Four artists, four cities, one shared obsession: the feeling underneath the music matters more than the music itself. This week’s dream pop picks are worth your full attention.
Agnes Fred – After Death
“After Death” is a stunning piece of Brussels dream pop and shoegaze: fragile, slow, and genuinely gorgeous in the way that only music about emotional isolation can be.
“After Death” moves at the hazy pace of something kind of half-remembered. Agnes Fred works in the shoegaze and dream pop space with a focus on emotional isolation and lost love. But there’s also a smidge of folk in there. Whatever it is; the vocals are just fantastic, the real highlight of this single, and atmosphere is wonderfully cold and cinematic, built from slow, layered ambient textures that feel closer to a film score cue than a conventional song structure. Didn’t expect Belgium to be producing my fave new dream pop, but let’s go with it.
Agnes Fred is a Brussels-based melancholic dream pop artist whose thematic preoccupations are consistent and clearly felt: self-deception, emotional isolation, illusion, and the unreliability of memory. Describing her songs as “memories that may or may not have happened” is not just good copy; it accurately captures the disorientation the music creates. The project is sparse in terms of public biography, which only adds to the sense that what matters here is the music rather than the person making it. “After Death” does everything a dream pop record needs to do on its own terms. It’s great.
BR!LEY – The Long Game
BR!LEY’s “The Long Game” is a stunning debut single: gorgeous, emotionally precise indie pop about waiting for someone who isn’t yours yet, with a maturity that has no business coming from a 16-year-old.
“The Long Game” arrives fully formed: upbeat enough to disguise the heartbreak underneath, dynamic enough to shift between hope and ache within the same verse. It lives in the specific emotional territory of a relationship that exists in one person’s head but not yet in reality, and the tremendous production holds that tension rather than collapsing it. Recorded in the same studio where Lizzy McAlpine made her name, the track carries that same indie-pop intimacy, built outward from feeling rather than formula. The influence of The Backseat Lovers and Girl In Red is there, but BR!LEY is definitely in her own lane.
BR!LEY is 16 years old and based in Orange County, California. This is a debut single released in February 2026, made with a creative process centred entirely on instinct: hearing the full arrangement internally before anything is tracked, and refusing to release anything that doesn’t feel genuinely right. That standard shows. Where most debut singles hedge or overreach, “The Long Game” knows exactly what it is and delivers it without apology. There are artists who take years to find this kind of confidence. BR!LEY arrived with it already. We love it, and will be watching her very closely this year.
Jaguar TV – Teenage Dream
Jaguar TV’s “Teenage Dream” is a brilliant debut single: a wonderfully emotionally honest piece of South Philly indie rock
“Teenage Dream” is the lead single from Empty My Heart, a three-song debut recorded and produced by Matt Paparone in a South Philly row home, with drums tracked remotely by California-based musician Kevin Kearney. The title of the EP’s namesake track borrows a line from an unpublished poem by writer Colin Schmidt, which gives the whole project an unusually literary grounding. Musically, it’s a zinger of a mid tempo indie rock track, produced like a dream, and is just crafted with care and skill. And with a message to match; the weight of expectations, a need to live out lives that were never yours, and doing your best to keep your own identity intact through all of it. Not easy, right? But conversely, it’s very easy to enjoy this track.
Jaguar TV is the solo project of Matt Paparone, a Philadelphia-based songwriter and musician who previously recorded and played guitar and produced in the bands Public Health and Northern Breaks. Empty My Heart is his debut under the Jaguar TV name, built almost entirely from home. We’re very excited what Jaguar TV will do next, because this is a little stunner. More please.
Adrian Sood – My Junky Friend
Adrian Sood’s “My Junky Friend” is a gorgeous piece of dark dream pop: a piano, a great vocal and an evocative 4am atmosphere
“My Junky Friend” is built on a lovely, soft piano sound and the vocalist Robyn, the two elements locked together into something that feels simultaneously kind of private and cinematic. Conceptually, it moves through the emotional territory of a party’s end: the moment when the noise drops away and whatever was being avoided by the highs becomes unavoidable. Having been in this situation once or twice, it’s unsettlingly evocative and honestly fantastic. Sood handles everything from writing and arranging to production and recording from his home studio in Dublin. But alongside the hook, it’s the production that really soars here, primarily through it’s beautiful simplicity.
Sood draws from Radiohead and The Stone Roses in roughly equal measure, which gives his productions an unusual dual identity. It’s definitely more of the former on ‘My Junky Friend’. But it’s a combination keeps “My Junky Friend” from sitting comfortably in any single genre corner. He is a Dublin-based artist still in the early stages of building his catalogue, and this track is a strong case for paying attention. We certainly will be, because this is fantastic.