Jackie West has a feathery soft voice, the kind of instrument that might not wake you up fully if you heard it in your while asleep but rather inclines to infiltrate your dreams. This second full-length, the second also to be released on her husband Dan Kniskowy’s Ruination record, makes an impact without excessive volume or drama. It sheathes cool-toned melodies in delicate layers of vocal and instrumental sound.
West says she wrote and recorded Silent Century as a mostly solitary effort, one that allowed her to examine and incorporate the dialogues that played out in her head. It is populated by many voices, then, but also the same voice, or perhaps the same person in many different ways. Thus, the heady country holler of “Overlooking…
Category: dream-pop
These days the term singer songwriter has grown in its scope from just a solo artist with an acoustic instrument and introspective lyrics to a solo artist that basically has a mind of their own and goes anywhere where their fancy, inspiration, and inventiveness take them.
You can add to the latter Delaney Bailey, who after millions of streams has readied her debut album Concave, an album where she seems to care very little about neat musical labels and genres, covering a vast ground between dream pop and everything else, keeping that introspective music and lyrics concept fully intact.
And she may be doing it all instinctively, but she seems to have a deep musical background that she has transformed into music of her…
After building momentum over a few years of local shows and an international tour, Hong Kong shoegaze quintet Lucid Express returns with their second album, Instant Comfort. Blurrier and less glossy than their 2021 debut, the new record is situated at the sweet spot of screwed-down dream pop, ethereal vocals draped over lush guitars and synths, with a few tense, discordant edges.
Instant Comfort was recorded in the band’s studio, an island within an island, perched in an industrial district outside central Hong Kong, with views of both skyscrapers and the Chinese border. It’s a sanctuary from the grinding realities of the city, and their music likewise plays like a delicate and immersive retreat, a space that feels temporarily above reality. Vocalist Kim Ho’s…
It’s all blurring together. Ambient is emo now. Rap sounds like harsh noise. Drum’n’bass is basically bedroom pop. And Ben Bondy, who until now has primarily dealt in disorientingly dubby ambient music, has emerged with something resembling a singer/songwriter album, but not quite. Bondy, a New York/Berlin-based producer who’s made a name as part of the latter’s cozy Kwia collective, has built a sprawling body of work across a number of labels representing the bleary haze of the left-field electronic underground. West Mineral Ltd., 3XL, Motion Ward, Quiet Time — if they deal in grainy, dissociative soundscapes, Bondy has probably released something for them. Across his scattered releases and DJ sets, Bondy’s demonstrated a voracious, shapeshifting…
“Three people will die listening to this album,” the Bandcamp description of Nashpaints’ first record since 2020, Everyone Good is Called Molly, reads. “Zzz they will endup in the same place.” There’s no backstory to Finn Carraher McDonald, only mystery and angelic voicings spread across decaying pop tapes with a butter knife.
Lead single “Boyfriend First” is this seven-minute mass of swirling noise with guitar streaks you’d have to break your nails just to make. There’s a lot of color in here even as the static fattens and the synths undress, because McDonald has melodies coming out the eyes. “Boyfriend First” sounds more like Natalie Imbruglia covering Deerhunter-or maybe it’s Deerhunter covering Natalie Imbruglia-in a sewer tunnel than the Duretti Column…
Lucy Kruger & The Lost Boys build a captivating sonic world tinged with intimacy on Pale Bloom. The Berlin-based band’s seventh studio album maintains a hauntingly atmospheric quality, ultimately honing the gothic art-pop sound the group have become known for.
Opening track ‘Bloom’ establishes the album’s persistent eeriness, initially playing with the melodies and lyrics of nursery rhymes. This almost ghostly nostalgia for childhood is evoked throughout Pale Bloom, supported by a mesmerising viola part courtesy of Jean-Louise Parker. The song’s instrumentals build, combining strings with electric guitar effectively. Like its title would suggest, ‘Bloom’ unfurls organically – a manifestation of slowly…
Numero present ’90s shoegaze band Should’s ’98 debut ‘Feed Like Fishes’ + 10 period bonus tracks.
The folks in Phoenix’s Half String talked up this trio when they were Austin, TX’s shiFt (before they moved north to various universities and gave up their name because of another band called Shift). And it’s easy to see why: Should would have fit perfectly into Arizona’s former “beautiful noise,” post-dream pop scene.
