Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
Chicago Tribune
Entertainment Weekly	A
NME	8/10
Pitchfork Media	10/10
Q
Rolling Stone
The Rolling Stone Album Guide
Select	5/5
The Village Voice	A−

Loveless is the second studio album by Irish rock band My Bloody Valentine. Released on the 4th of November in 1991. The album was recorded over a two-year period between 1989 and 1991. Vocalist and guitarist Kevin Shields dominated the arduous recording process; intent on achieving a particular sound, he experimented with guitar tremolo techniques and tuning systems, unorthodox production methods, obscured vocals, and sampled feedback and percussion. The group cycled through nineteen studios and a larger number of engineers during the album's two-year creation, with total recording costs rumoured to have reached £250,000.

While Loveless did not achieve great commercial success upon its release, it received enthusiastic reviews from critics, who praised its sonic innovations. Following the record's release, My Bloody Valentine were removed from their record label Creation Records due to the difficulty and expense of working with Shields, a factor that was alleged to have contributed to the bankruptcy of the label. In the subsequent years, the group struggled to record a follow-up album and would eventually break up in 1997. Loveless would be their last full-length release for over two decades.

Since its release, Loveless has been widely proclaimed as among the best albums of the 1990s by critics, as a landmark work of the shoegazing genre, and as an influence on various subsequent artists. The album was reissued as a two-disc CD set on Sony in May 2012, containing remastered editions of the original digital tape and a previously unreleased ½-inch analogue tape. The reissues placed in several international charts and in July 2013, Loveless was certified Silver in the United Kingdom by the British Phonographic Industry.

My Bloody Valentine were scheduled to record at Blackwing Studios in Southwark, London for the month of February 1989, and intended to use the time to conceptualise a new, more studio-based sound for their second album. Shields said that Creation first believed the album could be recorded "in five days". According to Shields "when it became clear that wasn't going to happen, they [Creation] freaked." After several unproductive months, the band relocated in September to the basement studio The Elephant and Wapping, where they spent eight unproductive weeks. In-house engineer Nick Robbins said Shields made it clear from the outset that he (Robbins) "was just there to press the buttons." Robbins was quickly replaced by Harold Burgon, but according to Shields, Burgon's main contribution was to show the group how to use the in-studio computer. Burgon and Shields spent three weeks at the Woodcray studio in Berkshire working on the Glider EP, which Shields and Creation owner Alan McGee agreed would be released in advance of the album. Alan Moulder was hired to mix the Glider song "Soon" at Trident 2 studio in Victoria (the song would reappear as the closing track on Loveless). Shields said of Moulder, "As soon as we worked with him we realized we'd love to some more!" When the group returned to work on the album Moulder was the sole engineer Shields trusted enough to perform tasks such as miking the amplifiers; all the other credited engineers were told "We're so on top of this you don't even have to come to work." Shields has since stated that "these engineers—with the exception of Alan Moulder and later Anjali Dutt—were all just the people who came with the studio...everything we wanted to do was wrong, according to them," although the band did give credit on the album sleeve to anyone who was present during the recordings, "even if all they did was fix tea", according to Shields.

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