Gloios - Polvorosa (2025)

A beautiful mess from Brazil; Rafael Xavier aka Gloios, the artist from São Paulo, himself calls his new album a mess that encompasses a shitload of various music genres. But the coherent slowcore warm atmosphere brings everything together, making Polvorosa a beautiful, musical journey.

Let me quote the artist further: "post-rock, ambient music, metal, dream pop..." but also Brazilian music like MPB, forró, samba, xote, baião which I know nothing about, all of this makes up the third album in Xavier's discography. Everything is based on slightly industrial electronica, but there is also some, very distant, very echoey and everything but clear vocals. And it doesn't really matter because you can hear the genres like you can see pebbles in muddy water. There is something there, but who knows what exactly? And the water is warm and welcoming, slightly terrifying, but you have to go in and let it go.

I love it when music clearly shows where it comes from and you can have little doubt that this is the sound from Brazil. There is so much going on there: various rhythms, paces, dance moves, everything slightly hidden but also clearly felt. Just listen to the weirdness of Boiafria or my favourite, very mysterious Ficha.

Polvorosa costs whatever you want to pay.

Check: Ficha

Country: Brazil

Genre: ethereal eclectic slowcore?

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Bartosz Dziadosz - Peace (2023)

Bartosz Dziadosz is better known as pleq, but this time he released his new album under his birth name. And the results are particularly interesting both thanks to the form of the music and the atmosphere that Peace is filled with.

Perhaps the artist chose to use his own name to underline the theme of the album which is the tragic war that Russia started in Ukraine and the longing for the title's peace. Interestingly enough, the album was released by the formerly Russian label DRONARIVM, making it clear that at least some of this country's citizen feel the same about the war. The music here is an extremely ethereal take on meditative and moody ambient-like neoclassical soundscapes. It's also fairly diverse genre-wise, but the overall results are clearly mesmerizing in the beauty of the neoclassic elements and experimentally interesting.

Peace costs 5 EUR.

Check: GABI

Country: Poland

Genre: experimental dreamscape

Label: DRONARIVM

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Rosa Vertov - Reflected In (2023)

The truest noisy dream pop band in Poland, Rosa Vertov have just released their new EP. It's been only two years since their second LP called Reflected In but a lot managed to change in the meantime, with the vital change in the band's line-up as the main thing..

As Olga Gniadzik left the band, it is now a trio and this fact reflects on the music they play. Now, their slow and melancholic music is more minimalist which makes it in turn more introvert and self-reflective. Particular elements of their music have more space and it's easy to focus on them separately, admiring the use of grunge'y guitar, noisy backgrounds and fantastic melodies. This is what I like about their music the most: while focusing on the tear-jerking atmosphere, they are perfectly able to smuggle some mindblowing melodies (like in Fading Out for example).

They say that their music "breaks dream pop dreaminess with a good dose of nightmarish unease and melancholy". The way the artists thick up the atmosphere with the use of backing vocals and organ-sounding keys is definitely top class. The album's finish in All We Have Must Be Enough makes the whole experience drastically heavier and more melancholic and I'm here for it.

Reflected In costs whatever you want to pay.

Rosa Vertov - Day In Day Out (2021)

Check: Fading Out

Country: Poland

Genre: slowcore dream rock

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Jolanda Moletta - Nine Spells (2022)

The leader of She Owl, the Berlin-based dream pop duo, Jolanda Moletta recently showed what seems to be her first solo album, and what an intriguing gem it is! Nine Spells are magical incantations that are clearly gates to a different, fantastic and pretty moody world.

What's most impressive about this album is that the only instrument Moletta uses is her voice. Distorted and experimented on, yes, but still, just the voice. And its various natures are collected together to create the eerie soundscapes. As she explains, "singing beyond words is a way to express an entire lifeline in one single breath, a way to represent and move emotional mountains, clouds full of tears and winds of laughter, infinite gardens where memories and desires intertwine and work together". This unique way of the abstract storytelling is used by Moletta to explore her ancestry, the history of her female predecessors on this Earth. One thing is certain, it's a magical tribute.

Nine Spells costs 7 EUR.

Check: Spell V: Like Honey in a Hidden Cave

Country: Germany

Genre: soundscape a capella

Label: Ambientologist

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Lights A.M. - Clouds (2022)

Erlend Eilertsen comes from Norway and it's something that certainly is well audible on his solo album Clouds. The member of a synthpop outift Essence of Mind, brings a lot of synths to create an airy and out-of-this-world soundscape neatly packed under the Lights A.M. moniker.

