The music world could not get enough of the greater shoegaze sound and all of its prisms of styles in 2025 even if it tried. Ever since the scene’s Gen-Z-fueled revival a few years back, the rippling currents of feedback, echoes in the atmosphere, and textures recontextualized and reshaped haven’t let up. You think each year that you’re living in is its new golden age, but then another one begins and you’re realizing the saturation point still hasn’t been hit.

Appreciate it while it’s here is what these pages will tell you, and that it did, because you’ll notice that a good percentage of albums below also made up a healthy part of this year’s 50 Best Albums overall (it should also be noted that one of the best releases from the scene overall didn’t make either list because it’s an EP: forever ☆’s Second Gen Dream.) Still, there’s so much left to be discovered in every crushed decibel that remains, from its foundational layers of loud distortion and soft dream-weaving resurfaced by generation’s past and present, the modern day Julia’s War contingent properly getting their laurels, to the experimentalists pushing its sound beyond tomorrow. These are the Best Dream-Pop & Shoegaze Albums of 2025.

Cloakroom – Last Leg of the Human Table [Closed Casket Activities]

After a three-year orbit away from this world, the Cloakroom’s fourth studio effort, Last Leg of the Human Table, is a concentrated effort to reground them onto more terrestrial surroundings, and at that, realizing the Indiana band’s most concrete-sounding form to date. The atmosphere which they reenter this Earth just isn’t the same one they left, though, and don’t we all know it. Societal decay and existential quandaries on the daily atop of the oddity feeling of returning to some place familiar that’s now rather alien resonates within their sonic reconfiguration. They don’t let it swallow them into a deeper vacuum, however. Vocalist and guitarist Doyle Martin, bassist Bobby Markos, and drummer Timothy Remis race black holes by ripping through them with hook-powered highlights, fusing shoegaze friction and elemental punk minimalism. Instead of meandering in the looming heavy plumes of doom, they let the heavy get spaced out psychedelically.

 crushed – no scope [Ghostly International]

In 2023, Shawn Durkan, frontman of psychedelic noise-gazers Weeknd, linked up with Bre Morell, frontwoman of dream-swept Austin rockers Temple of Angels, across wireless lines for crushed’s first release, extra life — an EP so perfect in the way it reinvented their existing sonic exteriors against a forward-thinking trendscape of ’90s trip-hop and that era’s FM alternative-pop dial, it almost made you wonder if they’d already arrived fully formed. On their debut full-length, no scope, they refine their dreamy electronic guitar-pop craft, crystallizing a polarity of lovelorn longing and timeline glitch bliss in the process. Tiny, perfectionist details stardusted along the way level up no scope with more life than where they first started, be it slowburning ballads tailor made for Morell’s vocal gravitational force, alien transmissions or that crisp collision of digital and electric layers ecstatically crackling through. no scope‘s energy pulls your head into galaxy brain mode, then rips you right back down to Earth a dozen times over.

Drop Nineteens – 1991 [Wharf Cat Records]

Drop Nineteens’ 2023 return and first new album in 30 years, Hard Light, shifted away from where they were yesterday in the dreamier tapestries that made their 1991 debut full-length, Delaware, a cult shoegaze classic. To understand how they got from there to here makes the release of their “lost” album, 1991, all the more important not only in the story of the band, but the story of shoegaze’s arrival on American soil after planting its seeds across the pond in England. Collecting early demos, now remastered in more crystalline form, we’re privy to hearing the quintet in their most nascent stages of recording music from within the tiny walls of Bostonian dorm rooms. The influences of stylistic originators My Bloody Valentine, Ride, and Slowdive are apparent in the way these 9 tracks whirl through the air with an opaque glow surrounding them, yet still, there’s an underlying “rockism” beneath it all plugged into the ’90s college and alternative rock amperage. In today’s lens, this approach has become visible in rising artists in the modern shoegaze revival, but that this was over 30 years ago, lost in time, makes 1991 a critical document of American shoegaze’s evolution.

