The lights are low, the radio’s playing the soft hits of yesteryear, and Greg Gonzalez has just been struck by a cartoon vixen in a Marvel comic from the early ’90s—that look on her face reminds him of someone. “I need that sweet life with its decadent ways,” sighs the lead singer of TikTok’s biggest dream-pop band on the woozy “Silver Sable,” a Cigarettes After Sex mission statement if there ever was one. Gonzalez formed the band in 2013, though he’d written songs under the evocative moniker since 2008: sultry songs that float along in a post-coital haze in the vein of ’90s bands like Mazzy Star or Cowboy Junkies, the kind of thing you play in headphones to feel like the main character in the noir film of your life. The band’s third full-length album, *X’s*, plays out like a dream you might have after a few hours of scrolling Tumblr. The title track is a pleasant blur of cinnamon and leopard print, candlelight and birthday cake, with a nod to Marilyn Monroe’s last photo shoot to fully set the mood, all sung like a horny lullaby as is Gonzalez’s trademark. “Hot” is all pink lemonade and backyard pools, while “Dark Vacay” reads like Eve Babitz at the Chateau: sleeping on the cool tile of the bathroom floor, drinking expensive bordeaux and listening to old voicemails. And on lead single “Tejano Blue,” El Paso native Gonzalez is the only guy at the beach in leather pants. The mood hardly deviates from the usual slow burn (though the muted disco pulse of “Holding you, Holding me” passes for upbeat in the Cigs’ catalog), but who needs bangers when you can wallow instead?
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.
