dream pop

Being the Focus: Emma Anderson Interview

Emma Anderson – formerly of Lush and Sing-Sing – generously takes us deep inside the mechanics of making her first solo album

Concrete Islands Albums of the Year 2022

These are the fifty albums of 2022 that have meant the most to us, alongside our compilations & archives of the year

Gloria de Oliveira & Dean Hurley – Oceans of Time (Sacred Bones)

Gloria de Oliveira and Dean Hurley’s Oceans of Time is Lana Del Rey reimagined as a Lynchian dream pop masterclass

Ask A Few Questions: Dean Wareham Interview

Dean Wareham accounts for adapting under pandemic living and rebooting his songcraft upon the release of a deeply enjoyable new solo album

Jorja Chalmers – Midnight Train (Italians Do It Better)

Jorja Chalmers’s second album Midnight Train is a confidently noirish affair that is as much dream pop as dreamscape

We Just Have to Change the Speed: Andy Bell Interview

The regenerated Andy Bell explains the backstory to his recent solo work as well as adding insights into his parallel Ride and GLOK lives

Beautify Junkyards – Cosmorama (Ghost Box)

Lisbon’s Beautify Junkyards have brought a dangerously dreamlike world to life on Cosmorama, their inviting new record for Ghost Box

Dog in the Snow – Vanishing Lands (Bella Union)

Nightmares of a ruined dreamland inspire Brighton’s psychic popster Dog in the Snow on her second album, Vanishing Lands

An Ever-Broadening Basilica: Sonic Cathedral Interview

Nathaniel Cramp, the head and the heart behind London’s long-surviving Sonic Cathedral label, shares all on fifteen years of auditory congregation

Billy Coté (Madder Rose): Things You (Just) Can’t Let Go Of Mixtape

Having recently brought us the first Madder Rose LP in twenty years, Billy Coté serves-up an equally reflective and deep-sounds-mining mixtape

Jorja Chalmers – Human Again (Italians Do It Better)

The synth-based tracks of Jorja Chalmers’s deep-dreaming debut Human Again are a cartography of unreal things that feel very real indeed

Larval Stage: Piano Magic’s Low Birth Weight Revisited

Glen Johnson recalls the gestation of Piano Magic’s inventive and sublime second album, upon its twentieth-anniversary vinyl reissue

Daniel O’Sullivan: Ornamentalist Mixtape

Daniel O’Sullivan’s mixtape for Concrete Islands allows a further glimpse into the displaced-in-time otherly pop music of his solo musical universe

MOLLY – All That Ever Could Have Been (Sonic Cathedral / Dalliance Recordings)

Innsbruck’s MOLLY channel their alpine environs into mountain-gaze epics on this promising full-length debut

MUNYA – Blue Pine (Luminelle)

The Blue Pine EP is dream pop loaded with Twin Peaks signifiers that floats out of the night without getting weighed down

Penelope Trappes – Penelope Two (Houndstooth)

Penelope Trappes’s second album delivers beautifully unsettling art installation dream pop while exploring interior worlds and minimal industrial zones