trauma ray - Carnival (2026)

Two years after their well-received debut album, the Texas-based trauma ray are back with a short EP. But, spoiler warning, the album may be short, but it's not short of intensive sounds balanced by ethereal peace in some parts. These ever-changing, forward-thinking but also always extremely moody compositions are what we love the band's music.

Years and years ago I called their music "Somewhat shoegaze, somewhat post" and I can still agree with my former self. Their music is very guitar-heavy, I don't think there's place for any weirdness like samples or synths or electronic additions. No, it's rough guitar sounds and tangible textures everywhere. But this is contradicted with very modern-feeling compositions that make me think of Holy Fawn or Nothing, bands that are definitely more keen on experimenting with sounds. I love it. 

The description of the album says that it's the band's "strongest, most intense, and exploratory work". It was created in the midst of an extremely busy period of time when the artists toured a lot with barely any time for developing the project further. In the middle of a real-life Carousel if you wish. But the compositions here don't feel rushed, in fact, if it wasn't for the length of the album, I'd say it's already material from the sophomore album. But for that, we have to wait.

Carnival costs 4.99 USD.

Check: Méliès

Country: Texas, US

Genre: heavy shoegaze

Label: Dais Records

trauma ray - [trauma ray] (2018)

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Nuclear Daisies - First Taste of Heaven (2025)

Coming from Texas are Nuclear Daisies, a band who likes their shoegaze served trippy. With Ringo Deathstarr's Alex Gehring in the lineup, the outfit released their sophomore album back in the summer, but it's so good that it deserves mentioning in the middle of winter's frozen landscape.

What makes this project quite special is the psychedelic vibes of the shoegaze/dream pop offered. Or even a step further: the trip-hop-esque bits and pieces that add up to the music's ethereal but very much otherworldly atmosphere. The further the album goes, the more audible the trip-hop influences with Doves and Fangs sounding as t-h as possible while still clearly within the realm of dreamy guitar music and finally, 333 is basically Teardrop.

This also makes the album's flow so attractive! The melodies are captivating, the pace faster than slower, the ethereality clearly noticeable in the soft vocals and hazy backgrounds. When it comes to the song I'd recommend, it has to be Infinite Joy as I love the shoegazey compositions that use the silence to fuel their overall catchiness and this is definitely the case here.

First Taste of Heaven costs 9 USD.

Check: Infinite Joy

Country: Texas, US

Genre: psychedelic shoegazey indie

Label: Portrayal of Guilt

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Glare - Sunset Funeral (2025)

A good dreamy debut album alert. Glare, a band from Texas with fuzzy guitars and soothing vocals is here to make you stare. At their music. Somehow. Anyway, the music is great: it's airy and noisy and melodic, just how you like 'em.

I'm shocked with how accurate and sly the description of their album is asking about what people envision when listening to the airy guitar music and answering: "Vistas big enough to be forgotten in. Deserts which stretch back to the beginning of time. Infinite horizons melting into pink bokehs. It’s Texas, isn’t it?". I thought it was northern Sweden, but they may be right! Never been to Texas. But this music is not only about geographical comparisons, it is  all about emotions. Like you do when you write dreamy music. The band states that it is aimed "for people who don’t know how to talk about how they feel."

I can feel it in every track at the album, especially in the ethereal vocals contrasting with the rougher music. I especially like the songs that have tons of atmosphere, but there are the summits of very noisy guitar sounds towering over it form time to time, which is especially noticable in 2 Soon 2 Tell and its finish. If metal screaming was played on guitars, it could sound like this part. A very promising debut from the Americans.

Sunset Funeral costs 8 USD.

Check: 2 Soon 2 Tell

Country: Texas, US

Genre: noise dream pop

Label: Deathwish Inc./Sunday Drive

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Daydream Twins - Solstice for Embodiment (2025)

Ok, ok, hear me out: Daydream Twins' debut was one of the best shoegazey albums of 2022, their EP Bombinate was one of the best ones in 2023 and... now it's time for their sophomore LP called Solstice for Embodiment and, in my books, it's on the best way to become one of the best of the incoming year when it comes to airy but also very melodic shoegaze/dream pop vibes.

The unbelievable talent for writing catchy songs is what attracts me to the Texas duo in the first place. You can say that if it wasn't for the dreamy arrangements and off-stream vibes, the songs would be featured on your mainstream radio stations and national charts. But it's a great thing they are not: the pop hit-like melodies here are enchanted within the airy guitar and ethereal vocals-fueled compositions, meaning it's what we like the most. This ratio of the catchy and the dreamy seems to me perfectly balanced and perhaps it means that it can attract fans of very wide range of genres.

