The 30 Best Dream Pop Albums

With many of the lists we’ve assembled over the past few years, the parameters have been clear. To be considered Britpop, for example, a record had to be guitar-based, from the UK, and released during a certain period. We can argue endlessly about what’s a mixtape and what’s an album, but in assembling the 50 Best Rap Mixtapes of the Millennium, the title said it all.

“Dream pop,” however, is a little different. The term has meant different things to different audiences at different times, because it was always more of a descriptor than a proper genre. So in assembling this list, we took the descriptive quality of the term and ran with it, assembling a list of 30 records that felt like they belonged together even as they came from different scenes, eras, and geographic locations. Despite the wide range of music here, there are certain qualities that unite these records: atmosphere, intimacy, a light coating of psychedelia, and, yes, dreaminess. In some cases, we defined what belongs here by thinking about what the music is not. We made a conscious decision to not include records that wound up on our Best Shoegaze Albums list—even though shoegaze and dream pop have, at times, been used interchangeably—and we avoided the more twee end of the indie pop spectrum. 

Before we get into the list itself, here’s a quick word on dream pop from Dean Wareham, whose first band was Galaxie 500 (featured twice here) and who played on bills with many other of our picks.

Scenes From a Dream

By Dean Wareham

As a musician, you often have to answer the question, “What kind of music do you play?” “Dream pop” elicits blank looks. It’s a construct created after the fact, not a movement associated with a particular time or place or hairstyle. Maybe it’s a category for bands, across recent decades, who are hard to categorize.

Galaxie 500 were called a lot of things. New York magazine called us “plain soporific.” A VJ at MTV England told us we were “wimpy.” Later, we were dubbed “slowcore,” along with bands like Low and Codeine who played a lot slower (and in a more controlled fashion) than we did. “Proto-shoegaze” was another, but I know we were not shoegaze; those bands buried their vocals and the guitarists strummed chords through a whole slew of effects pedals or a multi-effects processor. (For the first year of Galaxie 500 shows, I had exactly one pedal by my shoes: a Boss CS-3 compressor, which I fed into a Music Man 112-RD50 amplifier with onboard reverb and overdrive.) Shoegaze bands are more of an assault, a wall of sound, while there is more empty space in dream pop—allowing more room for melody and counter-melody, whether on vocals, keyboards, or guitars.

In the summer of 1987, Damon and Naomi and I started jamming together as Galaxie 500, and I moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where they were enrolled in graduate school. In Boston, all the bands sounded heavier than us; there were hardcore bands, and others playing a mix of metal and punk that was not yet called grunge. They probably knew what they were doing, while we were making it up as we went along. I was listening to a only a few current records that year: Opal’s Happy Nightmare Baby, Sonic Youth’s Sister, and Half Japanese’s Music to Strip By. More often, it was the likes of 13th Floor Elevators, Big Star, Love, or Jonathan Richman on the turntable.

That fall, we played some nervous local gigs, and in February, with a half-dozen half-written songs, we drove down to New York to record with producer Mark Kramer at his studio in Tribeca. Our sound became something else: On “Tugboat,” Kramer smothered the band in an infinite, hall-size reverb and tape delay. Our little three-piece band now sounded huge. Kramer’s unusual mixes are still hard to place as either ’80s or ’90s, and that’s a feature of many of these dream pop records: sounds that you don’t identify with a particular year, songs that are not tailored by hit producers for commercial radio play.

Our new cassette got us signed to a fledgling Boston label named Aurora Records. We couldn’t believe our good fortune. We kept playing shows, aided by DJs at college stations WMBR and WHRB, and then the album Today that we recorded in another three-day session with Kramer. We played a lot of shows over the next year, with the Lemonheads, the Pixies, Sonic Youth, Pussy Galore, the Flaming Lips. It was all D.I.Y.: In July 1988, unable to get an official gig at the New Music Seminar, we played at Nightingale, a bar on Second Avenue in New York. We put up some handbills outside CBGB and on random lampposts in the East Village. Naomi’s handbills drew from vintage celestial drawings and images, and our very name suggested a band from another solar system.

We signed with Rough Trade Records. In September 1989, they brought us to London for a prestigious gig at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. We were terrified. They had seen impressive American bands like Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, and Big Black. Galaxie 500 was a pretty different live experience; people had to strain to make out what we were doing. But some important people liked the show; that week, we recorded a BBC radio session for John Peel, who loved our recording of “Don’t Let Our Youth Go to Waste.” Listening to our broadcast was one Simon Raymonde of Cocteau Twins. The British audience seemed more receptive to my off-kilter vocals and our stark/lush songs; at any rate, things moved much faster there. We toured England with the Sundays, who had something we did not: a couple of beautiful, infectious pop songs that were bona fide radio hits.

The final Galaxie 500 tour, in March 1991, was in support of Cocteau Twins on their Heaven or Las Vegas tour of the USA. They were a special live band, the musicians standing in a line across the stage. With percussion and keyboard tracks running off an Akai sequencer, everything was perfect, ethereal and shimmering, and they did not make mistakes. Next to them, we were a garage rock band. I toured with Cocteau Twins again in 1994, this time with my new band, Luna. “They are two bands that couldn’t be farther apart,” noted TheNew York Times. But today both bands are called dream pop; it’s an expansive category, and I have to think we have something in common after all.

Dean Wareham is a founding member of Galaxie 500 and Luna and the author of Black Postcards, a Penguin paperback.

Listen to selections from this list on our Spotify playlist and Apple Music playlist.