The 30 Best Dream Pop Albums

https://pitchfork.com/features/lists-and-guides/the-30-best-dream-pop-albums/

 With many of the lists we’ve assembled over the past few years, the parameters have been clear. To be considered Britpop, for example, a record had to be guitar-based, from the UK, and released during a certain period. We can argue endlessly about what’s a mixtape and what’s an album, but in assembling the 50 Best Rap Mixtapes of the Millennium, the title said it all.

“Dream pop,” however, is a little different. The term has meant different things to different audiences at different times, because it was always more of a descriptor than a proper genre. So in assembling this list, we took the descriptive quality of the term and ran with it, assembling a list of 30 records that felt like they belonged together even as they came from different scenes, eras, and geographic locations. Despite the wide range of music here, there are certain qualities that unite these records: atmosphere, intimacy, a light coating of psychedelia, and, yes, dreaminess. In some cases, we defined what belongs here by thinking about what the music is not. We made a conscious decision to not include records that wound up on our Best Shoegaze Albums list—even though shoegaze and dream pop have, at times, been used interchangeably—and we avoided the more twee end of the indie pop spectrum.

30. A Sunny Day in Glasgow: Scribble Mural Comic Journal (2007)

Scribble Mural Comic Journal is the sound of an email with the subject line “FWD: FWD: FWD: FWD: dream pop.” It’s a slightly radical, distorted definition of it, one beyond chiming 4AD guitars and gossamer vocals, disassembled and rearranged in a space somewhere between a parasomnia hallucination and a club at the bottom of a lake. Four-on-the-floor beats melt into ambient spaces; the calamitous and enchanting “A Mundane Phonecall to Jack Parsons” is everything but. In their humble beginnings, A Sunny Day in Glasgow were comprised of the musician Ben Daniels, his twin sisters Robin and Lauren (who would later leave the band), and Pro Tools, so some of these songs feel less structured than most on this list, like they forgot to build a fence around the album. A song like “Lists, Plans” could scatter away into the night, but it’s this formlessness, this broken-mirror sound that speaks to their rightful place in the dream pop canon. –Jeremy D. Larson

29. Mazzy Star: She Hangs Brightly (1990)

Mazzy Star may have been born out of the ashes of Opal, guitarist David Roback’s Paisley Underground band, but on She Hangs Brightly, they arrived as a fully formed musical force. Everything that Mazzy Star would later achieve is here, perfectly realized, on their debut album, from the narcotic blues of “Halah” to the Doors-y crawl of the title track and the heady acoustic shuffle of “Free.” Hope Sandoval’s hypnagogic whisper and Roback’s velvety guitar tones create a gorgeous, late-night atmosphere, tempered by songs that borrow from the vivid musical austerity of early blues: On the heartbreaking “Ride It On,” for example, every stroke of the guitar and beat of the tambourine fall with perfect precision. The band even cover Memphis Minnie’s 1941 track “I Am Sailin’,” the song’s searing clarity reflecting their own meticulous songwriting. Mazzy Star would later go on to greater commercial and critical success, but dream pop would rarely again reach such sharply honed heights. –Ben Cardew

28. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: The Pains of Being Pure at Heart (2009)

Dream pop and indie pop are complicated cousins. Lines are drawn over technicalities like: How much jangle is allowed before celestial becomes C86? Is tremolo ever twee? When does shyness devolve into shoegaze? The Pains of Being Pure at Heart’s self-titled debut exists in the swirling intersection. Though easily the noisiest record on this list—you could say it never drifts off to Slumberland, pun intended—it’s determined to dream. More My Bloody Valentine circa “Sunny Sundae Smile” than Loveless, the Brooklyn band mixes a toffee and Vicodin cocktail topped off with a heavy dollop of power chords, fuzz pedals, and watercolor psychedelia. Guitarist/vocalist Kip Berman swoons with Edwyn Collins’ passion while Peggy Wang’s synths and backing vocals float through the reverb. It’s a romantic, youthful nostalgia that Berman once described as “sort of a John Hughes, magical feeling,” where the library is a hot hookup spot and every dweeb in an anorak can take on the world. –Quinn Moreland

