2024 was arguably a banner year for the shoegaze “revival. Whether you define that in its most purest, elemental form, or in its adjacents of dream-pop, slowcore, grunge-gaze, et. al., this year’s class of great listmakers across its evolving sphere came rarely from familiar names and veteran artists who’ve been respawned into relevance through treasure hunting discoveries of today’s listener on yesteryear, though their influences surely peak through. Instead, its a new sonic wave of DIY and independent artists who are breaking through the gauze curtains in both shimmer and static surges of light energy. This feeling of bliss is new. These are the Best Dream-Pop & Shoegaze Albums of 2024.

Aluminum – Fully Beat [Felte Records]

The upstart Bay Area band Aluminum is by no means appearing out of the blue, as it features scene vets Marc Leyda and Ryann Gonsalves, respectively of the departed underground rockers Wild Moth and Torrey, as well as Leyda’s previous Wild Moth bandmate Austin Montanari and Marbled Eye’s Chris Natividad. Past lives don’t explicitly shape their form regardless on their debut album, Fully Beat. Breaking free from exacting angles, Aluminum are a band navigating fluidly through pop and post-modern alternative rock textures filled with hypnotic guitar ripples and sticky, liquid bass grooves, helium-rich synthesizers, and the snap of drum beats that ensnare a lush haze through finer point detail. The listen introduces their sound as one which filters the everyday malaise, mundane, and depletion from the capitalist grind through their sonic prism, creating a necessary reactionary resistance against these motions.

Belong – Realistic IX [kranky]

The shoegaze revival needs a brainwash, and Reality IX is that acidic solution. It should be noted that the band Belong never directly ascribed their sound fully to that scene. In the early Aughts, they were merely tangents to it — circulating feedback through that era’s appropriation of its aesthetics where artists were more keen on reshaping its form through experimental electronic and droning noise textures rather than peeling away at My Blood Valentine and Slowdive’s exponential layers. For those in need of a reminder of those creative ambitions alongside a much needing cleansing of our modern palette, the New Orleans duo’s third full-length and first album in 13 years breaks away in its own soundwave, even if their avenue is that of a surge of motorik churns made melodious that could easily double as a white noise machine soundtrack to escape the sounds of the outside world from nighttime into dawn. Guitars are drenched in a hard-grained blanket of static, drum patterns are set to syncopate in repetitive motions, and the vague silhouette of human voices and physical shapes are filled in with monochromatic colors that swirl and diffuse depending on what amperage and velocity Belong press into.

Blue Zero – colder shade blue [Lower Grand Tapes]

Chris Natividad — guitarist and lead vocalist of Marbled Eye as well as drummer of the modernist noise-pop collective, Aluminum — already put out two listmaking albums in their own right with each of those bands. Consider his accolade as the MVP of the Bay Area’s underground rock scene solidified here with colder shade blue, the debut album from his solo-ish outlet, blue zero. This one doesn’t make it easy to pin down what you’re about to experience, however. He’s saved his most sonically dynamic listen for last, and for that reason, it makes for a heady trip if you’re into alternative rock that warps and distorts the outlines of noise pop, shoegaze, post-punk, and psychedelia without every concretely coming into one distinct form before shape-shifting once again before your ears. This is also to say it’s a very mood-driven pedal driver, too. The listen’s impressionistic energy rather rips through the atmosphere in whatever Natividad hums across its emotive spectrum, from inner anxieties to outward bliss all transmitted equally through fully amped instrumentation. For those who also wish to be tranquilized by the outer limits of guitar rock, colder shade blue is a strange, yet familiar place you can go to get there from someone who knows that area well.

Cold Gawd – I’ll Drown On This Earth [Dais Records]

When I spoke with Wainwright on the heels of of Cold Gawd’s 2022 breakthrough debut, God Get Me the Fuck Out of Here, he mentioned how being part of the hardcore scene as well as the studying the world of R&B was his ace card in carving out an identity all his own in nü-gaze’s crowded field. I’ll Drown On This Earth is a perfection on that thought, with many of the driving forces of lush distortion coupled with aggressive, post-hardcore diffused guitars and toppling reflections on wayward romance, self-defeating isolation, and existential inquiries from a swooning spiritual plane remaining constant, if not more embossed in detail and ready for their live reveal. Vocally is where you find Cold Gawd’s signature flex. Wainwright’s lips are drawn even more to an influence of searching for the inner soul through Drake-before-Drake-got-embarrassing, Solange, and Frank Ocean more so than whatever method of emoting is happening elsewhere in the scene. It’s shoegaze with the sweet caress of alternative R&B in its touch, except in this case, no body is moving because all of the bodies are cold and drowning.

