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The effects of incident shock strength on the mixing transition in the Richtmyer–Meshkov instability (RMI) are experimentally investigated using simultaneous density–velocity measurements. This effort uses a shock with an incident Mach number of 1.9, in concert with previous work at Mach 1.55 (Mohaghar et al., J. Fluid Mech., vol. 831, 2017 pp. 779–825) where each case is followed by a reshock wave. Single- and multi-mode interfaces are used to quantify the effect of initial conditions on the evolution of the RMI. The interface between light and heavy gases ( for the higher Mach number case. This could possibly be related to the high anisotropy observed in this flow resulting from strong, large-scale streamwise fluctuations produced by large-scale shear.