27. Lush: Split (1994)

By their second LP, Lush were drifting into the space between shoegaze and Britpop, the moonlit zone where guitars and windchimes suddenly had wonderful pop hooks to hang onto. With Split, the guitarists/vocalists Miki Berenyi and Emma Anderson, bassist Philip King, and drummer Chris Acland made an album of pearly guitars and prurient lyrics, born of the kind of intraband trauma that could really flourish at a rural French studio in the middle of winter. In separate interviews, band members have described the process as “traumatic” and “agonizing,” with Berenyi adding that she was in a state of “pulverized victimhood.” No wonder the resulting album is pitch-black thematically, touching on child abuse, infidelity, voyeurism, and death. But thanks to the meticulous production of Mike Hedges, Split sounds so luxurious and so powerful, the essential sound of Lush. Berenyi and Anderson’s voices sky together in their clearest, most present harmonies. Songs last no longer than they need to, even the ones that stretch to eight minutes. Split is at once grounded and aloft—fiery, poppy, druggy, and alone. –Jeremy D. Larson

26. DIIV: Oshin (2012)

The debut album from Captured Tracks stalwarts DIIV didn’t intentionally set out to channel dream pop. Yes, they were fans of Ride, but frontman Zachary Cole Smith cited this particular album’s inspirations as krautrock and Malian music. Yet from the opening gambit of the instrumental track “(Druun)” to the distant vocals of “Past Lives”—vocals that sound like they're being teleported from another dimension—DIIV quickly found themselves cited as revivalists of dream pop. The record plays out like an inversion of a late-’80s Sub Pop grunge record, taking the dirge and muddiness of guitars, drums, and bass and oversaturating that in blissed-out ambience. It ebbs and flows in a manner that often makes it difficult to distinguish tracks, driven largely by rhythm, echo, and a sense of wonderment. Lyrically, it’s not trying to offer much in the way of catharsis; instead, it provides a bedrock for you to come, lie down, and sink deeper into whatever emotional state you’re in. Isn’t that what dreams are made of? –Eve Barlow

25. Wild Nothing: Gemini (2010)

Gemini was released as part of the 2010 guitar-pop mini-boom, but it could just as easily have been recorded in 1989. Jack Tatum’s first album as Wild Nothing is full of songs that exist just outside the margins of your memory: Haven’t I heard this before? Isn’t this guitar part familiar? Didn’t an ex-boyfriend make me a mixtape with “Drifter” sandwiched between Cocteau Twins deep cuts?

Tatum put Gemini together while studying at Virginia Tech, and its amateurish charm separates the album from his more expansive, polished later work. When songs like opener “Live in Dreams” and the chiming “Our Composition Book” fade in slowly, it’s easy to imagine hearing them streaming from a dorm room window overlooking a verdant quad. And while there isn’t much lyrical depth to Gemini, that’s a feature, not a bug. You can listen to “Summer Holiday” or the gloomy, glamorous “Chinatown” and fill in the blanks with your own memories of being young, sad, and in love. –Jamieson Cox

24. The Radio Dept.: Clinging to a Scheme (2010)

For many dream pop bands, drum machines and samplers help ground a sound so ethereal, it runs the risk of floating away. For the Radio Dept., these tools are precisely what set them apart on their third album, Clinging to a Scheme. With their mix of sunny guitar jangle and melancholic sentiment, the Swedish trio could easily be slotted as indie pop. But factor in their apparent fondness for Saint Etienne and darkwave, diet-Eurodance-meets-reggae beats, and jokes landed via spoken-word samples (à la the Avalanches), and the album rests at the more electronic end of the dream pop spectrum. The post-punk riffs that made them interchangeable with ’80s bands on the 2006 Marie Antoinette soundtrack remain intact, as do the lo-fi charms of their 2003 breakthrough Lesser Matters. But on Clinging to a Scheme, the Radio Dept. apply their eclectic tricks easily to their moody, understated soundscapes. –Jillian Mapes

23. Brightblack Morning Light: Brightblack Morning Light (2006)

Born in the South, transplanted to Northern California, ostentatiously fond of cannabis, and known to perform in headbands alongside a sleepy dog named Lolly, Brightblack Morning Light all but invited mockery of the get-your-patchouli-stink-outta-my-store variety. Fortunately, on their self-titled second album, the highlight of their brief career, the mid-Aughts duo of Nathan “Nabob” Shineywater and Rachael “Rabob” Hughes sounded like the best possible combination of those influences.