Even without the interestingly sedate but grasping cover of the Wedding Present’s “Spangle” (and, on another record, 18th Dye’s “Merger”), their sound makes it apparent that they can match the English in pairing inventive, modern guitars to lulling tunes for nighttime singing. You could see “Sarah Missing” appearing on a Slowdive…
Bug Teeth’s debut full-length arrives softly, building and scrutinising loss down to its fine veins, even as it gazes upward to the skies.
With a title drawn from Robert Hooke’s 17th-century scientific text magnifying the minutiae of living forms, Micrographia zeroes in on the subtleties of grief, familial memory and the burden of loving someone who is gone.
At the heart of the album is the rupture of PJ Johnson’s life when their mother died suddenly in 2021 which left them unmoored and desperate to make sense of the absence. “Tapeworm” questions if her mother would prefer no children if she were to live her life over, “With time again would you give it up / A sacrifice / Would you give me up?” It’s a crippling place to begin.
The warm sounds of folk guitar provide the roots of Tessa Rose Jackson’s first album under her own name, time-travelling from Bert Jansch to R.E.M. to Sharon Van Etten in every strum and squeak. The Dutch-British musician previously recorded as Someone, creating three albums in dream-pop shades, but her fourth – a rawer, richer affair, made alone in rural France – digs into ancestry, mortality and memory.
The Lighthouse begins with its title track. Strums of perfect fifths, low moans of woodwind and thundering rumbles of percussion frame a journey towards a beacon at “high tide on a lonesome wind”. The death of one of Jackson’s two mothers when she was a teenager informs her lyrics here and elsewhere: in ‘The Bricks…
British duo Insides made their debut with 1993’s Euphoria, a sensual set of ambient pop songs filled with airy guitars, intricately crafted beats, and provocative lyrics about intimate relationships and emotional tension. The distinctive album was praised by critics and remains a favorite of dream pop aficionados, and the duo have sporadically released new recordings, including the 2021 full-length Soft Bonds.
Insides’ elusive and icy electronic pop explores the darkest, seamiest corners of love and sex – their songs capture the emptiness and hostility that surface when the afterglow fades, ugly scenes punctuated by eruptions of violence, waves of self-loathing and caresses that are cold to the touch. Singer/bassist Kirsty Yates’ vocals…
Some musicians get their first glimpse of celebrity, flinch in the glare of the spotlight, and quickly burrow their way back underground. But Duncan Sumpner, you suspect, knew from the beginning that fame – even fame on a very small and grassroots indie level – was not for him.
A schoolteacher from Oughtibridge, a residential village on the outskirts of Sheffield, Sumpner has released a string of records under the name Songs of Green Pheasant without ever quite stepping into the light. The project’s origin story speaks volumes about his elusive approach. A demo that Sumpner sent to Fat Cat in 2002 became a fixture on the label’s office stereo. But when they decided to get in contact to offer him a record deal, the email bounced back, and it took them…
Julee Cruise was a remarkable enough talent in her own right that it seems a shame to emphasize her links with David Lynch, but he’s an inescapable presence on this 2-CD set. That’s because Fall_Float_Love comprises her two albums for Warner Brothers, Floating into the Night (1989) and The Voice of Love on which, apart from one song, all the lyrics were written by Lynch, and all the music was composed and arranged by his collaborator Angelo Badalamenti. With the deaths of both Cruise and Badalamenti in 2022 and Lynch this year, the music takes on an even more spectral and haunting quality (and it started off with plenty of both those qualities), and Fall_Float_Love stands as a fitting memorial to the meeting of three unique but entirely compatible talents.
Vazz formed in Glasgow during the early ’80s, and initially consisted of vocalist/lyricist Anna Howson and multi-instrumentalist Hugh Small. With Howson’s ethereal harmonies floating over Small’s sparse drum machines and mysterious guitar hooks, the duo’s music fell somewhere between coldwave, post-punk, and dream pop. The five-song mini-album Your Lungs and Your Tongues (released in 1986 by Cathexis Recordings, also home to records by Fini Tribe and Pink Industry) was one of a handful of vinyl releases the pair made before splitting up near the end of the decade. As Small resurfaced during the 2010s with solo piano and ambient compositions, Vazz’s scant ’80s discography was rediscovered and revived in several different configurations…
Lightning in a Twilight Hour are another band built around the heartbreak of Bobby Wratten, and like the Field Mice, Northern Picture Library, and Trembling Blue Stars, their albums are made up of songs that trickle like warm tears down the cheeks of a heartbroken soul. Colours Yet to Be Named has all the hallmarks of his work: precisely jangling guitars, dub-inspired basslines, soothingly dark synth pads, and vocals that alternately glide on top of, or sink into, the gloom. Wratten is joined as he was on the group’s previous masterpiece of overwhelming melancholy Overwintering by longtime collaborators Anne Marie Davies and Beth Arzy on vocals along with producer Ian Catt and bassist Michael Hiscock. They work together seamlessly to create a soft…
One of the traits of what is loosely dubbed as modern classical music is that the classical composition concept serves solely as the base, where other elements are brought in, coming from the musical ideas developed further elsewhere – it could be pop in all its shapes and forms or just a figment of the artists’ imaginations.
