“Pandit” is Lance Smith from Lumberton, TX. His self-titled, sophomore effort can be coveted freely here.

“Since the notable success of ‘Eternity Spin’ in 2011, Lance Smith has kept very busy. Helping others to not only further their own path of success (Youth Lagoon, Coma Cinema, Foxes in Fiction), he has also kept steady at writing, producing & working on other projects amongst his own. 

It’s safe to say that Smith’s writing and audio engineering abilities are ever changing and constantly growing. Incapable of categorization and ‘genre placement’. Folk, dream pop, rock… Smith continues to intertwine multiple influences ranging from Bob Dylan to Al Green, and from Neil Young to Fleetwood Mac. It’s a true feat that many artists only dream of conquering, but few ever achieve.”

Watching, or rather listening to, Teen Daze’s sound evolve over the years from the jumbled and hazy mess of its infancy to the smoothed out and refined construction it now sports has been like watching a painter build a canvas from scratch: applying, adjusting, covering, and removing his marks until the image settles well. Everything is inching closer to it’s right place, and the results are already producing inveterate euphoria. 

Also, I’m moving to Brooklyn. Don’t be jealous, y’all.

Preorder Teen Daze - All of Us, Together over at Lefse Records

Niva - Dirty Water

Directed by Johan Haglund and co-directed by Sebastian Kriz. Edvin Oloffson served as the flame artist for the video (I didn’t know that was a thing).

Purchase Niva - Dirty Water at Amazon

“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.” - Edgar Allan Poe

Niva is the moniker of Christian Niva, a Stockholm resident who doubles as a dream-pop factory. An up-and-coming artist, I dare say! Slow Magic’s remix smoothes it all out for you so your ears can sit back and worry not about missing a beat. 

Purchase Niva - Dirty Water at Amazon

So, normally we couple each audio track with a related quote, but that simply is not happening this time around. Grimes is a blessing to the ears, truly; however, this song offers little in regards to something off of which one could select a good quote. The lyrics are rather simple and repetitive (Grimes’ lyrics are second seat to her classical vocal experimentations), and the song title relates too easily to religious shit into which I’d rather not delve. Otherwise, it’s a great and catchy song that’ll keep you entertained throughout its entirety. Yay!

“And if tonight my soul may find her peace / in sleep, and sink in good oblivion, / and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower / then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created.”

- Shadows

Download Day Joy - New Ordinary 7” at Bandcamp

“It gives me great pleasure indeed to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed.” - Albert Einstein

Purchase Youth Lagoon - The Year of Hibernation at Amazon

“You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too.” A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

Download Memoryhouse - The Kids Were Wrong at their website

“Somewhere in New York, Rome, or maybe London, there is a suitcase full of tapes, minidiscs and CDs — days and days worth of music, all of it the result of Mauro Remiddi’s 27 years of travels across Europe — from his native Italy to London; of caravaning with the Berlin Youth Circus playing traditional gypsy Klezmer music; of reinterpreting traditional music in North Korea; and of a stint playing piano for an Off Broadway tap dance show. At this point, Remiddi has lived three musicians’ lifetimes.

Amazingly, Strange Weekend — with deep roots in so many times and places — is an album that beautifully captures the fleeting right now. Remiddi’s interest in movement — about capturing a momentary now en route to the next — is apparent; postcards and polaroids of buildings and faces from the street flicker past. The project’s genesis lies in this visual imagery. Over the past year, Remiddi has compiled a catalogue of images — gathered from the various nooks and crannies of the internet — that have served as notes, inspiration, context and a map for Porcelain Raft’s music.

The myriad travels crystallize into something visceral; you may not be able to see the visuals Remiddi holds so dear, but you can feel them throughout Strange Weekend, and they stay with you as you travel on. Strange Weekend might have been made in a small place (a Brooklyn basement, in fact), but it is huge dream-pop, with melodies and synths billowing out in all directions.” - Secretly Canadian

Purchase Porcelain Raft - Strange Weekend at Secretly Canadian

“A lot of it’s autobiographical,” explains Caulfield, “but it’s universal at the same time, because everyone goes through these things.”

Listen closely. It’ll all make sense soon enough. Trust us.”

Purchase Young Man - Ideas of Distance at Amazon

Twin Sister is a dream pop group based in Long Island, NY, and they’ve garnered a lot of attention over the past year. They blew.me.away. with their Color Your Life EP, a release that literally induced severe daydreams every time I listened to it. I’d have those 6 tracks on repeat for hours without realizing it. Andrea Estella’s voice on “The Other Side of Your Face” is one of the most comforting sounds I have ever heard.

So, it’s no surprise I nearly flipped my shit when I heard about In Heaven, their first LP. It seems as though they’ve managed to feather out the brief, fumbling moments of uncertainty and to highlight everything extraordinary from their first two EPs. Estella takes her role to new heights, showcasing a variety of vocal styles, and the group’s new sound, now that it’s trimmed some of the fat, has slipped into a slightly sexier outfit. Honey-covered vocals, funky rhythms and cushioned beats all swimming effortlessly in a twinkling sea of ethereal bliss: how could you resist this?

Going to be honest though, hate the album cover. 

Purchase Twin Sister - In Heaven at Amazon

Beautiful hazy dream pop from London Ingaland, Still Corners a la Memoryhouse wants you to read between the riffs, to get lost in the nether of their strong post-rock sentiments, and lose yourself bouncing in and out of walls of sound.  Founded in 2008 on the hushed breathy vocals of Tessa Murray and the succinctly pop-inspired atmospheric renderings of Greg Hughes, they create a wash of giddy love songs in the vein of Au Revoir Simone.

Of You Are All I See, Pat himself says, “You Are All I See is an attempt to build a bridge between the listener and I, in that, I wrote these songs for you as much as I did for me. And right now when you are listening to my voice, by yourself, it really is just you and I […] The songs focus primarily on the joy and the heartbreak of relationships, love lost and rediscovered, battles with monogamy, battles with identity. It came out much darker than I had intended, but sometimes you only have so much control.”

Purchase Active Child - You Are All I See at Amazon