Out of burbling electric piano, twangy slide-guitar melodies that split the difference between Hank Williams and Mazzy Star, and their own somnolent vocals, Shineywater and Hughes crafted languid, lightly psychedelic paeans to the natural world. Brightblack Morning Light beefed up the dream pop aesthetic for heartier tastes—this was music for freak-folk stoners on a Joshua Tree camping trip, not pale, narcotized indoor kids. Even if you laughed at the trippy rainbow glasses that came packaged with the double LP, it was difficult to resist the blissful midsummer vibes they accompanied. –Judy Berman

22. Low: I Could Live in Hope (1994)

It takes courage for a band to play as quietly as Low do on I Could Live in Hope, their debut album. Mimi Parker brushes her drums as if fearful of waking a sleeping child, John Nichols’ trebly basslines are sparse to the point of abstraction, and Alan Sparhawk’s skeletal guitar suggests the gaseous atmosphere of Brian Eno’s ambient works, set off by vocal melodies of a powerful, understated economy. The effect urges leaning in, paying attention, but Low don’t want to seduce you; they want to unnerve you. I Could Live in Hope inhabits a world of disquiet, like the lingering malaise of a bad dream, where a line as seemingly innocuous as “She used to let me cut her hair” feels ridden with shame and discomfort. Dream pop records often come steeped in instrumental flourishes and pillowy effects; on I Could Live in Hope, Low prove that small gestures can be transformative, too. –Ben Cardew

21. The Clientele: Suburban Light (2000)

As its title strongly suggests, the Clientele’s 2000 debut album is all about finding the magic in the mundane. Collecting singles the band released in their late-’90s formative phase, Suburban Light showcases singer/guitarist Alasdair MacLean’s preternatural gift for crafting songs that feel both warmly familiar yet eerily distant, like a golden-oldies station beaming in from another dimension. Jangly gems such as “We Could Walk Together” and “(I Want You) More Than Ever” betray the unsubtle influence of ’60s-pop melody makers like the Byrds, the Left Banke, and the early Bee Gees, then shoot it through a gauzy Galaxie 500 filter, casting their lovelorn lyrics in a narcotic haze and letting each languid guitar line ripple out to infinity. The result isn’t so much dream pop as daydream pop: the sound of wistfully gazing out a rain-soaked window, imagining the more wondrous world that lies on the other side of the glass, and counting down the time until your escape with each drop of drizzle that rolls down the pane. –Stuart Berman

20. Atlas Sound: Logos (2009)

Listening to Atlas Sound’s second studio LP can feel a lot like drifting in and out of consciousness. Like Bradford Cox’s first album with this project, 2008’s Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel, Logos follows the logic of a fever dream. Voices rise from a haze of guitars and synthesizers, then dissipate back into it. People drift in and out of the field of sound, as though the listener were a sick child assumed to be asleep by the adults in the house; that these vocalists are not only the Deerhunter frontman, but also Panda Bear’s Noah Lennox and Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier, only compounds the effect.

If Atlas Sound’s studio debut inspired occasional bouts of claustrophobia, Logos opened up the arena of Cox’s sound experiments. The gorgeous “Quick Canal” yawns to an almost nine-minute runtime as Cox’s quick, scratchy drums egg on Sadier’s lilting soprano. There are pop gestures, too, on the twee-adjacent “Shelia” and the swinging “My Halo,” but Cox focuses more on lingering in that space between dream life and waking life, where each state of being feeds the other and neither seems quite real. –Sasha Geffen

19. Cocteau Twins: Blue Bell Knoll (1988)

The brilliance of Cocteau Twins is that they capture the lightness of dreams. Their pop sound is like they’ve dipped into your reveries and are playing them back to you. By the time Blue Bell Knoll, the Scottish band’s fifth album, came out in 1988, they had cemented this meld of glittery guitars and avian vocals, this talent for finding pure white in the black abyss of goth. This album, however, was their first significant U.S. release, introduced with their bewildering single “Carolyn’s Fingers.” On it, Elizabeth Fraser’s words are impossible to understand: Either they’re being spoken in another tongue, or you’ve temporarily developed aphasia and can’t compute them. Throughout the record, the trio strip back to their basic groundwork of bass-guitar melodies, a pattern they’d continue on Heaven or Las Vegas two years later. Blue Bell Knoll is not as dynamic a listen as that masterpiece, but its exploration of widescreen space is essential, and set down the canvas for glorious colors to come. –Eve Barlow

18. Grouper: Ruins (2014)

Grouper’s Liz Harris recorded Ruins in a small town off the coast of Portugal during an artist’s residency; the atmosphere of the place, miles away from her home in Portland, Oregon, bleeds into the album as much as any instrument. While most Grouper records cultivate dissonance and noise, Ruins focuses more on silence and all the sounds that can fill it. Frogs croak in the space she leaves between piano chords. At one point, without warning, a microwave beeps. What other artists might consider mistakes, Harris considers connection to a world of sound bigger than what she herself can create.

