San Francisco-raised songwriter Wisp has become the face of the shoegaze revival that has infiltrated the rock world in the mid-2020s. It’s easy to see why: Her catchy melodies are buried beneath layers and layers of guitar, the drums boom and crash, the basslines keep the ship afloat. Though she’s been compared to genre icons of yore like Slowdive and The Jesus and Mary Chain, she views herself more in the realm of dream-pop bands. “I love all those bands for sure, but I think the bands that I take the most influence from are definitely more dream-poppy bands,” she tells Apple Music. “So I grew up listening to a lot of Beach House, Cocteau Twins, and I definitely take inspiration from them, especially vocal-wise and how I sing in my music.” Cacophonies of melodious noise surrounds Wisp on *If Not Winter*, and her voice manages to pierce through and rise to the top. Take “After dark,” which buzzes with crisp guitar lines and sloshing hi-hats. Her vocals move through the composition like a fever dream, yearning for something she can’t quite reach. This emphasis on emotion and lyrical prowess was a focal point for Wisp while creating the album. “I try to put as much emotion as I can into my own music, and I always try to write about something that is true to me and something that I\'m feeling,” she says. “And that way it doesn\'t feel faked or it doesn\'t feel ingenuine to my sound.”
The Irish musician wrote her self-released debut album, 2019’s dreamy, reverb-drenched *All My People*, while living in Dublin and pining for her hometown of Connemara on Ireland’s Atlantic coast. Writing its follow-up, Maria Somerville returned to the rural landscapes of her youth, drawing inspiration from its wild terrain, its weather patterns and various bodies of water, and the Irish folk traditions still cherished by the locals. Between a pair of artist residencies on the nearby island of Inis Oírr, long conversations with her fisherman father, and home recording sessions with a small crew of new collaborators (Henry Earnest, Finn Carraher McDonald, Roisin Berkeley) emerged the ethereal songs of *Luster*, Somerville’s sophomore album and her 4AD debut. Wistful dream-pop numbers like “Garden” and “Projections” channel the woozy romance of Grouper, Mazzy Star, or Cocteau Twins, while evoking Somerville’s misty, windswept surroundings.
Vancouver’s EKKSTACY became an electro-emo hero by packing big emotions into compact bedroom-pop dimensions. But for this third full-length, he abandons his usual DIY drum-machined methodology for a full-band attack that highlights the difference between bouncing around on your mattress and stage-diving into a festival crowd. On *FOREVER*, the low-tech post-punk minimalism and Soundcloud-rap graininess of old gives way to pure ’90s alt-rock nostalgia and Warped Tour worship, with the yearning melodies and high-octane riffs of tracks like “seventeen” demonstrating why he was tapped to open stadium shows for blink-182 in the summer of 2024. But *FOREVER* also sees EKKSTACY moving beyond the in-your-face/heart-on-sleeve approach of pop-punk and immersing himself in the gauzy textures of shoegaze and dream-pop: “head in the clouds” echoes the slow-motion guitar surges on the classic Smashing Pumpkins album cut “Mayonnaise,” while the closer “keep my head in down” is a twinkling, twangy lullaby that travels down Mazzy Star’s lost highway.