Dummy – Free Energy [Trouble In Mind Records]

Dummy’s sophomore follow-up, Free Energy, moves past any and all discourse happening elsewhere in today’s music landscape, and instead shifts focus onto their singular, amorphous form of where their sound can move when approached outside the sphere of trend. It asks of you to open your mind past their many influential touchstones like Stereolab and My Bloody Valentine, and let mutating layers of noise-pop and ambient waves guide your through an all-in-one-sitting sensory experience. The dissolve of linear timelines on Free Energy is most obvious where Dummy blend colorful, cranking archways of static with meditative orbs. It’s a push and a pull, an ebb and flow, and expansion and decompression of matter reacting accordingly by their sonic guide. Unlike today’s vibe-as-aesthetic markings across indie’s dreamier pastures, its four members understand the power of bubbling pop into their own unshaped roads, offering up co-vocalists Emma Maatman and Nathan O’Dell as sage conduits for alien signals to be verbalized in the human language, as guitarist Joe Trainor criss-crosses any and all null spaces with cosmic electricity and drummer Alex Ewell oversees particles kinetic through motorik sputters. To be able to create music that liberates sound and style as if it wants to abstract the space-time continuum is perhaps one of the few remaining tells of any artist that takes advantage of this freedom through art, and Dummy are inviting all of that energy into their universe.

Horse Jumper of Love – Disaster Trick [Run for Cover Records]

Citing Leonard Cohen’s Songs From a Room and Hum’s Downward is Heavenward as influential touchpoints from where Horse Jumper of Love go on Disaster Trick, the Boston trio arrive right on time five albums into their careers with where indie rock’s current interest in slowcore and shoegaze resides right now and makes their sound an ideal culmination of both worlds. Patience remains a virtue in taking in a HJoL listening experience regardless. The music swashes slowly in thick density foam around brain matter, out of body, and the outside world. In being fortified with heavier textures filling in the past’s hollow center through distressed electric feedback, it plots Dimitri Giannopoulos’ steps with more sobered, visible outlines in their footpaths, simultaneously reeling the band’s creative method back to basics while turning the energy conserved from intentional restraint into something looser that piles over you like a fuzzy weighted blanket.

julie – my anti-aircraft friend [Atlantic Records]

Despite their enigmatic, very online origin story, julie’s music is a case of the more you hear, the more you discover that there’s something more to them than just a mood board of delay pedals, murmuring vocals drenched in reverb, and blurry photo posts as has become the case with too many from those born out of the shoegaze scene’s viral era. The Orange Country-bred trio arguably sound the least reductive as far as what their peers are creating on their debut album (a major label debut, at that, being signed to Atlantic Records,) my anti-aircraft friend. For one, it doesn’t hide Alex Brady and Keyan Pourzand’s presence in its murk, with their voices cutting clean through its erupting grunge craters. Guitars occasionally swerve in a fluctuating gravity, but julie are also incisive in tuning their rumble toward bleeding their youth sonically into compact bouts of ’90s noise rock and lethargic pools many of their peers wouldn’t have the patience to wade through. If Horsegirl have got refreshing the classic moves of indie rock in earnest cornered, then julie are restoring shoegaze to its more corrosive form rather than hiding their flaws behind a wall of filtered, dreamy textures.

Midwife – No Depression In Heaven [The Flenser]

Since breaking through the atmosphere with her self-professed “heaven metal” on 2021’s Luminol, the emotional landscape Midwife conveys through blissed out guitar rock has never felt entirely present in our physical form. No Depression in Heaven may feel closer to Earth than ever, but nevertheless, many specters loom and dreams parse together through her Madeline Johnston’s blinding faith in rock ‘n roll written from the road. Her voice, delicately washed in reverb and over tendril chords oft in a single electric guitar, sound like an echoey whisper from the beyond, haunted by memories of a town that’s in a dying state, beloved tour vans with human names, and Alice Deejay. You can never be too sure whether these thoughts came to Johnston in a day dream, through her subconscious, or through waking life, but reassured, she remembers everything, and when assembled together, No Depression In Heaven is its own affirmation of something real experienced.

Spiral XP – I Wish I Was a Rat [Danger Collective Records]

Following two EPs mostly under his guide, props to Max Keyes in amplifying Spiral XP’s collaborative energy when it counts the most on their Seattle rockers’ debut album, I Wish I Was a Rat. In giving bassist Lena Farr-Morrissey substantial shine on from the vocal heavens to offset his own bummer vibes getting buried under the dread of capitalism, they — alongside guitarists Jordan Mang and Kyle McCollum, and drummer Daniel Byington — sound wholly of a electric body in a static-diffused prism of colorful moods and textures where hook-perfect guitar-pop, the grungy indie rock inspo of their PNW surroundings, the cool slack of trip-hop, and a refraction of feedback-drenched riffs ebb the listen in and out of conscious and subconscious states. They’re seeking something real out of a world that’s becoming less honest by the minute, and yet, proving existential overcast and partly sunny skies can coexist within the same woozy atmosphere.

mo dotti – opaque [Self-released]