But if you ask me, the more airy, the better. That's why ballads like Aeromancy and Thousand Steps take the cake on the album. 

Solstice for Embodiment costs 7 USD.

Check: Aeromancy 

Country: Texas, US

Genre: ethereal pop

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Perfumed Saturnine Angels - Saccharine Curses Exhaled in the Wind (2023)

I know Garry Brents as Gonemage, the music project that combines black metal with chiptune and it's as crazy as it sounds. The project conceived as a duo, now, after Brandon Nurick's passing, continues as Brents solo project with the debut album called Saccharine Curses Exhaled in the Wind as a homage to Nurick's name.

While this time Brents doesn't use the electronica samples and, overall, sounds more "serious" for the metal music fans, his work still surprised me a lot. There is something in the quality of the sound (and particularly his vocals) that makes me feel like I've got hit in the head with the audio wave. It's loud and it's overwhelming in the best possible way. But the compositions are far from being homogeneous walls of noise: they are experimentally diverse with mathrock-like pace changes going from slow guitar-only passages to fast and angry, energy-fueled madness as rapidly as you can imagine. 

And I have to mention that: the cover art is at the god-tier level.

Saccharine Curses Exhaled in the Wind costs whatever you want to pay.

Gonemage - Handheld Demise (2022)

Gonemage - Mystical Extraction (2021)

Check: Trash Judgement

Country: Texas, US

Genre: math black metal

Label: Zegema Beach Records

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From Overseas & City of Dawn - Misty Memories (2022)

Kévin Séry (From Overseas) and Damien Duque (City of Dawn) are ambient artists who decided to make some music together and the first instance of their cooperation brought fantastic results. Misty Memories is an album that presents fairy-tale-like, calm soundscapes to smooth the every-day existence of each of us.

The ambient here is smooth and warm like a thick carpet. But there's also a lot of going on within this dense structure, a lot of lively micro sounds living there. It is all structured with acoustic sounds of guitar and tons of noisy backgrounds. The release breathes with calm and peace, it's a well a listener can draw those from in the form of beautiful music that is complex and simple at the same time.

Misty Memories costs 6 USD.

Check: Weathering

Country: Reunion/Texas, US

Genre: mysterious soundscapes

Label: Past Inside the Present

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Gonemage - Handheld Demise (2022)

I already know what to expect from Garry Brents, but it doesn't mean I'm always ready for the chaotic attack he serves on each of his albums. Handheld Demise is only a proof for this as from the very first notes, Gonemage's chiptune black metal overwhelms the listener's ears.

Just like his artworks suggest every time, the music here sounds like taken from a particularly unnerving but also entertaining computer game. The pace is always as fast as Sonic's speed runs, the energy must be the result of some sort of life boost while the black metal's aggressive sounds simply overflow the computer-generated tunes. As the artist summarizes it, "Black Metal/Chiptune convergence set in pixelated dream realms". The results are absurdly chaotic, but this is the very best feature of Brents' music. The game references are sometimes even less subtle when the artist reaches for sounds that everybody knows from their favourite oldschool games (as it is in The Suffering and Endurance). 

On the other hand, thematically and lyrics-wise, it is very much the metal gloom that rules on the album. This clash is what makes the project so special, perhaps the most unique one within the black metal community. 

Handheld Demise costs 3 USD.

Gonemage - Mystical Extraction (2021)

Check: Father Time's Grandfather Clock

Country: Texas, US

Genre: chiptune black metal

Label: WereGnome Records/Xenoglossy Productions/Fiadh Productions

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Delicate Noise - Hence (2022)

Hailing from Texas, Mark Andrushko creates ambitious ambient music based on very intriguing electronic sounds. I came across his music thanks to this year's EP called Hance but the artist's discography reaches 2009.

Accompanied by the beautiful daguerreotype cover art, the album is filled with this blink-and-you-miss-it kind of ambient music. It is so subtle and so quiet that it comes directly to one's subconsciousness and suddenly you feel like it has always been there. The compositions are very carefully put together to create this foggy and mysterious soundscape that is always a perfect place to dream.

Hence costs 5 USD.

Check: mellifluous

Country: Texas, US

Genre: subtle soundscape

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Ziggurat - HYPNOS (2022)

Ziggurat's PREFACE was an album I found particularly interesting on the post-rock scene back in 2019. Although years passed, the Texas band's eclectic and very broad definition of the genre hasn't changed. HYPNOS was meant to be released back before the pandemics hit and it took some years to finish after all.