That openness to her environment sets the perfect backdrop for what remains one of Grouper’s loveliest and softest albums. Most songs revolve around Harris’ voice and a piano. Her lyrics, uncloaked by reverb, become easier to pick out, and narratives of loss, alienation, and stunted affection emerge. Ruins is a document of loneliness, but it’s also the sound of someone opening themselves to their surroundings, softening the boundaries between the self and everything outside the self. Once you’ve learned to be permeable, being alone can prove to be a deeply fruitful state. –Sasha Geffen

17. Mojave 3: Ask Me Tomorrow (1995)

By the time Slowdive released their third album, Pygmalion, they had eroded from a swirling shoegaze band to a few shimmers in empty space. In response to how inert and ambiguous the songs on the record had grown, vocalist and guitarist Neil Halstead found himself listening to Leonard Cohen and Gram Parsons records, picking up his guitar, and trying to record actual songs instead of what sounded like their decayed echoes. He, along with Slowdive bandmates Rachel Goswell and Ian McCutcheon, ended up producing a sound faintly like country on Mojave 3’s debut album, Ask Me Tomorrow, but it still can’t help feeling drowsy and blurred; the opener, “Love Songs on the Radio,” unfolds at the rate of a bloom of smoke. It’s what makes the record so dreamy; the restless shiver of McCutcheon’s drums, the melting haze of Goswell’s voice, the cellos that swarm through the final minutes of “Tomorrow’s Taken”—these all seem to wade through the region between sleeping and waking, the coronal blurs the world melts away into when your eyes close. –Brad Nelson

16. Galaxie 500: Today (1988)

Inspired by the Velvet Underground, Joy Division, Jonathan Richman, and New Zealand’s Flying Nun label, Galaxie 500 stood out in the rollicking Boston underground thanks to their introspective minimalism. The 10 tracks on their 1988 debut, Today, are sprawling washes of sound that manage to capture an ineffable sensation: a nostalgia both known and unknown, intensely familiar yet completely mystical. But any shot at shoegazing here is thwarted by a subtle restraint. No matter how high Damon Krukowski’s primal, jazz-inspired drums, Dean Wareham’s psychedelic guitar ramblings, and Naomi Yang’s robust basslines soar, their playing always returns to Earth. Their heads, however, stay in the clouds on songs like “Flowers” and “Oblivious,” in which the trio ponder the trappings of romance. And then of course there’s the fuzzy and careening “Tugboat,” in which Wareham declares his humble resolution to buoy his love through whatever choppy waters they face. –Quinn Moreland

15. The Sundays: Reading, Writing and Arithmetic (1990)

“Skin & Bones,” the first track on the Sundays’ debut album, begins with a few seconds of feedback, like a spaceship landing, but the song that comes in is idyllic, as if that particular ship were the peaceful sort, with a greenhouse dome and a mission to terraform the world into a more pleasant place. Reading, Writing and Arithmetic was not treated as an alien release, though; it arrived to endless comparisons. Vocalist Harriet Wheeler, like every woman with a high and/or curious voice, was stuck with Liz Fraser comparisons, and Smiths references abounded thanks to David Gavurin’s Johnny Marr jangle and the twinge of wryness and introversion in the lyrics.

But the Sundays are like sunshine by comparison. On Reading, the percussion is light as shivers, the guitars nimble; even the comparatively funky tracks like “A Certain Someone” sound buoyant enough to float away. Wheeler’s voice is both distinctive and an exemplar of countless strains of ’90s vocal, its boundless freedom and wide-eyed weirdness reflected in Sue Tompkins of Life Without Buildings and the late Dolores O’Riordan, its clarion tone aspired to by an entire decade of women in alt-rock and indie pop. It’s not timeless so much as ageless, lending each lyric shades of old-soul rue and youthful idealism. “Poetry is not for me,” Wheeler sings on “My Finest Hour,” but the songs are written like poems anyway: small observations on twentysomething English life, each meaning volumes. Few albums capture so well the feeling of being young, earnest, and cradling that last wisp of idealism tight, lest it vanish. –Katherine St. Asaph

