Walk to the middle of your favorite forest and listen to duo Maria Lindén and Fredrick Balck sing about death and darkness, among other such cheery topics. Fuzzed-up one moment, clean the next electronic one moment, earthly and even primal the next. Hearts finds consistency not in theme or even in tune, but rather in pacing: This is a record built to showcase the careful process of braiding together synth snares, double time drums, arpeggio scaling, distortion and nicely opaque lyricism, all with an emphasis on interludes that rise heavenward thanks to the collision of the record’s multiple competing aesthetics. I Break Horses’ debut album Hearts is a 40-minute exercise in the proper techniques for warping and wefting disparate sounds and styles together into the same fabric. Largely recorded at San Francisco’s Hyde Street Studios, released on Rough Trade and later re-released by Capitol, She Hangs Brightly forever stands as a testament to the thrill of Sandoval’s heavenly coo, the genius of Roback’s instrumental explorations and of Mazzy Star’s audacity to dream. Like a gentle gypsy, a tambourine rears itself throughout the album, memorably on “Ride It On,” a song that packs the defining gaze of the early ’90s. On “Give You My Lovin’” Roback’s slide guitar presents a gorgeous companion for Sandoval’s breathtaking delivery. From the album’s cover shot of architect Victor Horta’s art nouveau stairway at the Hotel Tassel in Brussels, singer Hope Sandoval and multi-instrumentalist David Roback operate in marbled nostalgia and lovelorn bliss. What So Tonight That I Might See offers in the purest sense of dream pop vibes, She Hangs Brightly runs circles around it in sheer folk psychedelia and mind-bending bohemia. While Mazzy Star’s 1993 sophomore release, So Tonight That I Might See, is the album most people look to in the dream pop canon, this favoritism is largely propped up by the existence of sublime single “Fade InTo You,” while their debut album, She Hangs Brightly is a stunning work in and of itself. While the albums on this list could be described a million different ways, they all tread similar sonic territory: that floaty, surreal, cloud-like haze most often associated with dream pop. We made sure to take various eras of dream pop into account-from its formation in the late 1980s via ethereal groups like Cocteau Twins and My Bloody Valentine to its 21st century iterations in outfits like Jay Som and Alvvays. We went with our gut on this one, but that’s why this list is special. There’s overlap with genres like shoegaze, indie-pop, indie rock and synth-pop. Therefore, some of the albums on this list could very well belong on other lists. In dream pop, atmosphere is everything.Īs we mentioned before, dream pop is difficult to define. You may listen to some of the records on this list and not understand a lick of what the vocalist is saying-that’s what makes them great! Dream pop artists aren’t poets-they’re painters patching together swaths of sound into a big, beautiful landscape. Additionally, dream pop usually prioritizes sonics over lyrics. In a great dream pop album, chords and tracks blur seamlessly into one another so frequently that it can be difficult to even decipher when one song ended and another has begun. One reason dream pop is so difficult to pinpoint is the genre’s emphasis on mood and tone over specifics. There is no one right way to make a dream pop album, but when you hear a good one, you’ll know. Like indie rock and alt-country and innumerable other subgenres, dream pop is a fluid set of sounds.
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