Led by a grand piano, HYPNOS really feels like a fruit of many years of work. These compositions are very jazzy and chill-out-like. The pace is not very high but it's not the important thing here. There are still many things going on in every second of the album with the piano sounds cementing them together into the psychedelically diverse wholes. It was designed to meet the expectations of people of various musical interests who should be glad to taste this "musical smoothie [that] creates a refreshing experience" for all. It certainly makes the listener more relaxed, the mesmerizing compositions create a perfect environment for escaping the world's busy reality and, as such, the album should be praised.

HYPNOS costs 7 USD.

Ziggurat - PREFACE (2019)

Check: RETURN HOME

Country: Texas, US

Genre: piano-led instrumental

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City of Dawn - As the Universe, So the Soul (2022)

Damien Duque creates so many things, very often cooperating with other artists, like it was the case on Wander performed with zakè, the album he appeared on this blog with two years ago. This year, the Texas-based artist released, among many other things, this beautiful album called As the Universe, So the Soul.

As the title suggests, the music here feels very spiritual. The ambient soundscapes have very meditation-inducing abilities and this is certainly not a coincidence as the artist himself states that his music "will invite you into a meditational estate that is self-exploring" and this journey "can lead toward healing". The way the mind floats and relaxes while listening to this music, is certainly the most important thing about the album. But it can also be tear-jerkingly beautiful if you can submerge yourself within those waves.

As the Universe, So the Soul costs 7 USD.

zakè & City of Dawn - Wander (2020)

Check: Layers Unseen

Country: Texas, US

Genre: spiritual soundscape

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Letting Up Despite Great Faults - IV (2022)

I remember Letting Up Despite Great Faults from my younger years, going head to head with The Pains of Being Pure at Heart as one of my first connections to dreamy/noisy genres. After their third album, the Americans disappeared for 7 years but now they are back with the new album entitled, obviously, IV. 

Their ethereal music has some of this innocent lo-fi/twee pop vibes with dance-inviting tunes and light-weight arrangements. It's all about fun and ease of listening, especially that the music has some tropical vibes to me too. It's definitely sunny and mellow. This is only strengthened by the shy, delicate vocals by Mike Lee. The album is not long and it feels even shorter as the pop flow is strong here and ready to trap you within this dreamy torrent.

And as one could anticipate, the lyrics are mostly about love and the process of falling in love as well. The theme, however, is handled pretty tastefully with focus put on more interesting and deeper aspects like getting to understand the other person ("Did you put up a concrete wall cause you finally found someone/ I try to run across but the meaning is lost /I want to be so close to you and catch you standing there" in Gorgeous) or providing support and acceptation ("I love that you're always the one around to say it's okay/ I hope you know even my friends feel the same about you" in Gemini). Classy stuff.

IV costs 7 USD.

Check: Softly, Bravely

Country: Texas, US

Genre: dreamy indie pop

Label: New Words

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Blushing - Possessions (2022)

The Texas-based Blushing debuted (world-wide but also on my blog) with their brilliant EP Tether back in 2017. Now, 6 years (!) later, they released the sophomore album Possessions, making sure that they should be counted as one of the big nugaze/dream pop bands out there these days.

As the canons want it, the noisy pop from the Americans involves huge amounts of reverbs, guitar noise and soft vocals. But their new release is also catchier and more psychedelic than what I associate the band with. The high-paced tracks go on and on with upbeat tunes and catchy riffs, making your body involuntarily dance to the guitar psychedelia they offer. This makes me think of a lighter, dreamier version of The Pains of Being Pure at Heart that is able to write captivating melodies and drown them in the ethereal atmosphere with ease - both in the faster hits and the slightly slower, very much psychedelic compositions like Gel.

Undoubtedly, a big thing for the band is the cooperation with Lush's Miki Berenyi; the icon's guest vocals (together with unorthodox backing vocals) made Blame one of the more memorable shoegaze song of the beginning of the year. Really well-balanced, top-of-the-shelf release.

Possessions costs 8.99 USD.

Blushing - Tether (2017)

Blushing - Blushing (2019)

Check: Blame

Country: Texas, US

Genre: nugaze pop

Label: Kanine Records

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Kraus - View No Country (2021)

I have been waiting for Will Kraus' new music since his 2018's brilliant album Path. The Texas-based artist is someone who delivers one of the loudest and heaviest shoegaze-like experience these times. He showed it before and really nothing has changed, with his new album View No Country being as loud and as beautiful as the ones before.

