Coming March 19, 2026! Preorder at Bloomsbury 

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Mazzy Star’s sophomore album So Tonight That I Might See was a slow, reluctant success. Pushed by Capitol Records as an album for teenagers to make out during, as a record about girlhood, and as music for those uninterested in the era’s male aggression, the band’s reputation has been plagued by these forced connections ever since.

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Not that members Hope Sandoval or David Roback ever cared to dispel these notions. They preferred to disdain publicity and offer their art without preface. But there is far more to the Mazzy Star story than media-reluctant musicians and corporate-generated narratives.

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This book revisits how imposed mythologies have marginalized Sandoval’s Mexican American background, and the band’s place in the tradition of Chicano music. It combs through testimonies from bitter journalists, friends, and rivals, to reveal how Mazzy Star responded to the rising violence and gentrification of Los Angeles. Along the way, it ascertains the band’s interest in the American Southwest, 1960s psychedelia, and a surrealism which conjures the strange, dark shadows of everyday life in the US.