After four years, North London’s For Breakfast return with Longer Than Spring, an LP trading the murky, sprawling friction of the seven-piece band’s roots for a leaner, solo-led architecture. It’s a sophisticated if occasionally sanitised evolution; while the band’s signature virtuosity remains, it is now tethered to the singular narrative of vocalist and keys player Maya Harrison.
This shift is catalysed by Harrison’s decade-long recovery from illness, framing the record’s elastic pacing as a non-linear map of healing built around lyrics the band used as a centering force for their arrangements. Longer Than Spring also reckons with the external: the relentless broadcast of global suffering ubiquitous across digital feeds. This intersection of private trauma and…
Category: dream-pop
Daniel Monkman’s third album as Zoon, Happy Thought School, addresses similar themes as the project’s previous releases, from the racial prejudice the artist faced as an Indigenous student to their struggle with addiction. The songs blend the artist’s “moccasin-gaze” style with elements of 2000s-era pop and early-2010s indie rock, and it includes collaborations with Chris Chu, who attempted similar genre fusions with his groups the Morning Benders and POP ETC. The album’s title refers to the school Monkman attended, where they were one of the only Indigenous students, and were subject to racist discrimination from classmates as well as teachers. The traumatic experiences at school led Monkman to seek refuge by playing music, and to cope with pain…
One of the more enigmatic bands of the classic 4AD era, Swallow was formed by Louise Trehy and Mike Mason, who met in early 90’s Camberwell, London. both were deeply involved with the independent music scene of the time; Louise co-founded Setanta Records (home of The Divine Comedy, Edwyn Collins and Into Paradise with whom Mike would occasionally play), and Mike traversed between bike courier, video director, and lighting designer for Spacemen 3, Slowdive, Spiritualized, Curve and Chapterhouse. Prompted by Louise, they started writing songs together, drawing inspiration from a healthy mix of sources: CAN, noise, post-punk, and American forces of nature like Captain Beefheart and Butthole Surfers. Their first songs quickly surfaced and were recorded…
Radhika Dade’s debut album is a dreamy delight that balances her lovely vocals against varied musical backing that’s exceedingly poppy, but not afraid to gently paint outside the lines. Cine-pop is a fine title for the album; she seeks to make each song a different mood and each could fit a different scene in a film. The lilting ballad “Feline Bandits” would be perfect for a melancholy seaside walk on a rainy day, “Starry Eyes” is a fine soundtrack for a swirling party scene, the jangling girl group inspired “Cocoa Butter Eyes” feels like a falling in and out (and back in) of love montage, and “Sleep” is just right for a scene where the lonely protagonist can’t sleep thanks to a nocturnal obsession. Dade’s voice is a fine vessel for the songs, coming across sweet…
The band, made up of Delphine Lucy Lam and Vlad Swann, are originally from France and are now based outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
The album follows the single ‘Surrender,’ with ‘Qui manque dans ce pays’ as the focus track. Across 11 songs, Fleur Bleu·e move into a more direct sound. The vocals are clearer and more upfront, the reverb is reduced, and the guitars have a rougher edge, while the band’s dream-pop and new-wave melodies remain in place.
The album was written across France, Bulgaria, Mauritius, and the US, during a period of movement between countries and emotional states. After years in cities such as Paris and Los Angeles, the duo moved to a wooded part of Pennsylvania, where the album’s themes of displacement…
Mia Rocha writes music for herself. Releasing songs under the moniker Mia Joy, the Chicago-based artist is the daughter of a poet and a musician, and since a young age, she was encouraged by her father to channel her feelings into music as a way of understanding them.
Taking the advice, she wrote her debut ethereal dream-pop album Spirit Tamer over the course of several emotionally tumultuous years. It captures Rocha’s inner loneliness, cultivates healing, and creates a safe space where she can work through her darkest moments.
“The beginning of writing this album was an incredibly low, dark period and it was also a period where things were just pouring out of me,” she said in a recent episode of Jessica Risker’s…
As humans, we have an inherent desire to connect with those around us. These relationships shape our social interactions and influence us in ways we may not realize, each moment subconsciously ingrained in our decision-making. The people we decide to keep in our lives come with the weight of influence, but unfortunately, these wildly important relationships never hold the staying power they promise. We are all made up of the mistakes, triumphs, and losses that come with building a connection with someone, and how these lessons linger in future relationships. When someone decides to exit your life entirely, their presence takes on a ghostly aesthetic, leaving a void they once filled, and a rush to fill it ensues.
That moment of panic after your support…
The Asteroid No.4 return in 2026 with In Praise of Shadows, their thirteenth full length album and a statement release that reaffirms the band’s enduring place within the modern psychedelic underground.
In Praise of Shadows captures The Asteroid No.4 at their most focused and assured, leaning fully into the shoegaze sound for which they are best known. Swathed in multi layered guitars, dense reverb, and hypnotic melodic drift, the record reflects decades of refinement while retaining the immediacy and emotional pull that has defined the band since their earliest releases.