From the very beginning, his music strikes with the ability to create dense and thick synth atmosphere that seems to be very close to ambient soundscapes of the highest oneiric quality. But this time, they are used as backgrounds for slow and moody compositions based on Eilersten emotional vocals. Together, this combination brings one of the most ethereal experience of the year, that also involves tons of emotions. There's a lot of dream pop's atmosphere here obviously, but the tunes are livelier. It's something from Ruby Haunt, something from Fireflies, sometimes heavier, sometimes lighter. It is how bright nights of Scandinavia probably feel like.

Especially that the artist can easily ditch the vocals and still create something utterly touching, as it is with The Last Dance: its long finish is truly mesmerizing. Not to mention What I Am Feeling and Inscecure's utterly melancholic synthy vibes. And yes, I feel like the feeling of this autumn-like, subtle but omnipresent melancholia is what dominates this beautiful album.

Clouds costs 9 EUR.

Check: Inscecure

Country: Norway

Genre: synth-heavy dream pop

Label: Alfa Matrix

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Darkher - The Buried Storm (2022)

Jayn Maiven creates her music as Darkher. And what a music it is! The moniker she uses is a perfect fit here as there's few music genres that can be as dark as her post-rock/dark folk creations. 6 years after her debut album Realms, the British artist is back and The Buried Storm is certainly one of the best albums of the year.

It is said that Darkher's music is a "haunting trip through the mind and spirit of founding member". It is based on Maiven's mesmerizing vocals that are never angry and desperate: their gloomines is leaning towards the utter sadness and depressive resignation. They have some serious tear-jerking abilities but they are also so beautiful. Hunting, yes, but also subtle and pretty. And the vocals are not alone here: the darkness of the compositions is built by the dark folk music with tons of post-rock and noise traces, heavy vials of ethereal backing vocals and the unnerving tribal fragments. The music is so oneiric but it's not about good dreams, a nightmare pop could be a genre invented for this release. No wonder that it is advertised as "eerie and at times even outright sinister sonic storytelling" with the artist aiming to address the "darkness lurking at the edge of consciousness, hidden from plain sight but patiently biding its time to strike out at the heart", the title's burried storm.

The Buried Storm costs 6.99 USD.

Check: Fear Not, My King

Country: UK

Genre: dreamy dark folk

Label: Prophecy Productions

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瀚海瀾汐 - 趣稚錄 | 遺妄 (2022)

If Instagram is to be trusted, 瀚海瀾汐 is a solo project by Junny Chung, a musician from the Guangdong region in China. The artist released two short EPs this year and I'll be looking at the first one of the lot, called 趣稚錄 | 遺妄.

Both EPs are said to be parts of a four-piece whole entitled 遺妄 ("The Delusion"). 趣稚錄 | 遺妄 (that apparently translates to "Funny and Childish Records") consists of four compositions that show some emotional and atmospheric post-rock music with delicate and very sad vocals. The music is based on the balance between synth's beauty and guitars' ruthless grandeur, in many places achieving those extremely bombastic but very satisfying levels of music emotions that can easily make the listener sob. Especially with the addition of the artsy, theatre-like vocals, so important in the short ballad 扯纸鹞. However, the mountain tops-reaching, uplifting and otherworldly beautiful post-rock sounds are what really defines this album.

趣稚錄 | 遺妄 costs 5 USD.

Check: 再见 阿尔兹海默先生

Country: China

Genre: ethereal post-rock

Label: Weary Bird Records

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Zguba - Znój (2022)

After releasing his second album Potwarz two years ago (and winning my personal title of the best ambient release of the year), the artist known as Zguba ("Loss") comes back with another dark masterpiece. And Znój ("Drudgery") should be praised even more as it is supposed to be the final good bye with the moniker of Zguba.

It should be obvious by now that this project means darkness, depression and utter melancholy - emotions that are only empowered by the extremely gloomy track titles (here we can find "The Abyss", "The Swelling" and "The Ordeal" among others). But Zguba's characteristic trait is that he is able to convey it while creating very airy and ethereal music. Be it the use of backing choir vocals (as in Łaska ("Grace")) or synthesizers, this is fantastic means that adds tons of the sacral vibes and makes the listener relish the gloomy and the dark ambiance. I am very sorry that the project is not going further from here but I'll look out for anything that comes from the artist's side anyway.

Znój costs 6.5 EUR (30 PLN).