14. Low: Things We Lost in the Fire (2001)

Low’s 1994 debut found them extending the hazy, ethereal guitar-pop of Galaxie 500, aided in part by the reverb-heavy production of Kramer. By the time they released Things We Lost in the Fire, they’d figured out how to craft stargazing dreaminess with the simplest of ingredients and nothing extra. Their minimalist bent had been refined to a point as fine as an acupuncture needle, where every note in their music felt like it came from great emotion. On Fire, a couple of guitar notes, a cymbal brush, and the heavenly harmonies of Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker were all Low needed to transport you to another world, and the ultra-clean and dry recording by Steve Albini heightened the effect. –Mark Richardson

13. Chromatics: Kill for Love (2012)

“It’s better to burn out than to fade away” sounds hopelessly unconvincing sung by Chromatics’ doomed heroine, Ruth Radelet, as if she’d settle for whatever would make her disappear more completely. Kill for Love, released five years after its predecessor, is an overachiever’s guide to dropping out of life: 90 minutes of throbbing, moonlit Zen koans about ennui and heartbreak, delivered with a glassy-eyed shrug. A graceful blend of post-punk, Italo, and melancholy ’80s pop, Kill for Love is at once dystopian and romantic, moods that are presented as perfectly complementary—after all, what’s more romantic than total disintegration? In that sense, it’s always seemed clear that by the title, they don’t mean murder but suicide; on “Back from the Grave,” Radelet sings, “Memories fade, and I wish I was gone.”

Johnny Jewel—whose Italians Do It Better label marked the band’s fairly drastic mid-’00s shift in sound, and who had just gotten his big break via the previous year’s Drive soundtrack—once had a nightmare about Satan, a normal-looking guy with a loudly ticking wristwatch that beat like a heart. And so Kill for Love’s dreamy melodies and worn-in analog fuzz are constantly serrated by a paranoid hyper-awareness that, second by second, time is running out. Hence, a 90-minute album of which every minute feels essential, even as it sighs into oblivion. –Meaghan Garvey

12. M83: Saturdays=Youth (2008)

M83 has made dreamier albums, and ones that are more pop. Saturdays = Youth sits at the intersection, the record that shares most of dream pop’s defining qualities: blushing, soft-focus co-ed harmonies, cocooning reverb, emotional polarities on a song-by-song basis. The similarities end there; whereas most other bands on this list meekly want to see movies of their dreams, Anthony Gonzalez breaks the bank to shoot them in HD. With the addition of powerhouse vocalist Morgan Kibby and co-producers Ken Thomas and Ewan Pearson, Gonzalez forgoes the distended, saturated shoegaze tones of his earlier, insular work for a different kind of maximalism; everything from symphonic post-rock droning to skyscraping pop is rendered with an overwhelming, hyperreal clarity.

The cover is a fake-out: “Kim & Jessie,” “Graveyard Girl,” and “Skin of the Night” aren’t John Hughes characters, relatable and realistic teenage archetypes tied to single decade’s pastel aesthetics. Saturdays = Youth is more attuned to the highly stylized sensuality of Sofia Coppola and Baz Luhrmann’s big-top operatics, vessels of romantic indulgence. The message with M83 here: Youth isn’t wasted on the young, Saturdays are wasted on the old. –Ian Cohen

11. Spiritualized: Lazer Guided Melodies (1992)

Before he started amassing gospel choirs like troops and turning each of his records into an orchestral arms race, Jason Pierce found splendor in more intimate environs. His debut album as Spiritualized wades deeper into the meditative moments of his previous band, the drone-punk heroes Spacemen 3, furthering that group’s experiments in audio hypnosis through the twinkling psychedelia of “Sway” and the free-form ambient swirl of “Symphony Space.” But Lazer Guided Melodies also emits a warm, romantic glow that Spacemen 3 never really acquired, and that Spiritualized would relinquish on their subsequent, increasingly ostentatious records. “You Know It’s True” is the sort of nocturnal, organ-hummed ballad that Yo La Tengo would make a career out of; “Step Into the Breeze” and “Angel Sigh” ride their serene, starry-eyed verses into rapturous fuzz releases. And then there’s the absolutely divine “Shine a Light,” a heaven-sent hymn that clears the skyward path to Pierce’s future adventures in space floatation, and which remains the heart-stopping highlight of any Spiritualized show. –Stuart Berman

