the inert, gauzy dreaminess that is everywhere now

as mentioned by ums on PHOEBE BRIDGERS - what's the deal?

I think I'm just sick of the inert, gauzy dreaminess that is everywhere now, a sort of listless "interesting" production values

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), 22. august 2026 18:41 (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

what actually is up with this? the musical equivalent of frictionless living / every coffee shop looks the same?

Maybe people get enough edge in their lives just trying to live

I'm with ums (as usual).

I'm just trying to live, too, survive being smothered by a gauzy blanket made of NPR.

I’d actually say I think… not quite the opposite of the thread’s premise, but rather that “inert, gauzy dreaminess” only feels oppressive when none of the raw, unfiltered punky will-to-power moves feel/sound actually powerful enough to us to sweep the gauze away.

Whenever we say “this is what is going on right now” we mostly mean “this is what I am noticing”

The Inert, Gauzy Dreaminess = mid '20s version of early '70s Bland, Acoustic Smileyness?

inert gauzy dreaminess was a problem in the 2010s as well idk

i'm with tim tho. when you pair that inert gauzy dreaminess with odd fractured or expansive writing and arrangement it can really sing. when you pair it with normal-to-whatever songwriting it's like... what are we doin', who's this for. not that i'm arguing for verisimilitude (uninteresting, and form and function are often more exciting when misaligned), but if we're using the bridgers record as an example, it's like neither aesthetic serves the other

I haven't heard the PB album, are there any other examples of this phenomenon? Is there a specific song to use as a reference?

I saw Alfred mentioned Beth Orton on the other thread, but her voice is so jagged I feel like you need gauze to staunch the wounds

I'm having the best sort of wrestle with the Orton precisely because she's writing on the wider canvas that Tim and Ivy mentioned and because her voice these days eschews prettiness.

yeah I haven't listened to it enough (I find it difficult tbh) to know if the songwriting is fractured as in ivy's post, but her voice certainly is. I don't get what Tim means by "raw, unfiltered punky will-to-power moves"? As said I need concrete examples to follow this though

I feel there was this point somewhere in the mid-'00s where the idea of "the '80s" started getting distilled into this kind of out of focus dream-pop mode. I'm thinking of songs like, say, "Daniel" by Bat For Lashes, or Lana Del Rey's "Video Games," or even bands like Beach House. It's become (or stayed) prominent ever since, esp. among what might have in the past been bedroom recording artists, like Hozier or Sombr or even Taylor.

it’s kind of funny because the 80s to me is big loud gated drums, and in your face production values

and I lived through the 80s listening to pop music, which I think maybe some of these younger artists are retconning that everything was Shoegaze back then

I do think that there is a lot of discussion about how digital recording has changed music, things like auto tune, aggressive over quantization, but maybe not enough about plugins

it's very easy to get very dramatic and waved out extreme reverb and delay effects that would have required a ton of studio experimentation years ago, now you can just flip through presets on plug-in you got for $30 on a Black Friday sale, something like Valhalla Supermassive which is free or was free at some point

IDK I just feel like this thread could have been started at any point in ILM’s history and it would have been about as correct - there’s always gauzy inert dreaminess about, and there is also always the opposite of it about too.

I vividly remember Nabisco (who was famously OTM about most things) on some thread here in 2001 celebrating Life Without Buildings’ album as heralding a return to bands playing music together in a room - a rejection of gauzy inert dreaminess as rock’s organising principle.

I was very suspicious of this narrative frame at the time, because it seemed to me to be premised on an extremely selective notion of what was going on prior (as if the story of rock music from 1997 to 2001 was basically just OK Computer -> Deserter’s Songs -> The Soft Bulletin -> Kid A). It felt to me like Nabisco was telling a story about what he had been listening to previously, and what he was listening to now, and the context of the former gave the latter a certain exciting (almost illicit) freshness of feeling it might not have had otherwise. But it was an extremely subjective narrative, however true it was for him.