Zguba - Potwarz (2019)

Check: Łaska 

Country: Poland

Genre: dark dream ambient

Label: LOŻA Oficyna

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wøunds - No Beauty in the World (2022)

Igor Imbu from Chicago is better known as wøunds, and under this moniker, he released already several albums (it's difficult to follow as the numbers vary from source to source) with the newest being Past Inside the Present's No Beauty in the World.

It's probably the kind of ambient I like the most. What at first seems to be a slow and motionless ambient soundscape, soon can be recognized as bursting with life - those small electronic buzzings, the barely audible piano keys, the noise parts that are nothing more than fresh blows of breeze. It does sometimes get a bit louder, there are some hints of synth massiveness, but the compositions never really cross the line of the airy ambient.

No Beauty in the World costs 7 USD.

Check: There Has To Be a Reason

Country: Illinois, US

Genre: airy ambient

Label: Past Inside the Present

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Lights & Motion - The World I Remember (2022)

It's been too long not seeing Christoffer Franzén on my blog. Two years ago his The Great Wide Open brought tons of ethereal post-rock vibes to my world and to this website, and now we can admire the next album created under the moniker of Lights & Motion, one entitled The World I Remember.

As always, the weight of his certified super airy post-rock music is limitless. There's few people who can create post-rock music and at the same time fill it with so much of the ethereal, Nordic atmosphere that is both up-lifting and hopeful, melancholic and beautiful. The key to this music is creating post-rock, very much guitar-filled music with the neoclassical sensibility (and neoclassical instruments as well). This, together with a lot of airy backing vocals, brings to life the grand, a bit bombastic and very satisfying soundscape.

Having said that, Franzén can easily change the mood to something heavier, more post-rock-like in the track aptly called Panic Attack but it is still swiftly balanced by The First Day's piano keys and the whole neoclassical might. Simply beautiful.

The World I Remember costs 8 USD.

Lights & Motion - The Great Wide Open (2020)

Christoffer Franzen of Lights & Motion - Phenomenon (2017)

Check: The World I Remember

Country: Sweden

Genre: ethereal post-rock

Label: Deep Elm Records

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Murmure - Les mémoires dissociatives (2021)

I remember the Canadian Murmure as extremely airy dream pop, very much Slowdive-style. However, the new release, an EP called Les mémoires dissociatives, added to this a lot of heavy-sounding guitars  enriching the sound and make it even more shoegaze-like.

This short album is clearly inspired by the best shoegaze artists from the past. There's the airiness and ethereal vibes of Rachel Mayer's vocals and a lot of catchy melodies with loud and noisy guitars on top. Those are fantastic - in Au bord de l'abysse the guitar passages seem to have unlimited flow and ability to engage the audience on such a good level. No wonder the track is called "On the edge of the abyss" - it feels like just a step further, one would end up in a really noisy madness of sounds. The Ep is collection of potential shoegaze hits with Post-traumatique being one of the best tracks to combine the genre's holy trinity: the melody, the loudness and the ethereality.

Les mémoires dissociatives costs 3 EUR (4 CAD).

Murmure - Nos idées fantômes (2018)

Murmure - Évaporation (2017)

Check: Post-traumatique

Country: Canada

Genre: shoegaze dream pop

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36 & Duenn - Distance as Power (2021)

Dennis Huddleston, the ambient artist from UK, has such a long discography that it can barely be believed. Only this year he created 4 albums (featuring a collaboration with Awakened Souls). The last one, Distance as Power, is created together with Duenn, a Japanese vocalist, and present a very airy take on drony soundscapes.

The Japanese artist (who frequently works together with Merzbow for instance) provides the ethereal part of the project with the dispersed vocals creating soundscapes on their own. Foggy and mysterious ones. But the further into the album, the more important the role of the dark electronic drones. It's this kind of slow, contemplation-fueling music that is perfect for the long winter nights, especially in the finishing parts of the album when the layers of sound are heavy and leave little space for focusing on anything else than the music itself.

Distance as Power costs 6 USD.

Check: Distance as Power

Country: UK

Genre: ethereal soundscape

Label: Past Inside the Present

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Pertegò - Una (2021)

Pertegò and their emotional music appeared on my blog three years ago with their previous album Black. In the meantime, the Emilia-Romagna-based group celebrated the 10 years anniversary of their debut album and now, to underline this achievement, they showed their fourth album mischievously called Una.