Dummy – Bubbelibrium DLC [Self-released]

It’s rare to hear a remix album that is as remarkably as good as its original. Dummy’s Bubbelibrium DLC is far from a momentary distraction en route to wherever they’re headed next, however. Following last year’s sophomore follow-up and best album of the year, Free Energy, the art of careful curation comes into focus in this dense, hour-long exercise that stretches out Free Energy‘s full potential. The listen holds its space as its own distinct alternative universe that wonders how far its sound can travel through varying shapes, color wheels, and moods. To do so, each song is given reign over by a complimentary collective featuring kindred experimentalists and recent tour mates covering anti-gravity noise-pop, wilder electronic ambience, sun-warped trip-hop psychedelia, and synthesizer-scorched cyber-punk from the likes of Wishy, GMO, and the Mall. What Bubbelibrium DLC further achieves is an expansion not just on Dummy’s universe of sound, but also the core ethos of building a community within it.

Glare – Sunset Funeral [Deathwish Inc.]

When it comes to the new currents of the shoegaze revival, Glare are at the tidal of it. The Lower Rio Grande Valley band are a well-learned alchemy of the genre: lush, reverb-drenched ’90s reverence, heavy static cracked open by the advent storm of this millennium’s hardcore-tangent stalwarts Nothing and Whirr, and their own distinct, distant vantage point formed by a generation coming of age under the weight of grief over the past decade. It all bleeds soft and loud into our view through the vast, vivid pastel sky of sound that is their debut album and one of the scene’s best breakthroughs, Sunset Funeral. From their vantage point, they so perfectly capture the present day’s all-consuming melancholic drifts of disenchantment with the occasional warm reprieve flowing through. Like a sunset, its serene and beautiful when captured in a still frame, yet there’s a certain solemnity in realizing its reality is ultimately temporal. Still, the fade away is blissed.

 Hotline TNT – Raspberry Moon [Third Man Records]

If you’ve been a Hotline TNT listener since day one, Raspberry Moon may feel a little jarring at first. Its outer veneer is less about loud layers of static and swirling emotive synesthesia, and more forthright in its desire to create heart-bursting anthems where the feelings stand front and center. “Julia’s War” may be named after the modern DIY shoegaze label run by They Are Gutting a Body of Water’s Doug Dulgarian, but its structure — alongside the “nah-nah-nah-nah!” chorus — is more in line with Britpop pop-rock anthemry than Brooklyn underground rock oddity. The jangled tail-end standout “Dance the Night Away” only emphasizes that shift. That’s not to say Hotline TNT have fully left their shoegaze past behind. Instead, they’ve discovered that a widescreen projector and the art of collaboration (it’s the first album where frontman Anderson ceded complete creative control to his formalized bandmates) can expand their sonic diagram to reach more ears, rather than compressing it to a breaking point.

Maria Somerville – Luster [4AD]

The apparition of Maria Somerville is wondrously refreshing — a calming experience purifying the noisier feedback and pop in static of shoegaze’s modern air with something more considered in intentionally seeking out transcendence through minimalism and textures while meandering between the delicate and loud. After turning ears her way with the release of her self-released 2019 debut album, All My People, her sophomore follow-up, Luster, finds an appropriate home on 4AD that makes her a kindred torchbearer to the label’s own past dream-pop celestials the Cocteau Twins while also defining the Galway songwriter’s own new age spirit. She herself is an artist of multiple sonic dimensions: absorbing the walls of chamberic post-punk within cavernous waters and haunted echoes, an other-worldly presence in swells of ambient mystique, and tripping out in quiet rhythmic bursts of ambient pop bursting in color from the greyscale. It’s a listen that goes beyond known borders, and the physical realm for that matter.

 No Joy – Bugland [Hand Drawn Dracula / Sonic Cathedral]

Songwriter Jasamine White-Gluz, under the moniker of No Joy, has been a progressor of shoegaze’s outer limits well before it became in vogue to do so. It’s an actual joy to hear her fifth full-length album, Bugland — a production collaboration with the experimental producer and multi-instrumentalist Angel Marcloid of Fire-Toolz — being a coronation for her contributions towards its future which many of her peers haven’t even broached a proximity to. Layering dimension upon dimension into No Joy’s soundboard, the tandem take listeners through several left turns, from peaceful new age ambient reprieves to almost-metal breakdowns and the gristle against cosmic brass, all while the psychedelic tapestry spooled from silken synthetic strings weaves these sounds together in a way that sounds eerily natural. It succeeds at piquing the senses with brilliance, brightness, and contrast turned up to the max and pop weirding out hard.