10. Julee Cruise: Floating Into the Night (1989)

The opening piano clunk of Julee Cruise’s “Falling” are two of television’s most famous notes: Performed by Angelo Badalamenti, they are the basis for the “Twin Peaks” theme. On TV, the song is instrumental (and inferior), a creepy call to arms for weirdos to plop on the couch and cry for Laura Palmer. But Cruise takes the song out of the darkness, as the airiness of her voice transforms the horrid into something beautiful, if still somewhat grotesque. Dream pop is synonymous with fuzz, but Floating Into the Night has more of a lacquer in its blend of Cruise’s sweet and foggy singing, raw saxophone, gentle guitar strokes, and held synthesizer notes. Of course it worked for “Twin Peaks,” a dreamy, scary alternate reality; “I Float Alone”—written, like all of the album, alongside David Lynch—epitomizes that. It’s a lounge number that, in other hands, might have never left the hotel bar. Is “floating through this darkness all alone” about a breakup or about the fallout of a murder? Is Cruise an angel sent from heaven to bless us with her pure whisper, or is she the devil in disguise? Is “both” an option? –Matthew Schnipper

9. Beach House: Bloom (2012)

If listening to Beach House’s Teen Dream felt like throwing open the shades and letting light into a dusty sunroom, Bloom revisited that same space at twilight, still opulent and opaque but with new scope. Alex Scally’s sparkling guitar leads and Victoria Legrand’s cyclone of a voice are instantly recognizable, but they’re distorted in mystery. Bloom is a seductive album that has little to do with romance or sexual gratification; its characters feel the tug of adventure, of sensations and phenomena they can’t quite describe.

And while Bloom boasts some of the most indelible melodies in Beach House’s discography—the twinkling “Lazuli,” the extended sigh of “Other People”—it’s most notable as a collection of remarkable sounds. “Myth” opens with that plonking bell, cracked like an egg after two stiff shakes; the drums on “Wild” foam and splash like the ocean around your ankles; “The Hours” clocks you with that sneering riff, a slow-motion punk moment. These little moments may not sound like much, but they end up feeling like dashes of spice added to a favorite home-cooked meal. There’s something unexpected lurking in every familiar bite. –Jamieson Cox

8. This Mortal Coil: It’ll End in Tears (1984)

The muse sang in Tim Buckley when he wrote “Song to the Siren,” a lovelorn ’60s ballad for the female monsters whose incantations tempted Homer’s Odysseus. But the track wouldn’t fulfill its mesmerizing potential until 1983, when Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser unfurled her diaphanous voice over its devotional lyrics on a cover by This Mortal Coil. Intended as a B-side, the recording became the 4AD super-collective’s first single, lingering on the UK indie charts for two years.

“Siren” looms so large in the dream pop mythos, it can overshadow not just the debut album it anchors, It’ll End in Tears, but also the entire discography of This Mortal Coil. Conceived and produced by 4AD founder Ivo Watts-Russell, the band was designed to recontextualize some of his favorite songs and encourage experimentation beyond each contributing artist’s signature sound. Cindytalk frontman Gordon Sharp’s echoing laments transform Big Star’s “Kanga Roo” from lackadaisical to crushing, while piano lends additional solemnity to the same band’s “Holocaust,” as sung by Howard Devoto of Magazine. Paired with atmospheric compositions by Fraser’s Cocteau Twins bandmates, Dead Can Dance vocalist Lisa Gerrard, and more stars, this collection of covers helped set the template for dream pop and catalyzed 4AD’s ascendance from the stilted poetics of goth rock to the kings of gauzy transcendence. –Judy Berman

7. Broadcast: Tender Buttons (2005)

Tender Buttons was new terrain for Birmingham band Broadcast. The group had been known for taking the lithe psych-pop of the ’60s and smearing it with feedback, muscular percussion, and crunchy synths on their landmark albums The Noise Made by People and Haha Sound. But in 2005, the group shaved down to a duo, comprising only of frontwoman Trish Keenan and bassist James Cargill. As a duo, Keenan and Cargill translated their signature thorniness into something captivating.

The palpable power of Neil Bullock’s drums on Haha Sound seemed like something that could have been irreplaceable, but the pared-down sound on Tender Buttons proved that Keenan and Cargill were truly the group’s central nervous system. The flavors of yé-yé sung in Keenan’s spectral voice sound even more intimate over a drum machine, as evidenced by the sticky “Black Cat” and sparse, sweet “Tears in the Typing Pool.” Staticky and serene tracks like “America’s Boy” and “Corporeal” proved that Broadcast’s pop subversion was malleable. Tender Buttons may not be as delicate as other classics of dream-pop, but its noisy, sanguine sound and the group's maverick spirit make it essential. –Claire Lobenfeld