The focus point for their art is nature and its forces, they are "telling stories about still free nature, they are talking about their world made of simple things and the nature that gave them birth" and fittingly, the music on the new album ranges from delicate and airy places to sky-reaching, breath-taking monuments made of sound. Just like the world around us was meant to be. The artists do that with an epic take on melancholic post-rock/prog-rock music with extremely heavy focus on creating the airy and ethereal atmosphere. The inclusion of piano keys gives it the delicate notes, the string sequences add to the whole thing's tear-jerking nostalgia, the oneiric-sounding vocals bring the element of Sacrum and simultaneously makes me think of the soundtrack for Civilization V, my favourite gaming soundtrack ever - with similar orchestral/choral take on the ethereal music. I love it so much as it goes on and delivers more and more nostalgic cinematic vibes and, simply speaking, beauty.

For the band, the album is "the end of the fifteen-year journey, a journey that has described [them] in every moment of [their] life until today" and, at the same time, marks the time of personal changes within the band's line-up. As a result, the album sounds fittingly epic (it's not always that an album means so much for a group of people) and magical.

Una costs 8 EUR.

Pertegò - Black (2018)

Check: Una

Country: Italy

Genre: orchestral ethereal post-rock

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Blankenberge - Everything (2021)

When they debuted back in 2017 with their Radiogaze, there was little doubt that it was the beginning of an Eastern shoegaze icon in the works. And four years and three album later, you can safely agree that the Russian Blankenberge is one of the best heavy shoegaze bands out there and they just proved it with Everything.

This is not indie rock with shoegaze elements, this is not airy dream pop, the Petersburg's outfit clearly went all in the true shoegaze tunes. Their sound is extremely loud with tons of guitar-based walls of noise and subtle, barely legible vocals. Everything is designed to suck the audience into the loud and psychedelic world of noise, bury them within reverbs, trap them under layers of sound. And this is the best feeling ever with Yana Guselnikova's Slowdive-like vocals making this a sweet and memorable experience. There's little point in recommending any particular song, the whole album feels like a coherent and well-leveled whole, a noise adventure if you will. But some parts do feel even more ethereal thanks to the density of dispersed backing vocals that fill out and compliment the guitar noise, like it is the case with the title track Everything.

The lyrics here deal with the human lives' basic but fundamental questions: what's the nature of happiness, what's the nature of relationships and, yes, about being high as a kite. Everything fits shoegaze's euphoric and a bit bombastic vibes and I'm here to feel that. Can't wait for some live gigs by the Russians and their friends from Life on Venus.

Everything costs 7 USD.

Blankenberge - Radiogaze (2017)

Blankenberge - More (2019)

Check: Everything 

Country: Russia

Genre: true shoegaze

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永遠の悪魔 Eternity Devil - 実存的恐怖 (2021)

Ethereal take on very modern electronic music, this is 永遠の悪魔 Eternity Devil, a Hungarian artist who makes "dreampunk and other aesthetic music". This year they released at least two albums, one of which is this highly interesting 実存的恐怖.

The album's title translates to "The horror of Existence" which neatly corresponds with the short poem included at the album's site. the inspirations taken from death and the fragility of human life are clear here. The artist uses them to make the most ethereal kind of electronic music that is close to vaporwave but also ranges from ambient up to heavier industrial sounds (especially in the great Vacuum of Space). And in every second it amazes with the ethereality and psychedelia, both dripping from this weird music. On one hand, the compositions seem to be kept in similar pace and are rather homogeneous, on the other, when dived deeper, the complexity and sweet chaos are staggering. 

実存的恐怖  costs whatever you want to pay.

Check: Vacuum of Space

Country: Hungary

Genre: ethereal vaporwave

Label: vaporgaze

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Innesti - Filament and Place (2021)

Innesti, the Illinois-based ambient artist creates some particular kind of extremely ethereal  soundscapes. The almost an hour of which is included on the new album entitled Filament and Place, is filled with field recordings that make it depict the reality around us so well.

This is that kind of music that forces you to get quieter facing the dreamy wave of peaceful music, as the artist describes it, "ethereal, minimal ambient soundscapes created with field recordings, organic synthesis, fading light, and experiments in dreaming". This oneiric feel of the whole album, the way of stretching the compositions to make it sleepy-like while filling them with extremely airy sounds everywhere, makes it the dreamiest ambient I've heard recently. 

Porya Hatami and Valotihkuu, ambient artists I respect a lot, were also involved in creating this album and it only makes me like it more.

Filament and Place costs 5 EUR.

