Pygmalion

Pygmalion moved well away from the shoegaze sound of the first two albums toward sparse, atmospheric arrangements and ambient electronic music. Halstead wrote all of it, with lyrics for Miranda and Visions of LA by Goswell. He had been experimenting with looping and reverb, born of a growing interest in electronica and dance music that began in 1992 when the former Seefeel member Mark Van Hoen played him Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works 85-92. Chris Hufford and the band produced and engineered it. The cover illustration by Steven Woodhouse uses Rainer Wehinger's graphic notation for Ligeti's Artikulation.

Creation released it on 6 February 1995 and dropped the band a week later. The press was largely uninterested: Melody Maker's Jonathan Selzer called it an insipid attempt at prettiness and the NME's John Harris saw career suicide, though Q's Andrew Collins was enthusiastic. Pitchfork's Nitsuh Abebe called it a detour of the best sort in 2005, and the BBC's Wyndham Wallace later wrote that it remains Halstead and Goswell's masterpiece. Blue Skied an' Clear was used in the 1995 film The Doom Generation. Pitchfork's Abebe described the songs as ambient pop dreams, and Q's Andrew Collins said the album basks splendidly in its own resonant shapelessness. Pitchfork called it a post-rock masterpiece in a 2018 article that quoted members of Low, The Twilight Sad, Deafheaven, Mum, A Place to Bury Strangers, Survive and Girlpool. Ned Raggett placed the album 122nd among the albums of the 1990s, and Pitchfork put it 12th on its 2016 list of shoegaze albums.