The most interesting thing about what’s been happening in dream-pop and shoegaze sphere in 2023 is that beyond the line of sight that is My Bloody Valentine’s huge, singular looming shadow, its sound feels more complete and faceted than ever. Whereas trad indie rock for dads and its modern rock takes created by their Gen-Z children still couldn’t be any further apart on the Venn diagram, everything lush and dreamy — from the seminal returns of veterans being rediscovered decades later, artists from our current century finally getting their dues, and newer shapes in the static and clouds being invented by its future — are swirling around in the same sensory pool. As their descriptors distort, so do its sounds, and for that, we’re in a new age of bliss. There are the Best Dream-Pop and Shoegaze Albums of 2023.

Beach Fossils – Bunny [Bayonet Records]

With Bunny, Beach Fossils get their laurels. Between exploring new facets within 2017′s Somersault and 2021′s piano ballad reimagination of older material, The Other Side of Life, it has felt like Beach Fossils have been trying to escape their former life over the past few years as one of Brooklyn indie’s pioneering forces behind what we now hear everywhere in guitar-driven dream-pop rock. With their fourth-full length, Beach Fossils resurface within the clouds full circle in a clearer hindsight without abandoning the lush for life of their past selves. Frontperson Dustin Payseur’s headspace certainly suggests an appreciation for holding time close and making moments seemingly insignificant into something worth capturing. In finding their way back home, Beach Fossils hits different after a long journey to get there.

Blonde Redhead – Sit Down for Dinner [section1]

At NYC’s peak era of Aughts indie influence, many took Blonde Redhead for granted. Their sound — an evolving framework of alternative that traversed no wave, shoegaze, and experimental electronic pop –- had its noticeable touchpoints, but as history has proven, was still way more outside the box than what became of the middling indie rock and boilerplate dream-pop in the years proceeding it. Their return on their first new music since 2014 and 10th studio effort, Sit Down for Dinner, reinforces hindsight and makes it all the more easy to appreciate where Kazu Makino and the brothers Pace are in the present, every moment moving with intentionality, unassuming in its gentler return to the surface while leaning into experimental world styles and acapella harmonies to create a sensation of floating between their power as an energy oft overlooked as it is unseen.

Cupid & Psyche – Romantic Music [Felte Records]

The return of Abe Vigoda’s formidable members in Michael Vidal and Juan Velasquez as Cupid & Psyche on their debut album, Romantic Music, makes for a more than satisfying epilogue-new chapter from the duo. Whereas Crush heard their sound veiled in darkness, Romantic Music isn’t fearful of sunlight, although it does inhabit its vampiric creature of the night tendencies naturally. Vidal’s vocals haunt themes of love and lust with forlorn desires and long sighs to be closer to another, as many a goth does, with deep-plunging guitar-pop, tripped out rhythms, and speckles of synthetic air swirling a euphoric spell around those emotions. The heavenly dour merges the past life of Vidal and Velasquez’s brooding post-punk into a different kind of gaze for those who prophetically dream up their downfalls in masochistic ways.

Gaadge – Somewhere Down Below [Crafted Sounds]

Mitch DeLonge’s alternative fever dream, Gaaadge, is by no means just starting out, having been a sonic vision of his from its early, crusty lo-fi start in 2016. Across a shifting line-up which eventually solidified itself on their 2021 sophomore effort, Yeah?, this year’s breakthrough effort, Somewhere Down Below, hears the Pittsburg quartet properly at the epicenter of a new wave of ambiguous alternative guitar rock where the four-piece recognizes the subterranean levels of shoegaze’s past while warping the future outlines of it. From My Bloody Valentine to Drop Nineteens to Galaxie 500 to Duster, Gaadge absorb all gazing adjacencies together and then create their own force of mind-bending gravity from its energy.

Drop Nineteens – Hard Light [Wharf Cat Records]

The members of Drop Nineteens were about the same age as the college-age listeners who are just discovering their music now when they released their then-last album 30 years ago in 1993’s National Coma. If there’s any artist on this list whose influence has been felt even more so with shoegaze’s new wave, it would be the oft-overlooked purveyors of its ’90s collegiate rock sound, fittingly from Boston, and who here on their return album, Hard Light, return in wiser form. Still, on a highlight like “Tarantula”, vocalist Greg Ackwell recalls afterschool afternoons, this time from the afterlife of Drop Nineteens existence

Lost Film – Keep It Together [Relief Map Records]

Since 2014, Jim Hewitt has been creating a cozy, humble space for his music in the hidden corners of the Western Massachusetts independent music scene as Lost Film, a lo-fi helping of dream-pop perfection with enough long sighs curling up with jangled guitars and a soft glow of synths in its sound to make the doldrums feel very bit like home. On the band’s third full-length and best album yet, Keep It Together, Hewitt and his close company arrive at an intersection between where their sound once ventured and a more power pop-nestled emo vibe from which they peak out from beneath the surface of what these last few years have weighed down on all of us. Through it, they come out sounding more brighter from the doom and gloom by finding small joys in everyday living.