6. Grouper: Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill (2008)

Liz Harris’ early work as Grouper was dark and distorted, a black-hearted churn of ambient and noise that found her burying her voice under piles of sonic sludge. With Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill, her music crawled out from under the wreckage and turned to face the sunlight. Where she once assembled free-flowing “pieces,” she was now singing proper songs, ones that connected strands of British folk, gothic lullabies, and devotional music as heard echoing through an ancient cathedral. And it’s all done with very little. Most of the tracks on Deer feature just a few elements—a gently strummed guitar and Harris’ processed and layered voice predominate—and the arrangements are thin and airy, evoking the tingle of buried memory returning to consciousness. But an intense ache sits at their center of these songs like a boulder. Every note drips with loss and the music is crushingly sad, but by sharing in Grouper’s pain, we get a feeling that art just might save us. –Mark Richardson

5. Yo La Tengo: And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out (2000)

Over the course of their 34-year career, Yo La Tengo have summoned squalls of feedback and tackled Stooges covers; they’ve swum with the fishes, whispered nursery rhymes, worshipped at the church of Burt Bacharach and Hal David. But their range and curiosity are balanced by their interest in conjuring enveloping moods, the kind you can wrap around yourself like well-worn woolens. With 2000’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out, they embarked upon a 77-minute immersion in the deepest, sweetest sort of reverie.

In a year that was supposed to be all about cybernetic upheavals, Yo La Tengo made the quietest, coziest album of their career, one suffused in lullaby-like close harmonies and cotton-candy 1960s flashbacks, from the liquid slide guitar of the opening “Everyday” to the weightless closer “Night Falls on Hoboken,” an 18-minute excursion that plays out like a dream within a dream. Rather than a radical departure from the trio’s well-worn sound, And Then Nothing clarifies their signature into a heartbeat wrapped in a hush. Even the lone explosion of out-and-out rock—“Cherry Chapstick,” which channels shoegaze’s whammy-bar abuse through Daydream Nation’s silvery fuzz—is as sweet as it is abrasive. Sure, you can have it all, as they sing on one of the album’s highlights, but wouldn’t you rather have just this one perfect thing? –Philip Sherburne

4. Galaxie 500: On Fire (1989)

With its dislocating atmospheres and diffident vocals, all dream pop is outsider music. Galaxie 500 sounded so removed from a sense of time or place that they made this fact nonnegotiable. The droning, doleful music of their second album, On Fire, arrived with the quiet subtlety of a profound secret. Over a few chords and understated drumming, Dean Wareham mumbled clever lyrics about his Dodge Dart, the weatherman, and liminal things. Drummer Damon Krukowski and bassist Naomi Yang made their spare neo-psychedelia burst with emotion.

On Fire sounds like the Velvet Underground slowly warming up: In lieu of a Pop Art banana, Wareham sings about waiting in a line eating Twinkies; instead of heroin, he has a song about dropping acid in the woods; instead of Warhol, Galaxie 500 pair with an eccentric, no-frills producer named Kramer. As in all great dream pop, these impressionistic elements congeal into a single atomic sound, as if the instruments have eclipsed one another, moving with the crawl of a cloud. –Jenn Pelly

3. Beach House: Teen Dream (2010)

The Baltimore duo of Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally had established themselves as effortlessly sublime dream-pop adepts by the time of their third album, but they hadn’t yet embraced the production values that might convince people who weren’t reading mp3 blogs. Teen Dream, Beach House’s Sub Pop debut, was the sound of a band going for broke at that exciting moment before they know what they’re really capable of achieving. Recording in a converted church with producer/engineer Chris Coady, whose credits span Amen Dunes to Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the pair demonstrated a rare balance of preaching to the choir and pulling in new converts. The spidery guitar lines, dimly lit organ tones, and sparse drum machines remain. But there’s also much more attempted: crystalline Fleetwood Mac–style harmonies, shoegaze-teetering crescendos, even kitchen-sink piano balladry. Each of the 10 songs could’ve been a single, and the physical edition’s accompanying DVD offers pleasantly warped videos for all of them. It was still dream pop, all right, right down to the “Twin Peaks”-echoing lyrical hook of the bleakly glamorous “Silver Soul.” But it was dream pop that could entice Jay-Z and Beyoncé out to a gig. Beach House have a well-earned reputation for not changing much, but on Teen Dream, they came into their own, and ushered the languid reveries of Galaxie 500, Mazzy Star, and Cocteau Twins into the current Instagram decade. –Marc Hogan

2. Mazzy Star: So Tonight That I Might See (1993)

You didn’t need to be especially cool to be up on Mazzy Star’s second album, thanks to the unexpected breakaway success of “Fade Into You.” One of the greatest slow-dance songs ever recorded, it’s easy to see why it took on a mainstream life of its own despite its uncanny bent (“I wanna hold the hand inside you”) that made it feel like a Lynchian waltz, barely swaying, eyes fixed on nothing. But really, you came to hear Hope Sandoval, husky-voiced East L.A. priestess, shaking a tambourine without passion. So Tonight That I Might See, a secret blues album obfuscated in fuzz and fog, entered the canon of the California Gothic—a vision of the place that felt like a nap you might never wake up from.

