actual shoegaze festival. I want to avoid saying the word because it feels like a parody. I’ve always had a hard time struggling with the fucking identity politics of music. Now, as much as I hate the overuse of the word and how it doesn’t apply to certain things, I also equally hate the people that hate it being overused because they’re somehow worse than the people overusing it. So I try to ignore everybody and just do things. Hopefully we can make it more than what everybody thinks it is. With Nothing, we never followed the rules. I used to struggle dealing with that, but now I’m comfortable with it. I can do whatever the fuck I want.

I felt like there was so much bad music coming out that was inspired by Nothing for a while. That whole heavy shoegaze thing that got beat down everybody’s throat, that’s when people started to get tired. But then you see bands like Full Body 2, TAGABOW. I’m not saying Nothing is responsible for that but we’re here and they’re coming through after, and they’re doing this thing that’s so special. It’s redeeming.

I don’t want to be playing it by year three. I would love to be able to go to the festival and focus on running the productions. Location-wise, I want to move it to wherever I feel it needs to be. We’re working on a U.K. thing, probably for 2026. We’re working on Japanese plans, too. Then we’re gonna explore some other cities in the U.S. I’m designing the merch, I’m fucking designing my posters, doing the social shit. We’re a small team, so it would be great to be able to walk around the festival as a promoter because I guess that’s what I am in this.

Shoegaze in general has always been for the weirdos, anyway. Socially awkward, nervous, sad people. The introverts. And they’re the ones who should have a community. It’s where everybody can fucking bond over what they fucking love.