Nuclear Daisies – First Taste of Heaven [Portrayal of Guilt Records]

Welcome to Nuclear Daisies’ own Heaven, a supernatural place where the next phase of shoegaze’s life is beyond this plane and sounds nothing like what might be currently whirring to increasingly exhausting, monotonous forms throughout sound systems down here on Earth. The first full-length taste from the Austin trio, featuring past and present members of Ringo Deathstarr and Temple of Angles, imagines the possibility of an infinite future for all of us as well as their sound where transformation has no cosmic ceiling by popping a curious pill that allows the trio to dive head-first into colorful DMT-soaked ’90s dream-pop, big beat, industrial, and electronic new age. The lasting effects of these alterative energies in collision on the same plane creates the movement which pushes a forward-transcending passage through all of one’s experienced time and space, and into an indescribable destination where ultimately, who you once were is shattered and what remains is a new you, transfigured on the cusp of bliss.

Prism Shores – Out From Underneath [Meritorio Records]

Young adult friction is right. With 2025 marking the the 15th anniversary of the Pains of Being Pure at Heart’s jangle-pop classic debut, Prism Shores’ sophomore effort, Out From Underneath, reminded us and celebrated an undying influence of the C86 sound with their own ever-so-slightly sweet spin on it. Though their influences within that scene’s lore are evident — touchstones of Creation, Flying Nuns, and Sarah Records abound alongside the dreamy college rock of Galaxie 500, Teenage Fanclub, and Velocity Girls running through shoegaze-punk waveforms of nascent My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, and Dinosaur Jr. material — the four-piece’s latest expands on the foundational elements of all those sounds laid bare on their 2019 debut full-length, Youth In Abstract, with their own subtle experimentation. Guitars sparkle and spangle purely beneath out-of-focus verse and harmony, all the while pulling synthetic atmospheres and overdubbed distortion into the fold. Its smudges their canvas with a very specific warm, fuzzy-feeling joyous melancholia pinpointed in time.

Shaki Tavi – Minor Slip [Felte Records]

Leon Manson isn’t wasting time playing around in shallow feedback pools or wading his voice through a murk of distortion before mustering up the courage to be heard. Unlike too many within the modern wave of shoegaze more concerned with pinning themselves to a certain aesthetic, he’s leaping right into the crashing extremes loud and clear through his noise-pop vehicle Shaki Tavi. There’s no need to get caught up in narrow facets of a sound when there’s a whole spectrum of it to explore, and Manson wants to dive into it all. More than anything, he wants for you to feel it all with him on his breakthrough sophomore effort, Minor Slip. Mammoth, skull-rattling riffs erupt from his “Lip” and through the “Trees”. Bleary-eyed adrenaline rushes sweep you into the glint of “Sunscreen” and eviscerate you on “Peeler”. “Foam” rages right alongside the existential dread with an Oasis-sized grandeur. The constant push and pull of his head-weighted emotions — whether sinking beneath his own daily malaise or drifting away out-of-body skyward — always find their way back to ground. If you desire a range of realism within your shoegaze immersion, Manson gives it to you in rich sonic detail.

terraplana – natural [Balaclava Records]

Just because they’re professing a more audible tutelage from the likes of Blonde Redhead, early Sonic Youth, and Lush rather than another distillation of MBV pedal worship, it doesn’t mean terraplana’s music lacks the ability to levitate you above ground, even if it keeps your senses fully intact when doing so. In going the au natural route with their sophomore effort, the Brazilian rockers show the rest of the world that there’s still plenty of corners to revisit and restructure from within when you begin to rely on organic substances. The Curitiba four-piece are more forward-thinking in that approach, exploring a noisier meeting ground between Heaven and Earth that uses the studio space to produce psychedelically blushed indie rock. Through it, they’re unafraid to make visible a separation of each electrical current and a distinct voice amid relying on more than one within their hook-and-drum-driven sonic structures, collecting the air’s static rather than dispersing it.

