Photo by Vice Cooler

When I saw Peel Dream Magazine play at the west coast version of Nothing’s Slide Away fest this past spring, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from a band that has mutated their sound on more than one occasion over the years. Would they lean more heavily into the static-dense noise-pop of their earliest work, or would they challenge the notion of a fest built around pushing Decibel limits by pulling more from the quiet, inverted headspace that was their 2022 avant-pop affair, Pad? The answer was somewhere in-between, and that we now discover predicted where they’re headed on “Lie In The Gutter,” the first single from the Los Angeles trio’s fourth full-length effort, Rose Main Reading Room. Project mastermind Joseph Stevens and his principal contributors, vocalist Olivia Babuka Black and multi-instrumentalist Ian Gibbs, work sonic tangents seamlessly into their sphere from where they last left listeners in dissipating terrestrial and astral planes from the ground up and gazing into cosmic view. The stillness of Pad‘s particle matter is sensory-stimulated — the touch of a kiss, patterns of constellations, and psychedelic starlight — funneling into one condensed energy form by a motorik patter pace and dimension-altering dream-pop. It happens so fast, but at the same time, there’s not a moment else you’d rather be gravitating into.

Peel Dream Magazine’s Rose Main Reading Room will be released September 4th on Topshelf Records.