The Love Variants - golden age, 2025

"Austin quartet The Love Variants emerge onto the underground indie pop scene as subtle as their music. Their eight-song debut cassette, Life of Riley (released by Keeper Records), is one of those records where one spin in, you already know they are not your average jangle dream pop band. Take Golden Age, where it becomes clear how much this band values letting melodies linger and shimmer rather than rush past you. The vocals match that mood, romantic and dreamy, but with enough melancholy underneath to keep things grounded."

The Mary Onettes - stop this melody, 2025

"The drums take center-stage and it seems a little darker. It also ends with a tiny sample and makes a nice nice bookend to the record's start."

Seeming - tomorrow place, 2025

"So midway through the hellscape of 2020, pretty much by accident I discovered on Bandcamp The Birdwatcher’s Guide to the Apocalypse by Seeming, a pretty awesome industrial/EBM album from mastermind Alex Reed, formerly of ThouShaltNot, that blended its pulsating grooves with touches of chamber pop, huge hooks, and the sort of studied radical left-wing politics that would leave the average liberal commercial punk in the dust, that was more prepared for the action required in protest than so many have the stomach to accept, including myself at the time."

Woods - goodnight, 2025

"a distinctive blend of spooky campfire folk, lo-fi rock, homemade tape collages, and other noisy interludes, all anchored by deceptively sturdy melodies."

Cloud Studies - last night i fell again cover, 2025

"Taking the loose feel of the original track and confining it to a much more rigid, thumping, song-serving, rhythmic framework – the Cloud Studies version ends up falling somewhere between Alvvays, The Cranberries, Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine & The Jesus & Mary Chain. Guest starring Kirstin Isolde Lavender on lead vocals, the resulting tune is a hazy, atmospheric dreamgaze masterpiece and should be considered a how-to guide for aspiring dreampop/shoegaze musicians everywhere."

Sweet Unrest - sometimes, 2025

“This song started about a breakup, but I abandoned it because I couldn’t figure out the rest. Then two of my mates died in the same week, and the rest of the song just fell out of me. After their deaths, I realised how I wanted to live: to love better. If I could do that, they wouldn’t have died for nothing. Though inspired by different events, the song deals with one feeling – accepting loss in any form and celebrating the memory of people who aren’t here anymore. It starts with an aching heart, and explodes into a celebration of joy and life, working through grief in its own way. Every time we play it, I’m reminded that after sadness always comes joy.”

Club 8 - daydreams, 2025

"The Stockholm-based indie pop duo (Karolina Komstedt on vocals and Johan Angergård on everything else) continues their prolific 2025 output with this track. It features their signature breezy, hooky sound—described as nostalgia-inducing, with Karolina's ethereal and yearning vocals over shimmering guitars and a steady motorik groove. The song captures a pleasant, bittersweet reverie, acknowledging that good moments are fleeting."

John Van Deusen - jesus of nazareth acoustic live, 2025

"I’ll admit that I was skeptical of a much more straightforward “Jesus song” coming from John at first, especially coming on the heels of a few albums that were much more open to interpretation in terms of how the listener could apply the lyrics to their own experience of faith."

Melody's Echo Chamber - eyes closed, 2025

“My eyes are closed not in denial, but in devotion—to vibrant memories, to the complexity of human feelings, to seeing more deeply. It’s also driven by a resilient aesthetic that emphasizes the beauty of transient things and the bittersweet feeling of their impermanence.”

Meltt - in your arms, 2025

"Meltt – a mind-bending alternative-rock band with a love for heavy riffs, colourful instrumentation, detail oriented production, and under it all, multi-layered song-writing. Let them sonically paint your soundscape and sweep you into an ethereal dream."

Suede - broken music for broken people, 2025

“Broken music” is the closest thing to a classic Suede song as this album gets but it is bigger and more epic, every rimshot, every guitar lick, every hip shake dialled up to eleven. It is an anthem, a call to arms, celebrating the broken people, rather than looking down on them. And it’s not singling anyone out. We are all broken people in our own sense, with our own histories, but we are shined on in a positive light. We are all in this together."

Wedgy - i can't address it, 2025

"On the surface, I Can’t Address It is a combination of shoegaze and grunge, and these elements are quite clear. They’re there, but there’s much more bubbling beneath."

Bluhm - slow rewind, 2025

"The song fits into the shoegaze revival scene, blending ethereal vocals with layered guitars and introspective lyrics about longing, regret, and fleeting connections."

Club 8 - none of this will matter when you are dead, 2025

"a wistful, driving indie pop gem blending dreamy melancholy with urgent synth-pop edges—think The Radio Dept.'s hazy atmospherics crossed with The Raveonettes' rock-infused hooks, all wrapped in sugary melodies and sharp lyrics about fleeting worries."

Car Culture - nothingburger, 2025

"Daniel Fisher, AKA Physical Therapy, is releasing a new album under his Car Culture alias. Due out on October 9th via NAFF Recordings, Rest Here includes contributions from Patrick Holland, NAFF cofounder Priori, J. Albert, Squirrel Flower and Ms Ray. Fisher recorded the 12-track album between New York and Montréal over the past three years—it also features his own vocals. Fisher debuted his Car Culture alias back in 2021, releasing the record Dead Rock to launch a sub-label of Allergy Season, Lighthead Records. He shared his most recent solo EP, Nothingburger, in June of this year—it was recently named one of our staff's favourite summer releases."

Melody's Echo Chamber - the house that doesn't exist, 2025

"The House That Doesn't Exist" is exactly the kind of groovy, glamorous, pillowy music that Melody's Echo Chamber makes so well. It's got funky-ass drums and dizzy cinematic strings, and Melody Prochet sounds like she lives in an old European art film. In a press release, she says that the song "turns the impossible perspective of a joyful human life in today’s world into reality, evoking a new sense of faith."

Miki Berenyi Trio - eighth deadly sin, 2025

"The album’s richly layered, imaginative, and uniquely slanted strain of dream pop is an often euphoric and sometimes melancholic mix of guitars and electronica, fronted by Miki’s instantly recognizable vocal, overlaid with an often profound and sometimes abrasive or yearning view of the world."

Nation Of Language - silhouette, 2025

"At their best... they offer a seemingly contradictory melancholic uplift"

Ulrika Spacek - square root of none, 2025

“On this song we kinda embraced the notion of throwing as many ideas onto the canvas at once. We wanted this overwhelming feeling musically with the lyrics talking formulas and code. It always felt forward moving, and despite feeling free when contributing more and more layers it was troublesome to mix to make sure every detail is heard. Some songs feel made to be played live and this is certainly one of them for us.”

Club 8 - your modern heart, 2025

"Your Modern Heart continues this year’s run of songs that flow from beauty to heartache and back. Each line of the lyrics pulls at your heartstrings, one after another fraying with every unanswered message, a bitter melancholia giving the shoegaze-meets-dream-pop guitars a sharper edge. If your emotional walls can resist that, then the vocals of Karolina Komstedt will certainly tear down your defences, reminding you of your smallness in the world of love."