His idea for the music is simple: the guitar has to be loud, the vocals extremely dispersed and subtle. It works like charm. The compositions are very short, they certainly have this punk-like vibes all over: short and rapid, leaving impression on the audience and quickly go further, to the next song. The guitar sounds are very loud, but they have also this blackgaze's synth-like layer of smoothness that make them sound crushingly heavy but also extremely attractive, creating mesmerizing soundscapes that are only subtly distracted by vocals. Those are extremely dispersed, to the point that it feels almost wrong to hide singing so deep into the audio. You just listen to Expect/Deserve and can't help but feel for the barely present beautiful vocals. But that's the point, that makes Kraus' music so special; perhaps there's more into this too, perhaps it's all about the fact that beauty is very subtle and difficult to appreciate - not only in his music.

I love the way Kraus combines two very different approaches to music: the loud and rapid blitzkrieg of sound and the extremely airy and melancholic music genre. His works could easily be called punk shoegaze  but to fully appreciate that, they have to be listened to as loud as possible.

View No Country costs 7 USD.

Kraus - Path (2018)

Check: Glass Valley

Country: Texas, US

Genre: punk shoegaze

Label: Terrible Records

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seizure sister - witness (2021)

If the Texas-based artist's moniker is a reference to Scissor Sisters, the music doesn't show it in any way. He makes a slow-paced but heavy take on noisy but ethereal music. And shows his creation to the public on his debut EP called witness.

His music is built on the heavy guitars - soft voice opposition. The airiness of the artist's voice soothes the roughness of the backgrounds, creating a really well-shaped dreamy soundscape.  Regarding the guitar music itself, you can more or less hear that it's a one-man project. This sense of minimalism doesn't take anything from this music, quite on the contrary, it's somehow more genuine this way. It also goes along with the feeling of grunge/stoner rock vibes the album gives and, similarly to the last week's Day Aches, this is what is fairly unique and definitely attention-grabbing in his music. Especially when particularly coarse sounds of the guitars are soften by particularly dreamy backing vocals (like in the finish of pinpoint). The album is kept in a rather slow tempo, however, when the artist feels like it, he can create a really involving, fast  but still airy composition (yes, under you is something you can't miss here).

witness costs 5 USD.

Check: Fawn

Country: Texas, US

Genre: dream grunge

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Gonemage - Mystical Extraction (2021)

I'll be honest, chiptune is the music genre I appreciate the least to call it mildly. However, Gonemage is the first project ever that made me question this view. Garry Brents' works combine it with energetic and dark black metal and the result are great, available now for the audience on the project's debut album called Mystical Extraction.

Earlier this year I posted about Lorem Ipsum, the French neoclassical post-hardcore band, and I was pretty much shocked with that blend, Gonemage though is something even more peculiar. Brents is an artist who has an impressive resume of projects he's been involved in, this one is surely the weirdest (although it's just my assumption). The album is meant to be a concept album, the theme of which is, quite naturally, a story within a video game - more about it with some quite vivid details can be read on the album's Bandcamp Website.

The colourful midi sounds of chiptune here, after combining them with the metal pace and vocals, get a different vibe to them - rapid, dangerous and extremely engaging. Especially that the metal elements here are taken from its darkest and most violent subgenres and only the chiptune tones this down a bit. Still, this is the kind of music that gives the audience so much energy, it is impossible not to dance and/or pogo to it. And most certainly one that is very unique, a music born from a combination I would never even thought is possible.

Mystical Extraction costs whatever you want to pay.

Check: The Gullying and the Purple Hoax

Country: Texas, US

Genre: chiptune black metal

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Withered Witch - Infinite Void (2021)

A new thing from Texas. This is one of the best quality very heavy albums I heard this year. The band you can find next to nothing about in the Internet, seem to be debuting now with an EP called Infinite Void.

In their tracks, the Americans make the best of metal music genres, post-metal atmosphere and stoner rock's heaviness. You can feel the loudness with all of your body's cells and it does feel phenomenal. The post-metal pace is slow but also inevitable, emanating this powerfulness that is typical for epic nature phenomena. Scary, yes, but also mesmerizingly beautiful and fascinating. This is very tangible especially in Grave Moss, the way the vocals are distorted here evokes some horror-like, primal fears inside you. The way the band combine a lot of things from a lot of genres, as well as the free form and inclinations to experimenting (within a genre's limits) makes me think of this music as psychedelic metal. And I enjoy every second of it.

Infinite Void costs 4 USD.