Perhaps a few months later Yankee Hotel Foxtrot dropped, and lots of people used that album to construct a narrative that was the opposite of that for which Nabisco had contended - here, finally, was US indie rock reaching new heights of transcendence via a vis the “band playing together in a room” model. What is happening now really can be whatever you want it to be - you just need to elevate a few handpicked examples to the status of universal truth. Which we all love to do.

Given it is at least somewhat more common for artists to start off rudimentary and then embrace more rather than less dense production over the course of their career, I tend to think this apparent trend is constantly reproduced as a byproduct of listeners dutifully following artists to their albums number three or four. What we’re really observing is the passage of time and, to some extent, our own aging process.

Perhaps aesthetic narratives need to be subjective and myopic in order to derive their power: it’s certainly true that my own thinking about music has been characterised by feeling less and less certain of anything as I get older, and I do at times vaguely miss the evangelical zeal I felt at times when I was young.

I just want to say this was just a comment I made in 15 seconds after listening to half of a Phoebe Bridgers album, not a Simon Reynolds book

I like this sort of thing, I think. Things were so in-your-face and over the top in the 00s. Mystery and subtlety started creeping back in around 2012/2013. I resisted for awhile and tried to like all the neon lights turned up music but the haze is my true nature, I fear

There’s this VEVO channel that shows new r&b artists, a lot of live in the studio stuff and there’s just so much ineffable soft gentle stuff with lots of electric piano and really soft drums that sound like the beginning of “footsteps in the dark” and yeah this kind of flutteriness or something.

Matt’s point about reverb-tech makes me think of a sort of parallel I see in “abstract” ambient electronica stuff, where theres been a really audible sense of “playing” with new control surfaces and plugins and so forth… sort of like “acid tracks” but with glitchy vsts instead of a 303… a lot of it I find difficult to listen to but there’s a lot of beauty as well. it’s like, people don’t have to grind so hard to make a pretty oval album or something now so they can throw all this other playful stuff in as well

“I think I'm just sick of the inert, gauzy dreaminess that is everywhere now, a sort of listless "interesting" production values“

I think I started to find myself hating this on Blonde by Frank Ocean and that seems like a million years ago and nothing has changed

I think this is definitely a thing and has a lot to do with streaming, Spotify in particular not wanting to offend people with abrasiveness or have them stop listening/skip for any reason, playlist culture, 'functional'/mood/background music, music as anesthetic, etc.

That said I'm totally guilty. It coincides with getting older, but I think I started listening to a lot of ambient music, Scandinavian jazz, etc during the pandemic when I was working from home for the first time (with other another person and a dog in the house). Obviously, I consider my taste impeccable and don't listen to the bland, corny playlist filler version of this stuff (or so I tell myself, lol).

Listening back to some stuff in the mid 90s: “oh weird, some of these guys think they can mix all genres into one pot, Cibo Matto are rapping”

Listening back to some stuff from the past 15 years: “oh weird, some of these guys think they can mix all genres into one pot, everything sounds like a boring beach house album”

For sure Frank Ocean's material after 2011 started to annoy me with its softness

i agree that this is a sound that has consistently been a big part of popular music for the past 50ish years, but also that there's a big wave of a new version of it happening in the past decade roughly. the major elements have already been pointed out - growth in easy access to digital recording technologies that encourage getting really fiddly with sonics and ambience, a pandemic-era search for music that is comforting and chill and relaxing, and streaming service algorithms. there's nothing inherently bad about it but like UMS said in the quote in the original post, a lot of it is feeling stale and omnipresent. time for the return to the return to the return to the return to rock!

*looks up from another Steve Roach album zoneout* Sorry, what?

I have an ambient album coming out next week, please don't cancel ambient music until after that, thanks.

the return to the return to the return to the return to rock!

good song title for your next record

Ethel Cain immediately comes to mind...

Also, musicians using looping onstage, for creative reasons and also as a more affordable way to tour, comes to mind.

didn't the pitchfork reviews reviews guy do a socio-political analysis of chillwave sonic aesthetics or did i make that up

Well, for a long time, really going back (at least as far as)to exotica and a then-minority trend in jazz, both in the 50s, and certainly as electronic options improve, for production and consumption (also weed), there's been music that emphasizes texture and atmosphere above all---for that matter, I've heard classical music headz refer to Vivaldi as "wallpaper," and I think it was Satie who said he aspired to (at least in some works) "musical furniture." It can be good, though there is indeed a shit ton of it, in or riding with every genre and subgenre tag.

