In the years following the release of Santa Barbara and the ensuing departure of Anita Visser, the Llamas were only intermittently active, largely due to Sean O’Hagan’s commitments with Stereolab. During this time, the band’s output during this period was largely limited to a handful of contributions to tribute albums.

O’Hagan’s time with Stereolab was deeply formative, prompting him to reconsider The High Llamas’ aspirations for their next album Gideon Gaye, resulting in a dramatic shift from the guitar pop of Santa Barbara to a sound primarily influenced by The Left Banke, Van Dyke Parks and most prominently, The Beach Boys. 

The Llamas recorded Gideon Gaye in the Winter of 1993 with engineer Charlie Francis at The Stone Room studio in London. Inspired by the frenetic and adventurous recording sessions during his time with Stereolab, the album was recorded in just a few days on a tiny £4,000 budget allocated by the Brighton label Target. O’Hagan recalled in a 2011 interview that “we were drunk on experimentation: wheeling in rank pianos, recording impossibly thin buzz guitars, and for the first time I was experimenting with string writing. As the ideas fell upon themselves, and it all worked, the architecture of the band just started to build itself before us”. Van Dyke Parks’ influence extended to the cover art (created by former Stump frontman Kevin Hopper, who would go on provide artwork for the Llamas throughout the ’90s) which paid homage to his album Song Cycle.

Gideon Gaye was released in 1994 on the aforementioned Target label in the UK and Delmore Recordings (with altered cover art) in the US. The album was the first from the band to receive significant critical notice, with Scott Schinder of Trouser Press referring to the album as a “homespun, heartfelt art-pop masterpiece”, as well as attention from major labels including Epic, who re-released the album in 1995, as well as Jeremy Pearce of Sony LRD (Licensed Repertoire Division), who worked with the band throughout the rest of the decade across various labels including V2, who re-released Gideon Gaye again in 1998, though the album remained out of print on vinyl until 2024 when Drag City repressed the album as part of the band’s reissue campaign.