Hotline TNT – Carousel [Third Man Records]

Hotline TNT has been hiding in plain sight over the last few years in a very DIY sense, self-releasing most of their early work and putting out their debut LP in 2021’s Nineteen In Love on the small, noisy indie label, Smoking Room. For the day ones out there, Carousel, their sophomore effort and first for Third Man Records, isn’t so much a surprising level up from the wistful daydream romanticism singed in dense layers of white hot feedback and peculiarly bent guitars that its sensory effects, but in becoming more comfortable in stepping in front of fuzzed out, lo-fi production, we’re able to hear just how singular frontman Will Anderson’s nebulous of noise-pop architecture is with a little just clarity recorded into its rock elixir. For that, his hindsight of swan diving in and out love becomes all the more vivid in its blur, and the hooks burst loud more so than they pop in colors and formations unmatched by his sonic peers in the modern shoegaze scene.

Parannoul – After the Magic [Topshelf Records]

After the Magic, the latest full-length effort from the enigmatic experimental shoegaze, Parannoul, explodes the diagram that touched the fuzzed-out bedroom ceiling atmosphere of their 2021 breakout, To See the Next Part of the Dream, into a listen that is expansively cinematic. Moving in and out of this Earth and the ethereal, the album places its emotional depths within a tangent orbit of anti-gravity rock like M83 and Sigur Rós while its digitally progressive approach to dream-pop maintains its glide with featherlight aerodynamics, albeit into alien terrains removed from the wash of our earthly distortion. “I’m always afraid when what I have now will disappear and when people will leave me. I think these are some kind of magic, that will shine bright for a while and then lights out, like nothing happened,” its creator said of its making. This is the album that assures Parannoul’s existence will live infinitely through all who its energy flows through.

Slowdive – everything is alive [Dead Oceans]

In their post-reunion form, Slowdive have acknowledged those fingerprints but reconvene more concerned in pushing their sound forward and beyond. everything is alive, their the shoegaze cornerstone’s fifth studio effort, is another assured leap 30 years from their inception which presents their art as something once more evolved from it, and likewise, evolving what the definition of shoegaze can be by one of its godliest creators. The melodic emotional patterns outlined by lush crushes of guitars still exist beneath the surface, but where they once fully enveloped you to hypnotic effect, they stimulate a calming frequency through soft synths, fine-tip acoustics, and Rachel Goswell and Neil Halstead’s voices glowing from within. Romantic longing, sighs of grief, and the occasional capturing of a moment of perfection in our nature, they’re more in touch with the physical form her without departing the cosmos fully.

Sword II – Spirit World Tour [Self-released]

Sword II are keeping the ATLien spirit in their creative energy flowing through this year’s breakthrough debut full-length, Spirit World Tour. Their perspective in art is one born from experiencing a timeline like no other in recent memory, where the climates of the world — socially, politically, and environmentally — have made it all the more messier to exist, yet necessary for artists to stand out in their purpose in designing the sonic canvas. Spirit World Tour for that matter is a mind-splatter of those themes eviscerated through guitars, rhythm, electronics, and varying languages and tongues bent within the band’s plane. Entering your peripheral nervous system is an esoteric smash of rough noise textures, woozy new wave shoegaze, and iridescent Internet pop and dance beats that present these times as a dizzy of fleeting beings.

Strange Ranger – Pure Music [Fire Talk]

For Strange Ranger to call their third and final studio effort Pure Music risks everything to live up to its titular expectation, and yet the Philly-based experimental indie rockers have made a career-definitive album that exemplifies the relationship between our humanly sensory experiences and song. Following the multi-dimensional trajectory which their 2020 mixtape, No Light in Heaven, traversed, Strange Ranger go deeper out into their outer element. Particles of synthetic pop and deep house beats molecularlizing sound alien yet intimately designed in their ability to connect with feeling everything in the moment, while ambient solar waves sync into guitar-born electricity like memory synapses. In its most purest form, Pure Music is sonic plasticity whose form may have been sourced from a creator, but ultimately is defined by those who come into contact with it.

Tanukichan – GIZMO [Company Records]

Hannah van Loon’s relationship with music can be seen and, for that matter, heard as an outlet of escapism, and on GIZMO, her sophomore effort as Tanukichan, she challenges herself to find inspiration in good things in spite of heavier realities. With her meditations, she builds her own world where emotions sync into her mood board with deeper hues of color, creating a warping physical experience that feels like its changing something inside of you. Though the reality may ultimately be that escaping isn’t always a viable option, her sound allows these feelings to move through you like electrical currents, getting you even further in the long run.

Temple of Angels – Endless Pursuit [Run for Cover Records]

Temple of Angels are fully understanding of the dream on their debut full-length, Endless Pursuit. The listen acts as a sonically rich culmination following an extended play and coupling of singles that heard the Austin four-piece of vocalist Bre Morrell, vocalist and guitarist Avery Burton, guitarist Cold Tucker, and drummer Patrick Todd pushing through turbulent, psychedelic gazey swells where they now discover an alternative world outlined by a rush of new-found lucidity from the movements of pop architecture. It boasts an impression of feeling vivid within the subconscious, both a balm and spark to the senses. Sharpened punk guitars are Temple of Angels’ blades so that the lush melodies the shared space of vocalist Morell and Burton’s voices can send you through the clouds. This is the pursuit of a supernatural sensation.