For me it is not a problem with ambient music or things that have played with ambient sounds per se (such as vaporwave). It is when I hear something lazy presented as cooler than thou or “experimental”. Atmospherics do not make for interesting song writing. Atmospherics can add to something but often, it feels like padding out something, masking uninspired ideas.

That’s just me though. A lot of the bands or acts I have thought this about have gone on to massive success, so maybe I’m in the minority. I’ve not listened to many new albums this year so I am thinking more about Frank Ocean or Tame Impala and their rip offs when I say this. Someone said Ethel Cain and I think this is true of the Venn diagram crossing between Billie Eilish and Phoebe Bridgers influence too (Clairo-core?)

xpost So we shouldn't blame current times or customs too much. PS: I too have been getting back into new rock the past few years, ever since black midi and spin-offs showed up.

Clairo is exactly what the title of this thread made me think of, and I'd say I'm a fan regardless

If pop music has its coke eras and booze eras, makes sense that we're in the weed era.

clairo??? not sure i agree except for maybe the second record xp

first clairo record is crisp as hell

Clairo (and Eilish etc) is maybe a good example for vocal style though, quiet & intimate because people go from recording in their bedroom to making albums to eventually touring once it pops off. There's no interim step of having to project/scream for years at DIY shows with shitty PA systems.

Of course harder music could emp. texture and atmosphere too: Phil Spector, Beatles, Stones, many other, though usually with at least an attempt at catchy toons, hooks---Exile On Main Street and There's a Riot Goin' On took some people a while to get into, with production getting away from the slick-tasty-licks etc. ideal of so many big critical and/or commercial faves of that era.

Musically, a lot of this stuff doesn't really resonate (in every sense) enough to distract or disrupt, but I hear this languid lack-of-affect-as-affect in a different way than how I hear ambient music, possibly because it's often paired with hyper-personal lyrics. If you are attuned to the artist, their foregrounded words can help the material break out of the background/changing room/spa/restaurant playlist.

I also agree (not least after reading the Spotify book) that conformity to algorithms can become kind of a self-fulfilling/propelling factor. Another delayed influence on a lot of this music is (for example) Mazzy Star. I have no idea what put that band back on the radar, esp. for Gen Z, but all it takes is Lana Del Rey or Taylor Swift (or Jack Antonoff) riffing on that (importantly) pretty easy to dial in sound to set the stage for countless others to do the same. It's telling that afaict the brief Kate Bush resurgence didn't exactly a lot of imitators. Too weird! Too much work!!

Noodle Vague makes a good point, life provides me with quite enough toxic, jagged nightmarishness.

Not to say I specifically think a Phoebe Bridgers record is the right prescription (as a healing balm for the cares of this world), just sayin I can see the argument.

Quiet & intimate because people go from recording in their bedroom to making albums to eventually touring once it pops off.

The only way we can set things right is to go back in time and kill Godley and Creme before they can record "I'm not in Love."

I'm yet to encounter this gauzy dreaminess in my world. Left that shit behind in 2009 when bands like Grizzly Bear and Beach House were blanding away.

I've never knowingly heard Phoebe Bridger. Should I? Sounds like it's going to be Guardian reader music

Grizzly Bear got harder and weirder than most people remember, it was a rock show when I saw them last year.

Yeah, they quickly got pretty proggy!

the inert, gapdy dreaminess that is everywhere now

Ethel Cain immediately comes to mind...

Also, musicians using looping onstage, for creative reasons and also as a more affordable way to tour, comes to mind.

― coffee-themed romance ads (Eazy), Monday, 24 August 2026 18:12 (two hours ago)

Only Ethel Cain I've heard it "Perverts", and that definitely does not strike me as being easy listening dreampop.

I do recognise exactly the type of music described though, it's that "late night chillout mix on 6 Music" vibe. Pleasant and undemanding but doesn't really do anything and you wouldn't ever listen to an entire album of it.

something to do with this thread?