They Are Gutting A Body of Water – LOTTO [ATO Records / Julia’s War / Smoking Room]

Where are they? The weird, synthesized accents plastered all over a mess of a soundboard. The guitars looped ambiently into infinity and breakcore beats compressing and decompressing all of shoegaze’s history into a split second. Uncanny-to-replicate cuts and splices in song composition that time-shifts your focus in and out of nowhere. LOTTO is a totally different game from what we’ve come to known of the experimental ways of They Are Gutting A Body of Water. Yet, perhaps unsurprisingly as the Philly band’s most highest profile release to date — their first in tandem between frontman Doug Dulgarian’s Julia’s War label, the cassette imprint Smoking Room, and major indie ATO Records — heading into this moment with as much “structure” as one can expect from a band who has never quite aligned with convention is to be expected. Siphoning every eccentricity delivered aggressively in dreamscaped swaths of feedback against a grotesque canvas reflecting society and the self is what makes the underground darlings of shoegaze futurism’s big move so ready for the added ears and attention.

Total Wife – come back down [Julia’s War]

We should probably consider it a curse word to consider the Nashville-by-way-of-Boston duo as mere shoegaze, as you’ll discover on Total Wife’s new album, come back down. Instead, Total Wife immerse you within their own underground world that is entirely own thing, traversing between lucidity and a waking reality through a strewn, recycled energy source. Guitars are repurposed as synth samples as well as those of the unassumingly not-so-obvious which keep its cosmic body evolving (the entire album is apparently scattered with vocal samples taken from a single unreleased cover of Elliott Smith’s “Between the Bars”.) Blurring lines between slowcore fades, digital pop glitter, blown out techno, and yes, swelling pools of shoegaze, into one sonic topography where vocalist Ash Richter’s lyrics — a hushed dissolve of thought borne of pure isolation — truly make the whole of the body a connection between human emotion and what your senses translate into sound.

Welcome Strawberry – desperate flower [Cherub Dream Records / à La Carte Records]

There have been plenty of shoegaze albums to preoccupy the vibes this year, but few of them past the purity test alongside the novel nature behind it as Welcome Strawberry’s latest, desperate flower. Stemming from the Bay Area’s esoteric DIY scene, the band led by multi-instrumentalist Cyrus Vandenberghe has been growing out its form since their eponymous 2022 debut through a dreamy cross-pollination of swirling ‘gaze, psychedelic plumes, pleasant bursts of noise-pop, and lo-fi tape loops that still render vividly. It all blooms in full wonderfully here on their sophomore effort in which Vandenberghe becomes something of a shoegazing perfume genius where it’s the power of scent that leads he and his band’s creative intuitions with the way the music opens up your senses. The definition of a sonic bouquet, if you will…

Whirr – Raw Blue [The Funeral Party]

Returning a decade later more grown and repented with Raw Blue, Whirr’s first new album since 2019’s very quietly released Feels Like You, the Modesto band led by Nick Bassett finally can be acknowledged in much better light, even if the deepest wells of the ‘gaze’s abyss are still where they prefer to dive into. Again, it comes back to that seminal modern shoegaze aesthetic which Whirr have perfected — a teetering balance between riding out turbulent waves of feedback and an immersion of distant echoes through a similar degree of sensory tranquilizing. Its effect transports mind and body neither near Heaven nor the depths of Hell, and instead into its own outer space gravity, here refined by embossing the layers of guitars and big bang rhythm and opening new pathways to experiment with glitching patterns of static and horns. Raw Blue may be its hue, and what a deeply resonant one it is in making it their arguably their most visibly audible listen to date.

Winter – Adult Romantix [Winspear]

Adult Romantix is the millionth release from Winter, but if this your entry point into the dream-pop perfectionist lens that is Samira Winter and her band vehicle’s deep feels bundled up in blankets of fuzzy electricity — now more than a decade into her career — then let it arrive right on time no matter what stage it finds you today in life. For Winter, it’s a season of change. The Brazilian-American songwriter recently made a cross-coastal move from Los Angeles to New York City, and the listen is Polaroided with memories of the life she left and the one of new possibilities she’s living in out loud through vivid color. Her formula of a knack for making the familiar sound fresh need not to be upended much from the entangled foundations of shoegaze and trip-hop despite her roots doing so, however. Across 13 indie-pop sparklers that range from intensely blissed to warmly wistful and melancholic, she pieces together sugar-rushed nostalgia-in-real-time, saccharine afterthoughts, and a wide-eyed ‘gazing wonderment on the point of it all.