My Bloody Valentine's Loveless stands as an album of (at least) equal importance to Nirvana's Nevermind. A great deal of its importance is how it offers a gender-bending sonic style that severed the entrenched connections between the electric guitar and masculine phallic power.
Although Purity Ring's WOMB never stops sounding good, the bops came easier in 2012. WOMB is an effortful return to form for the electropop duo.
Anna Burch's sophomore album, If You're Dreaming, is a jazzy, sophisticated, timeless joy from start to finish.
Ellis' unhappiness serves as armor to protect her from despair on Born Again. It's better to be dejected than psychotic.
Canadian indie folkster Jennah Barry returns with her long-awaited sophomore album, Holiday, which takes on a looser, more relaxed approach.
Yumi Zouma, a once-New Zealand-based band whose members scattered to four different cities around the world, return with a sparkling new pop album about distance, Truth or Consequences.
Creative, existential bondage for the sleep-deprived, Grimes' "Idoru" is better than any hallucination Titanic Sinclair could dream up for Poppy this week.
Welsh trio Islet's third album Eyelet is, for the most part, an engaging and contemplative journey through ethereal psychedelic pop.
The Saxophones seamlessly blend surf pop, exotica, and West Coast jazz on their smart and sensitive new LP, Eternity Bay.
Working with indie pop's Tennis, There Will Come Soft Rains moves Esmé Patterson away from her folk music proclivities towards a more dream-pop vibe, and uses the album to musically capture the emotionally unspeakable.
Tougher than you think, Squirrel Flower's first album, I Was Born Swimming, combines Joni Mitchell with dream pop, but with an indie rock bite.
Suddenly is Caribou's most willfully experimental album to date, his soft, distinctive vocals flow through every track, binding the whole thing together.
Straining to be heard over the noise of a 1,000 over-effected electric guitars, are Pale Saints the lost champions of shoegaze?
Ironically, you may wind up wishing that Grimes' vision of a scorched Earth was a bit more fun.
Canadian cellist and activist Rebecca Foon channels her emotions into music that honors a planet in peril on Waxing Moon.
No Future finds Dublin's EDEN furthering his distinctive vision as he expands his sonic palette and broadens his perspective on an achingly beautiful modern pop album.
Tennis' Swimmer is a distillation of everything they do so well, and it further establishes them as a dynamic, sophisticated pop act worthy of even bigger stages.
Louisville's Twin Limb emerge from hiatus with an ethereal, intoxicating blend of styles both retro-leaning and futuristic on In the Warm Light, As a Ghost.
Conceptualized, edited, and directed by Lady Lazarus herself, the dream pop artist's new music video for "I Recall July" is a longing reflection on a romance come and gone.
For their Double Exposure tour, Chromatics travel through their endless gems in a masterful performance in Manchester.
Nearly 30 years have gone into the making of Tim Bowness and Steven Wilson's seventh album as No-Man, Love You to Bits. Bowness speaks with PopMatters about returning to the duo's electronic early days, and how Love You to Bits may be the Terminator: Dark Fate of No-Man albums.
Producer and engineer Josiah Mazzasch celebrates 20 years of his dream pop project Light FM on new EP, Tourist, and shares the title single.
Brooklyn dream pop darlings, Cigarettes After Sex re-emerge from the touring circuit with their second record of lust, longing, and nicotine-stained regret.
Indie pop singer-songwriter, Hana Vu's second release Nicole Kidman / Anne Hathaway is a fantastically polished double EP but could have made an even better album.
Dream pop's Kae Astra shares her latest single "Grow". "Through suffering, we deepen our well of empathy and experience in life," she says.
M83's follow-up to 2007's ambient collection Digital Shades Vol. 1 lacks the ingenuity of his pioneering predecessors' output and the thrill-ride wonder of the genres he set out to salute.
Dreamlike, psychedelic and infectious, the new single from Costa Rica's Las Robertas will make you grab your dancing shoes and head to the desert.
On her first album independent of Blonde Redhead, Kazu Makino arrives at a new stage in life, one she examines with the curiosity of a beginner.
In contrast to Bat for Lashes' previous efforts—whose dense peculiarities and poeticisms rewarded deep listening—the retro Lose Girls is too run-of-the-mill and inconsequential.
Jay Som speaks to PopMatters about handling expectations, agents of change, and how her newfound sobriety influenced her new album Anak Ko.
On the 22-track concept album Zdenka 2080, Bay Area musician and planetary scientist Salami Rose Joe Louis shuffles nu jazz, dream pop, and hip-hop vibes into the soundtrack for a dystopian sci-fi allegory of ecocidal capitalism.
DIY musician Jay Som's Anak Ko exudes tentativeness in the face of subtle personal upheaval, but a veil of motherly tenderness offsets the loneliness and desperation.
Lana Del Rey's sixth studio album is a brazen, honest exercise in studied sophistication as well as the art of not giving a fuck.
Scott Hansen's Grammy-nominated instrumental outfit has thrived in the streaming era, soundtracking lives with quiet anthems while selling out arenas. With Tycho's new album, he does the unthinkable and adds vocals to the mix.
"Don't you know that life is rarely ever fair?" Knowing this truth doesn't make living any easier, yet Clairo's Immunity hints at the positives of acknowledging this lesson.
Absent from Instagram and Twitter and mostly uncommunicative to the press, listeners must wait patiently for the reclusive Hope Sandoval's return without any hints as to what she may bring.
On Weather, chillwave's Tycho proves he can incorporate all of his signature elements into a traditional pop song structure without having to compromise the core.
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