Since 2020, mo dotti have been humbly doing their own thing in the Los Angeles underground without much paid attention from ongoing discourse and social media trends outside that space. Instead, they’ve been perfecting their nuanced blend of noise and pop over two extended plays that trigger those extra special sensory-inducing chemicals vividly through their turbulent spinouts. opaque, their debut full-length, is that perfection realized in full as well as the mark of a band who understands how to bend their instruments in ways that the shoegaze gods intended. Despite its title, a balance of exhilarating aggression and transcendent serenity through its static shimmer hits from all directions and everything in between. Emotions, color, scenery, and the speed of sound travel in varying facets held within opaque. Perhaps the reason why no other light is let through is because mo dotti’s shoegaze of substance radiates out so much no matter the medium of melody.

Prize Horse – Under Sound [New Morality Zine]

It’s hard to get as excited about anything emerging from familiar influences of ’90s grunge, post-hardcore as well as shoegaze now that we’re a decade removed from Title Fight’s Hyperview and the deluge of bands appropriating the same lot of sounds. Prize Horse challenge that notion, however, by slowing down its churn and swirling the formula. Instead of whelming the listener in a very loud eruption of dense, heavy prism of rock, they’re requesting your patience to hear through the reverb waves and static building in decibel form, pulling in queues from a slowcore state. It’s as though their collision starts out far away instead before arriving at the foot of your doorstep, moments from crushing down and burying you miles beneath with it. On the Minneapolis trio’s debut full-length, Under Sound, they pull you into their bottomless pit and make it all the more impossible to find your way back to surface in compliment to Jake Beitel’s poetic impressionisms of personal emotion. Still, sunlight lies visibly in the distance as a reminder of what was before everything came to collapse. It’s a submerging atmosphere that doesn’t necessarily want to break you — just leave you dangling in the atmosphere close enough to stay warm.

Shower Curtain – words from a wishing well [Angel Tapes / Fire Talk]

words from a wishing well is the debut bedroomgaze delirium from the Brazilian-rooted Brooklyn four-piece that sonically literalizes a darker defeat. On the standout “Benadryl Man”, it’s just you, your antihistamine-fueled thoughts, and an imaginary man sitting at the edge of your bed while your body turns on itself. “Left a bad taste in my mouth / It was burning, it was sour / 30 seconds, it comes up / I feel like I’m throwing up,” vocalist and guitarist Victoria Winter sings. On “wish u wait”, she thinks she sees the apparition of a former flame dancing in the dark. Their fuzz crush potion made of a mixture of paranoia, doubt, and hallucinatory longing for better times — or that just emotion sickness?– can make for a transfixing trip, and similar sentiments meander throughout the rest of the album’s dazed duration. Whatever the case, shower curtain know these kinds of spells of inner weakness aren’t ones you’d want to tackle in your loneliest hour, and their music is all for the best to settle any unease.

Trauma Ray – Chameleon [Dais Records]

trauma ray’s core songwriting duo of Uriel Avila and Jonathan Perez became kindred creatives over shared Slowdive worship, and it’s telling that they gravitate to alter of all sounds Duster, Deftones, Hum, and Nothing, too. Like many of the younger bands who are rediscovering shoegaze in a heavier lens, they’re drawn toward the drainpool of life’s weight while using big riffed walls to swallow and dissipate them into the air. On the Fort Worth band’s long-awaited debut album, Chameleon, they — alongside bassist Darren Baun, drummer Nicholas Bobotas, and guitarist Coleman Pruitt — aim to be just as divine as their shoegaze gods, even as sin hangs heavily over their heads. The transfiguring collision between atmospheres makes for a catastrophic showdown between light purity and a deep dark decay in their sound. Whether the heavens swirl thunderously or the air is left with a void of mystery, this is grungegaze that wants to become as synonymous with the sounds of the black hole we are all inevitably drifting into.

Wishy – Triple Seven [Winspear]

We first met Wishy a year ago when they put out one of 2023’s best EPs with their promising first release, Paradise. Like many new bands figuring out who they are, however, where Wishy were yesterday and where they are today is many moons apart on their debut album, Triple Seven. Luck — and timing — have very much been on the side of the Indianapolis crew, as primary songwriters Kevin Krauter and Nina Pitchkites had been like two ships passing in the night within their scene while playing in their respective previous bands. Now that the stars have finally aligned between the two, it’s like everything is in sync within their universe, full band in tow. On Triple Seven, the five-piece arrive sounding nearly fully formed in their frame-up of daydream-swirled alternative pop-rock, with the listen baring no holes in its songwriting formula, whether it’s when Krauter takes the steering wheel and swervedrives distortion-fueled synesthesia onto exhilarating runways or the way Pitchkites’ turns every day into Sundays that shimmer on cloud nine. Equally lovelorn and blissed with a kiss, Triple Seven hears Wishy come true to the potential Paradise had to offer in lustrous effect.