Oakland’s Dandy Boy Records describes Above Me as “the main songwriting vehicle for San Francisco based artist Rick Altieri”. As part of Blue Ocean, Rick released two albums on another Oakland label, Slumberland. The dreamy shoegaze of that band (and many other bands on that label) is a good reference for Above Me, though here the synths and drums play a more prominent role, making me almost write ‘soundscapes’. I say almost, as underneath the electronics this Water Drops, like most of Above Me’s debut album Soften The Blows, is a really fine pop song.

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I started a new job last week and went to a conference right away. That was great. It was also mentally exhausting and that is when I fall back to ‘safe bands’. The Softies are a very safe band. There is a lot to say about all the bands Jen and Rose were in too, because that matters, but The Softies are also two women, two guitars, two voices and very intimate songs. This is from their 2024 comeback album, that I love to bits and is as good as their early work. I am so glad The Softies exist.

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There is a kind of synth-driven indiepop that goes all the way to British bands like the Field Mice and Another Sunny Day back in the 1980s. It was very popular in Sweden in the early 2000s, when that country was an indiepop Valhalla (and this kind of music was particularly popular) and now lives on in bands like Vain Pursuit, who I discovered recently through the JanglePopHub blog. Vain Pursuit appears to be the solo project of Vinny Ball from New York and ten (digital) singles in, Fears (from 2023) is my favourite song.

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More laptop twee! Josephine’s Next Million Miles (cool band name, BTW) are a four-piece from New York City. They share with bands like London’s Worldpeace DMT and The Femcels a playful enthusiasm and a childish seriousness (or serious childishness) that goes all the way back to the original twee pop from the 1980s. I would gladly recommend any song from their recently released debut album Buckle Up (out on dawk26). I’m choosing this Summer Song because it reminds me of Architecture in Helsinki who, come to think about it, were kind of proto-laptop twee.

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This week, a friend scanned the first band interview I ever did, in 1996, with Peter Hughes of DiskothiQ. I didn’t know what to ask a band – I still don’t – and most questions were about the European tour Hughes had just done with the Mountain Goats, whom he would later join as a full-time bass player. DiskothiQ ceased to exist around the turn of the century, but not before they had planted this very catchy (that bass line!) simple 3-minute pop song (a lo-fi pop variant of college rock, if you need a description before you listen) in my brain.

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Chicago’s Sunday Records was active in the 1990s and early 2000s, releasing 7” singles and CDs by legendary indiepop bands such as Fat Tulips, The Cat’s Miaow and Aberdeen. They returned in 2018 to release some great music from all over the world, all musically going back to 1980s Britain, the golden age of indiepop. Sheffield’s The Suncharms are not only British themselves, they also go back to the 1980s; like the label they reformed some years ago. The songwriting and vocals here remind me a lot of Razocuts, if perhaps slightly more shoegaze-y. Great stuff for any day.

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Someone wrote a book about The Clean. And though it may never reach the top of my To Read pile, it was a good reason to listen to some of the songs of the legendary and influential New Zealand band. Thankfully, The Guardian compiled a list of ten essential songs. Of which this 1994 song Secret Place is my favourite. Less Velvet Underground than a lot of their other music and more jangly organ-led pop like, say, The Bats. Which I guess is hardly surprising as the song is written and sung by Robert Scott, who is in both bands.

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The thing with reading announcements of upcoming releases is that I get impatient and end up falling in love with previous work and then write about that. So with apologies to Love, Burns (Phil Sutton of Brooklyn, NY; previously of Comet Gain, Kicker and others): their new album Pavement Drawings will be out in a month, but I currently really love its 2024 predecessor Blue and this Hard To Fall in particular. For fans of 1980s British new wave (say Aztec Camera, but less Scottish). And, well, with more to come in a month.

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I saw a video of Loren Vanderbilt performing with Heavenly and that reminded me that I had never posted anything by Humdrum, of which Loren is the main member. And that despite this There And Back Again being one of my favourite songs of the past few years, one that even made it to my very selective playlist with favourite songs I put on when I am sad and need grounding. It is happy, it is pure indiepop, British at heart but Chicago by location, obviously released on Slumberland but also reminding me a lot of mid 2000s Matinée records. 

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In what feels like last week but was actually the beginning of the century, I traveled to Sweden for a tiny indiepop festival. One of the bands that performed was Dorotea, a then very young trio from Gothenburg who played very energetic, punky indiepop, as if the Ramones were decent people and into indiepop. Speaking of decent, Decent is my favourite song (at 84 seconds far from their shortest) by the band, who were still going a dozen years later when they played the song at Indietracks and had not lost any bit of their youthful energy.