Check: Filament and Place

Country: Illinois, US

Genre: dream ambient

Label: DRONARIVM

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Windermere - Unspoken / Unheard (2020)

The Danish Windermere haven't released any new album sine 2006 but somehow recently they are able to entertain us with their music again. After the live recording earlier last year, they released an unused material from after No One Winds, their last studio album. And Unspoken / Unheard makes a sad experience, showing how much hood music have we lost due to the band's inactivity.

Although they are more likely to be called a dream pop band, the new album is purely instrumental and filled with an exciting blend that could be easily called "dreamy post-rock". It is told to be "a bit rough around the edges", but, honestly, I have little idea what they are talking about. Instead, they are a great example of how well the dream pop's ethereal atmosphere can work with instrumental-only post-rock sounds. I bet there would have been lyrics and vocals put on top if it had been to be fully developed, but it really works like it is now.

Actually, it works exceptionally well in Untitled 2, in which the drone-like passages are given so much dream pop fantasy but at the same time preserve their mysterious atmosphere until they transform to a full-time post-rock composition. And when the whole thing dies slowly in the very much instrumental ambient of the fourth track, you can ask yourself a question, "how good their third album could be?".

Unspoken / Unheard costs whatever you want to pay.

Check: Untitled 2

Country: Denmark

Genre: dreamy post-rock

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Beckahesten - Vattenhålens dräpare (2020)

Beckahesten, Swedish ambient trio is the latest addition to Cyclic Law impressive portfolio of ubelievable artists. Their debut album is called Vattenhålens dräpare and mixes most of the most atmospheric genres into one, mesmerizing work.

One of the most striking features of the Swedish project is the way Viktoria Rolandsdotter's vocals are incorporated into the industrial/horror ambient adding mysterious, ethereal but also as much as frightening vibes to the project. Especially when, in the second part of the album, she's all in for folk chants. But there's so much more too. The folk influences as well as some dark ambient layers of heavy, overwhelming sounds make the project's music catch the audience with no intention of letting them go.

Vattenhålens dräpare costs 7 EUR.

Check: Dödsfålen

Country: Sweden

Genre: ethereal dark ambient

Label: Cyclic Law

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Fadi Tabbal - Subject to Potential Errors and Distortions (2020) EN

I gotta say that the Ruptured Records label opened my eyes to the Middle East music experiments. It's such a fantastic feeling to listen to a good ambient work coming from some less obvious directions. And this is exactly what's going on with Fadi Tabbal, A Lebanese artist, and his new album..

As expected, there's some Middle East-sounding inspirations on the album, at least to my unprofessional ears, but what really rules the release are beautiful, long soundscapes equipped with some ethereal vibes either in the form of airy backing vocals (as in The New and Improved Guide to Birdwatching, Vol. 1 or the super exciting second part of the track) or simply the inspired, subtle noise. In some places, the music is fantastically euphoric in this ambient, nostalgic way. I don't like some atonal, experimental fragments like the finish in The Sidewalk at Night but I'd say it's a matter of taste. The whole album, really solid.

Subject to Potential Errors and Distortions costs 8 USD. 

Check: The New and Improved Guide to Birdwatching, Vol. 2

Country: Lebanon

Genre: experimental soundscape

Label: Ruptured Records

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Fadi Tabbal - Subject to Potential Errors and Distortions (2020) PL

Muszę przyznać, że label Ruptured Records otworzył mi oczy na muzyczne eksperymenty z Bliskiego Wschodu. To fantastyczne uczucie posłuchać dobrego ambientu dochodzącego z mało oczywistego kierunku. Tak jest właśnie z Fadim Tabbalem, artystą z Libanu i jego nową płytą.

Jak należało się spodziewać, na krążku jest trochę bliskowschodnio-brzmiących inspiracji, przynajmniej na moje, nieprofesjonalne ucho, ale głównie królują tu piękne, ciągnące się soundscape'y niepozbawione eterycznego vibe'u czy to w postaci chórków (w The New and Improved Guide to Birdwatching, Vol. 1 albo w niezwykle ekscytującej drugiej części utworu) czy po prostu natchnionego, subtelnego noise'u. W kilku momentach jest fantastycznie, wręcz euforycznie w ten ambientowy, nostalgiczny sposób. Mniej podobają mi się atonalne momenty na przykład w finałowym The Sidewalk at Night ale to już kwestia gustu. Cała płyta - naprawdę solidna.

Subject to Potential Errors and Distortions kosztuje 31 złotych (8 USD). 

Sprawdź: The New and Improved Guide to Birdwatching, Vol. 2

Kraj: Liban

Szufladka: experimental soundscape

Label: Ruptured Records

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