That is basically a manner in which Vanbur, a collaboration of Bristol-based composers Jessica Jones and Tim Morrish, seem to be building their music upon their (formal) debut album Of Becoming. Actually, the manner in which the duo were to develop their music could have already been visible/audible with their debut EP Human (2020), and its remix version (2022), including versions by Mogwai, Alexandra…
At first glance, it seems like Horse Vision build their debut album, Another Life, from wholly familiar ingredients. Its drop-D tuning, rhotic vocals, and pastoral guitar passages would slot in nicely on the shelf between Alex G and Pinegrove. But then the Swedish duo of Johan Nilsson and Gabriel von Essen will throw in something unexpected: They interpolate a classic pop song, or get Swedish singer Tiffi M to sing an Auto-Tuned chorus straight out of a Porter Robinson track, or drop what might be the most heartwarming MIDI airhorn riff ever put to tape. Another Life isn’t strictly Americana, but it does feel informed by an American attitude, winking at the tropes of U.S. pop culture right now — gratuitous mashups, unblinking earnestness, shaky irony — in a way…
Lost Coast: Some Visionary Music from California 1980-1992 assembles little-known sounds from California’s metaphysical underground. Each recording is stylistically different — dream pop, guitar soli, fourth world, avant-electronic — but they are held together by a regional ethos of the “visionary.” This is music that sees through the mind’s eye and conjures new worlds.
Some people say that California is where “the nuts stop rolling” — where those too eccentric to fit in elsewhere often find themselves. What was meant pejoratively is easily reclaimed as a celebration of the free-thinking and the freely-freaking. Until the turn of the millennium, all manner of seekers rolled westward until they hit the pacific. Stationed along this edge, music was a way to…
Like Arya Stark without the training of an assassin, Julia Kugel is a musician with many faces: She leads The Coathangers, Soft Palms, the all-star squad Julia & the Squeezettes, and her own solo project, Julia, Julia. Her ambition is particularly remarkable given that, when I’ve touched base with her over the course of 2025, humility seemed to be her ostensible calling card. And it is on Sugaring a Strawberry, even if she’s releasing it through the seemingly self-focused moniker. Her second album as Julia, Julia magically resolves the inherent contradiction of the trendy term “mindfulness”: How can a practice intended to integrate one’s self with the outside world be reconciled with the fact that it is by definition a selfish exercise?
Let’s clarify: In a modern-day gathering of…
Digging up information on lo-fi pop entity Great Area feels almost counterintuitive, given her sparse online presence and succinct promotional materials accompanying her latest record, Good Coding, courtesy of fellow absurdist Lolina’s Relaxin label. The musical project by London artist Georgie Nettell presents itself in the form of brief, laconic pop songs which tread the line between social commentary and disillusionment, chronicling moments of city life with little apparent enthusiasm, and yet all the more entertaining for their honesty.
The two-minute bop “100% enthusiastic”, from last year’s sample-heavy LP light decline, might be the perfect introduction to the Great Area treatment: a recalcitrant beat and a wistful bassline conjure a sense of mischief, until…
Italian-born, France-located artist, Ailise Blake, who also operates under the moniker Ali Macabre, has been around for a while, both as a member of the bands J.C. Satan and La Secte du Futur and as a solo artist, has just released her second solo album, Soave.
This somewhat dry introduction hardly gives you an inkling of what Blake is on here. First off, that Ali Macabre moniker is just an indication that Blake has a detailed focus on all things connected with all things connected with magic, in her case, that of the ceremonial kind.
At the same time, she explains the title of the album: “I titled this album ‘Soave’ not only because of the sound of the word itself, which to my ears sounds like the wind, but because…