“Fade Into You” isn’t necessarily the album’s high point, though. There is “Mary of Silence,” with its strung-out organ drone and resigned cymbal clatters, Sandoval channeling Jim Morrison. Or “Five String Serenade,” a devastatingly simple acoustic Arthur Lee cover, in which her voice is joined by soft, sad violins. “Wasted” is blues at a narcoleptic crawl, as fucked-sounding as the title suggests. There’s something unknowable to all of it. And yet it’s one of those albums where it’s imperative you look up each song on YouTube and get punched in the gut by the humanity in the comments below. One, beneath “Blue Light,” goes: “In 1998, I had the best thing. A beautiful Angel that sang this to me. She’s gone.”   –Meaghan Garvey

1. Cocteau Twins: Heaven or Las Vegas (1990)

Heaven or Las Vegas. You’re either in the good place or a gaudy replica designed to trick you. Sweet relief or a desert mirage. It sounds like a trap, doesn’t it? That’s kind of what the record was for Cocteau Twins, too. Six albums in, the gothy cult heroes of 4AD Records gave in completely to the pop urges they had flirted with on 1988’s Blue Bell Knoll and 1984’s Treasure. Happily, the resulting masterpiece not only defined the Scottish trio for good, it established an ethereal blueprint for dream pop. While there are countless examples of indie bands struggling to marry their deep weirdness to pop structures, the Cocteaus’ version of a slightly more commercial sound did not compromise their individual idiosyncrasies. Rather, it distilled them into something painfully gorgeous and utterly mesmerizing.

Elizabeth Fraser, Robin Guthrie, and Simon Raymonde were each going through heavy periods when they wrote and recorded Heaven or Las Vegas at their own September Sound Studios in London. Raymonde, the keyboard player and bassist, had just lost his father, composer Ivor Raymonde. Guthrie, the guitarist and drum programmer, was at the height of his cocaine addiction, and his partner, vocalist Fraser, was a new mother keeping things together. Fraser had been known for her impressionistic approach to melody, focusing more on the sounds of the words and effortlessly bending them into evocative gibberish with her piercing soprano. On Heaven or Las Vegas, though, you can actually tell that she is singing about her relationship and her daughter, still in an oblique and conflicted way but still with a newfound confidence she attributed to her pregnancy. At the time, dream pop was one of the few rock subgenres where overt femininity was not only tolerated, it was necessary. Fraser had already redefined how operatic vocals, glossolalia, and a vaguely new age aesthetic fit into the ’80s alternative world, but here she was being newly direct with declarations of motherly love—building hooks out of them, in fact, like on the effortlessly cool dance track “Pitch the Baby.” Arranging her peerless voice into more elaborate layers and flows, Fraser centered herself at the forefront of a band now pushing the limits of lushness.

The crucial counterpoint to Fraser’s voice can be found in Guthrie’s elaborate, effects-laden guitar loops, which sent reverb through the songs like an industrial fan whipping air around a warehouse. As a guitarist, Guthrie is to dream pop what Kevin Shields is to shoegaze. But by adopting a dazed, dreamy slide technique on songs like “Cherry-Coloured Funk,” one of the best scene-setting opening tracks ever, Guthrie cemented another aspect of his signature guitar jangle; it’s a tone you can hear traces of in everyone from Lush’s Miki Berenyi to the xx’s Romy Madley Croft to the Weeknd (quite literally). With Guthrie providing the blissful wave of noise, Raymonde adding the crucial ominous undertone, and Fraser tending to the otherworldly drama, the band reached the heights of their mood-setting abilities while still keeping most of the songs around three minutes. Not that you'd necessarily notice the song lengths: Heaven or Las Vegas is less a collection of tracks than a 37-minute journey to a surreal realm. You don’t know where you are, exactly; you just notice the warm feeling that washes over you when you arrive. Heaven, after all, is subjective. –Jillian Mapes