Check: Grave Moss

Country: Texas, US

Genre: psychedelic post-metal

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Last Ice - Last Ice (2021)

Last Ice is a combination of two shoegazey bands: Bloody Knives and We Are Parasols. While I don't know much about the latter, the Texans of the former have been one of those fresh and very good takes on nugaze. Together with their Oregon and Georgia-based counterparts, they master this even more to such an extent that their debut album Last Ice seems to easily be one of the best shoegaze releases of the year.

This is clearly not just indie rock with noisy add-ons, it's shoegaze in its best, one that combines Slowdive's delicateness with MBV's mystery, one that sounds like homogeneous sea of powerful sound but at the same time pampers the audience with the quality of lulling sounds. The combination of two bands, among other things, results in having two vocals: very dream pop-like, subtle male one and the second, female, folk-like airy, sounding as if Enya decided to leave her castles and start a shoegaze band. And the latter provide what can be described as the uniqueness factor for this project. They don't sound like anything I know.

They do, however, tend to get lost within the overpowered guitar and synths-based backgrounds. On the other hand, the longer the album goes, the more electronic and trippy the music gets. So Curse is barely shoegaze anymore, more of ethereality-rich electronica of the best kind while Disease is perfectly trip-hoppy trip-hop. Until in the end it finishes with a gothic and industrial wierdo called, obviously, End.

Last Ice costs 8 USD.

Check: Chains

Country: Texas/Oregon/Georgia, US

Genre: ethereal nugaze

Label: No Movement Records

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Tapes and Topographies - Inoculations (2020)

I almost missed this, but Tapes and Topographies is a moniker of Todd Gautreau a.k.a. Sonogram who for me is better known as the leader of Crushed Stars, a duo responsible for the brilliant album Go Dark, Canaveral from two years ago. Here, within his solo project, he's busy with casting spells with ambient music and he does it very regularly as Inoculations is already his second album in 2020.

It's unbelievable how beautiful Gautreau's music is. The way the subtle, extremely delicate noise goes together with the elements of neoclassicism and soundscape'y vibes is something one can hardly find anywhere but also longs for all the time. It's very, very sad but also quite constant in this sadness as if it was morning about something that happened a long time ago. No bursts of depression but long, peaceful melancholia. I absolutely love it.

Inoculations costs 7 EUR.

Check: The Leaving Feels the Same

Country: Texas, US

Genre: melancholic ambient

Label: DRONARIVM

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Loma - Don't Shy Away (2020) EN

Loma is a trio established in Belgium and making their music in Texas, their music meaning a unique mix of dream pop vibes with somewhat exotic inspirations, something like dreamier Still Corners. No wonder that their albums are released by Sub Pop themselves. And since the last one was so great, the new one, entitled Don't Shy Away, had to appear on the blog even more so.

Extremely airy vocals by Emily Cross make the basis of the music. Within there's both the mystery of dream pop and the catchiness of art pop. And when it's not enough, there are backing vocals that bring on such quantities of ethereality that it can be swum in. What's less obvious is the music - it sounds more like exotically inspired indie pop in some parts while somewhere else more like intimate blues-ish tunes rather than more traditional guitar-oriented dream pop/shoegaze. It's so good that the band got back together to record the second album, as the legend says, after their music became of interest by Brian Eno himself.

This style is present in the fantastic Half Silences, probably the most catchy one on the album. Still, the artists can easily make this jazzy, a bit old-school mixture turn into some really mesmerizing passages as in Given a Sign or Breaking Waves Like a Stone. And the spoken word in Thorn is something that brings goosebumps which is especially wierd while listening to such a hot album.

Don't Shy Away costs 10 USD.

Check: Given a Sign

Country: Texas, US

Genre: jazzy dream pop

Label: Sub pop

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SRSQ - “Unreality” Live Sessions (2020) EN

Lately I'm more keen on live albums, up til now they were very rare on this blog and now are more and more frequent. Perhaps it's simply the question of missing concerts. Or certainly it is. This time, I'd like to recommend a live album from the American artist Kennedy Ashlyn (once half of the Them Are Us Too duo).

Short album is a recording of a session on which the Texas-based artist performed tracks from ther debut album Unreality from two years ago. It's filled with intriguing merging of solo and minimal electronics with extremely unique vocals. They can easily be mighty as well as melancholic, with super broad spectre of sound and in every second beautifully airy which means that we deal here with music that is both synth-minimal and emotionally rich and hot at the same time.

If someone hadn't had an occasion to get to know SRSQ's music, this album is a great reason to catch up with her still fresh debut release. And for anyone, to put Ashlyn on their concert bucket list.

“Unreality” Live Sessions costs 5 USD.

Check: Only One

Country: Texas, US

Genre: electronic dream pop

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