Formed in Philadelphia in the late 1990s and now based in the San Francisco Bay Area, The Asteroid No.4 have built a reputation…
It’s become fashionable of late for bands to release powerful new albums after extended absences. My Bloody Valentine did it, Slowdive did it and Boards of Canada will be doing it later this year. The fallow period falls somewhere in the middle for Christopher Barnes’ project Gem Club.
They last released an album 12 years ago, but Emerald Press picks up where they left off, albeit with an improved sense of how to use empty space and minimalist arrangements to fill out bedroom pop songs to massive proportions. There are no left turns here, only the same rainy day recordings writ larger.
Barnes has noted in the lead-up to the release of the album that even though Emerald Press is the first Gem Club record since 2014’s…
Fuzz Club are becoming one of the key hubs for all sounds psychedelic – whether it is the music that is fully in vein with the original psych of the late sixties or any of the updated versions from there on to current times. In that respect, to all who follow all things psych, it will probably be no surprise that one of the modern purveyors of psych that are Minneapolis’ Jason Edmonds and his Magic Castles, have found their way to this label with their new offering Realized.
Edmonds, as the bad’s principal songwriter, has always favoured that trippy, dream-like thread that original psychedelia introduced (not much fuzz or energy rush there), giving it that shoegaze/dream pop veneer, but then updated for the new century. Of course, many critics have…
There’s a sense in Misty Coast’s fifth album Always Sun that the Norwegian band has opened the curtains a little. Just enough to let the light in more easily this time around.
The familiar elements are all still there, with arrangements that drift and blur their soft-edged melodies, but now they’re put together with more space and less gauze. It’s not a seismic shift in their sound, but it changes what it’s like to sit with: unusually textured, more gently outlined and, ultimately, not quite as intense.
That softer instinct has been there from the beginning of this project. Formed by Linn Frøkedal and Richard Myklebust after their time in The Megaphonic Thrift, Misty Coast has always worked by easing melody out from beneath…
White Flowers, the long-running collaboration between Joey Cobb and Katie Drew, exists within what they call “the realm” – a shared creative space, wherein time, rather than being a restrictive force, is fluid and boundless, and music exists as an endless conversation with their past and present selves. Adopting what the band describe as a “sketchbook” approach to writing, White Flowers is the product of a decade’s worth of recordings – snippets nestled away on hard drives, only to truly make sense years later.
On Dreams For Somebody Else, the Preston duo expand upon the dark-hued dream pop of their debut, channelling the catharsis of dance music via repetitive structures and “sad, euphoric sounds”. Working alongside…
With every successive album she makes, Carla dal Forno‘s songwriting becomes clearer, more upfront, and more emotionally direct. She actually intended her fourth solo effort to be more abstract, perhaps closer to the mystery-shrouded experimental work of her earlier group F ingers, but as she was writing the songs, she found that they only made sense when she wrote about her emotional experiences in plain language. Her recording environment also helped shape the directness of the songs. Instead of living in a busy city, she had relocated to a small country town which offered stillness and solitude, making it easier to reflect on her life situations and focus on the truth. That said, even though Confession lays deeply guarded feelings bare,…
When deary, the dreampop three-piece composed of Ben Easton (guitar), Dottie Cockram (vocals, guitar) and Harry Catchpole (drums), named their debut album Birding, it wasn’t just as an homage to our feathered friends, they were referencing the sense of expansion, wonder, and abandon their music evokes. They chose the title to draw attention to the direct impact humans have on the world around us, whether that be nature, or ourselves.
“I got really into reading about birds and all these historical stories and poetry about them,” says singer/guitarist Dottie. “You find these beautiful images of birds that represent hope, but they’re also animals. Some of them, like vultures and crows, are a sign of death to some people. They represent all these different…
Minneapolis trio Spaceport is back with their second album Cut the Lake, with many missing their first offering Window Seat (2023).
Maybe this time around that initial slip will be corrected, as the band’s creative force, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Arianna Wegley, seems be in full form.
Spaceport’s sound might be in that nether ground many indie bands operate in these days – the subdued guitar rock full of quality melody hooks, with added elements from elsewhere.
Spaceport’s added elements though cover quite a wide ground – on that indie rock base they add folk, classical, and ambient/electronic sounds. Of course, the possibility of a sound mess is there, but Wegley and her band seem to swim…
One of the clearest examples of an album that crafts a strange and beautiful world not quite like any other is Rocketship’s 1996 full-length debut A Certain Smile, A Certain Sadness. Even upon arrival, this was an experience unto itself, and 30 years later, these eight songs of bittersweet bliss still feel new.
Rocketship spiked their deliciously melodic indiepop with buzzing organs, spacey interstitials and motorik repetition, aligning them with mid-90s peers like Stereolab and Unrest. “A Certain Smile, A Certain Sadness” is an album of unrepentantly vulnerable melodies, unusual seventh chords, lingering ambient interludes, and soft sentiments released at a time when unfriendly, self-conscious punk rock was the order of the day…