I mean, I figured it was simply reflective of the metacrisis

time to fall asleep reading Proust in a hammock while listening to Harold Budd. or the live the live Life with Buildings PS Exclusive, such choices in this year of a monday 2026

The production on the Bridgers album reminds me somewhat of 4AD stuff — gauzy/dreamy, but also with a sense of grandeur that occasionally breaks through to crescendos of sound. It's folky and floaty, not rootsy or rooted.

I definitely felt this in the mid to late 00s when stuff like "Two Weeks" was popping off. I wasn't into it then, the reverb, highs rolled off the mix, the languidness of it all. I now recognize that "Two Weeks" is a fantastic song, but at the time I really didn't get it. What I wanted out of music at the time (and what I still want, a lot of the time) was a quality of presence and lucidity. It's hard to articulate just what I mean by that, but I know it when I hear it, and it's not something that has anything to do with genre. A lot of ambient artists, especially the ones who use some kind of live or acoustic instrumentation (e.g. Stars of the Lid) have this quality IMO. It can be harder (but not impossible) to find with music that's 100% the product of a DAW.

(the best Albini recordings all have this quality)

The PB album has that Antonoff-thing where there's a million people credited on every track, and it sounds like a lot of it is getting pretty buried in the mix. There are songs where Caroline Shaw is credited with the arrangement, where I can hardly hear any harmonies. It's the same thing he did on a couple of Taylor Swift albums, and the last Miley Cyrus one did it too - there's a song on there with 3 (!) people credited on harpsichord, and you'll hardly notice the harpsichord.

I think it's also a way to signal that this is A-music (like with A-movies and B-movies once upon a time). So many ressource poured into it, clearly it's important, no? But yeah, it often just sounds gauzy and samey. I kinda like some of the PB songs, there is an astounding amount of things going on there if you listen closely in headphones, but I don't entirely get why they are there.

Also just a massive economic flex when studio time
Is so inaccessible to so many musicians

what are people actually complaining about exactly? idk, i feel like there's been music with vague dreamy vibes for ages and whether it's good or not has little to do with the dreaminess itself, and i don't think this has really changed lately or is particularly overrepresented in stuff that's popular or stuff that critics like lately?

i think the bridgers album is extremely overrated but the problem isn't really the production (which is pleasant enough), it's that the songs aren't there

Yeah that was basically my query. There’s also just so much music in so many different styles and vibes being released at any given point in time that pronouncing certain trends as sweeping almost necessarily requires a certain myopia or at least selective focus. Much easier for the follow trends amongst small circles of artists (e.g. early 2020s Taylor —> Gracie Abrams).

IDK, maybe one issue now is that in times gone by one kind of had to seek out inert gauzy dreaminess, so if you were feeling over it at any point you could ignore it, whereas now algorithms tend to create their own private long tails: if you listened to the previous two Phoebe Bridgers albums you are likely to be alerted to the arrival of the third. Trends die less and less easily, and persist less ignorably.

Would also be interested to what extent people primarily associate this vibe with female artists and female fronted bands, and where the outer borders are. Is Mk.Gee part of this? Justin Bieber?

Cloud rock might be part of it, might be something differnent. I think the special thing right now is so much pop music sounds like this right now. Even something that tries to be a banger, like Manchild, has this overstuffed floaty vibe. There's a sitar in the mix! If you told me a few years back, that one of the biggest hits of the year would have a sitar part, I would have thought it would sound a lot stranger than Manchild.

oh is this just people are kinda sick of antonoff again? and yeah i'm still kinda confused that aaron dessner has ended up having an actual career as a 'pop' producer of sorts

Antonoff is on the Bridgers album but I don’t really associate the sound/style being discussed here with him. I’m tired of him too, but not because he sounds like this.

It’s somewhat more Dessner than Antonoff, if we’re going to home in on Taylor Swift producers - the fact that Dessner is Abrams’ main collaborator really seals that deal IMO.