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Does anyone remember Kindercore Records, the Athens, GA label that around the turn of the century released a lot of soft, gentle indiepop (Kincaid, Masters of the Hemisphere)? It is those bands that Research Vessel’s Where You Are reminds me of. (Their own bandcamp says it evokes the melancholy of The June Brides, if you want an officially endorsed comparison. I don’t disagree.) I loved those bands and I love this song, from the five-song debut EP Research Vessel (the alter ego of Danny Rowland of Seattle, WA, who also plays guitar in Seapony), just released on Sunday Records.

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I got all excited when I read on Slumberland Records’ website “Kids On A Crime Spree are set to release a new record”, only to realise this actually refers to the band’s 2022 second album Fall In Love Not In Line. That won’t stop me from writing about this song — the album’s opener — of the band with members who were in #Poundsign# and From Bubblegum To Sky. I’m also adding Pains of Being Pure at Heart as a musical reference, especially on this shoegaze-y dreampop song. And hey, maybe that third album will come one day.

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Early 1990s Superchunk (the albums On The Mouth and No Pocky For Kitty in particular) is among the best powerpop ever made. According to me anyway, but this is my blog. Their later work never did it for me, but I like Superchunk as an idea so much I don’t feel like complaining about that. And hey, here is a recent song (the B-side of a 2025 single; a Look Blue Go Purple cover in fact) that has some of that same early energy that shows the kind people from Chapel Hill, North Carolina still have it in them.  

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The Long Secret on Harriet Records is one of only two or three compilation records that I have kept during various international moves. My Favourite Jumper by Australia’s The Ampersands is probably my favourite song of the album. The Ampersands never released much (there’s an interview Roque from Cloudberry did in 2012 that serves as a good biography) but I love everything they put out. Small though they might have been, they were well connected within the Australian indiepop community, even sharing a band member with The Cat’s Miaow, which is probably the best reference for this perfect indiepop song.

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I fell in love with The Wulongs after 20 seconds of listening to this Text, the opening song (on some streaming platforms anyway) of the Japanese three piece’s second album FACH (just released on Sunday Records). It’s a classic punky indiepop song from the same mold that gave us, say, The Shop Assistants. The rest of the album is a bit more quiet – though still punk in spirit – and also very good, but first love never dies and Text remains my favourite.

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On this blog, I have several times compared bands to All Girl Summer Fun Band, which I guess makes sense as their name implies a concept as much as a sound. Croutons (“a female power trio from West Seattle”, according to their label Lost Sounds Tapes) certainly follows the same concept, but also fits very tightly in the musical box that has AGSFB written on it: cute, dreamy tweepop songs with girl-group harmonies. Mountains of Blue is the opener of their recently released self-titled debut album (cassette!) and my favourite song, but it is well representative of the whole album.

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Never too old to learn something new, I only very recently figured out that Ladytron is from London, not New York. In my defence, I associate Ladytron with the early 2000s blogosphere when London and New York (and Paris and Munich) seemed to be one thing. I also learned the band is still making music, its eighth album Paradises released last month. I like it, not in part because it’s not very different from early Ladytron, where “a clubby version of Saint Etienne” is the best description I came up with. It certainly applies to this catchy I See Red.

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Some time in the late 1990s, I saw US band Fuck play a show in front of a few dozen people. They had put wind-up toys between them and the public that moved around during the show. Now that’s how you create an intimate atmosphere. It matched the band’s quiet 90s indierock really well: listening to Swinger almost three decades later – someone mentioned the band on instagram and I dug up my favourite songs – I can still picture all those toys doing their thing while the band was playing behind them. Calling this music ‘Fuck’ is the real punk.

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Several albums in, on Tidal, my music streaming platform of choice, Miscellaneous Owl has one fan: me. That’s the true bedroom-indiepop spirit. Miscellaneous Owl is the solo project of Huan-Hua Chye of Madison, Wisconsin, who also sings in the Allo Darlin’-esque Gentle Brontosaurus. In her very prolific solo project she sounds more like a bedroom version of the Magnetic Fields. I really loved her latest album The Wanting Chemical, with this Aspect, Tense probably my favourite. I get Tidal’s message that it’s not everyone’s thing but if you’re into this kind of music, like I am, it is really good.

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I only really like one type of pop music (the simple pop song), but then I hear that in a lot of different kinds of music. Such as in this Falling by Xylitol, the alter ego of British DJ and producer Catherine Backhouse. It’s the final track on an album (Blumenfantasie) filled with jungle and drum & bass (or, as she herself describes it, ‘mitteleuropean melancholy’) that works well for me as background music but my pop-sensitive ears get only really excited for this song, that resembles early 1990s eurohouse. But really, it’s just pop music. 

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