Anyway I think trying to extrapolate from Bridgers’ music in this regard is sort of difficult because Phoebe’s whole deal is a kind of studied inertness, regardless of the production style. Even her jokes, from the outset, were always the blankest of deadpans (“why do you sing with a British accent? I guess it’s too late to change it now”). That’s not even a comment on the quality of her songwriting - at her best she raises “inertness” to new heights. But it does mean that - however influential she has been, which is probably a lot - she’s probably always going to sound like she sits at the farmost extreme of a certain kind of bloodlessness.

I’m tempted to postulate that Wye Oak / Jenn Wasner are the real square root of whatever it is that we are talking about here.

i was thinking antonoff because frederik brought up "manchild" (as well as him being one of 5? producers on the bridgers album) - i don't think all his work has that quality but i can hear the complaint there

Oh yeah Antonoff isn’t immune by any stretch

that Antonoff-thing where there's a million people credited on every track

I suspect this might all be related, in that these albums I bet are not strictly products of people gathering together in a studio and more often the producer in a studio gathering together contributions from all these people (recorded separately, emailed in, whatever), and that maybe what we're hearing as gauzy homogeny is a conforming baseline blur to smooth over the cracks and contrasts of all these disparate and differently-sourced contributions. It seems pretty common these days, or maybe even more than it used to happen, to have people construct tracks or entire albums while on tour, piecemeal and ad hoc, as schedules allow.

Would also be interested to what extent people primarily associate this vibe with female artists and female fronted bands

This does seem to be a focus, but that's one reason I think it's good to bring up dudes like Hozier and Sombr or even Noah Kahan, who also imo sometimes exemplify this kind of generic haze, too. (Bon Iver might be in the mix somewhere as well.) It may go back to home recording practices, where reverb and double-tracked vocals are often enlisted as ways to cover up for both insecurities and technical deficiencies (both playing and recording); that's something the Cocteau Twins, for example, have cited as the source of their sound. Those inclinations may be sort of moot now in the sense that someone can probably record a high-quality radio-ready song on their phone, but I assume they're still common go-tos for someone starting out and experimenting, and when someone like Sombr or Gracie Abrams breaks through, their formative sound gets carried along with all the momentum. They don't necessarily have the time or luxury to disappear and evolve or change, they gotta keep pumping stuff out, and radical risk or change is not always rewarded.

Can I borrow this title for a McCabe & Mrs. Miller thread?

I’m tempted to postulate that Wye Oak / Jenn Wasner are the real square root of whatever it is that we are talking about here.

― Tim F, Tuesday, August 25, 2026 8:18 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

that last flock of dimes record is inert gauzy dreaminess perfected

and that maybe what we're hearing as gauzy homogeny is a conforming baseline blur to smooth over the cracks and contrasts of all these disparate and differently-sourced contributions.

That's a compelling point. It's a different thing, but I remember listening to some podcast about Hans Zimmer's current process where he gathers incredible groups of musicians and instruments for months, then has his assistants laboriously create bespoke multi-sample software instruments for him to compose with. Then you hear the final score and it's all smothered in the same reverb patch, and it sounds like some Kontakt preset that could have been done in a day.

bon iver is obviously an important influence on the current wave of like arena folk-pop acts but i don't think vernon really fits here, not inert really much at all

maybe eno is ultimately the one to blame here

I don't blame Eno, his production (at least of bands) is generally pretty weird and spiky and dynamic. Lanois, he is gauzier, but he is also really attuned to dynamics, too, hiding stuff in the murk but drawing specific voices or instruments out.

I can't know what ums actually was referring to but the description resonated with me, and in general I don't associate it with guitar based music or live instrumentation, but as others itt very much with music that sounds like it was created with VSTs in a DAW, and with the post-pandemic algorithm supported interest in music suitable for background listening

an upbeat song like "Purple" by Olivia Rodrigo might also be an example for me - it's like even the guitar solo is buried under layers of cotton

an uncanny DAW-based synthesis of the reverb-heavy digital sounds from the 80s revival with the muffledness of 70s egg-carton studio production

I agree that while this sound seems to be everywhere there are also completely different trends that seem omnipresent