Lucid Express is five young dreamers who create a stunning airy blend of shoegaze and indie pop amongst the skyscrapers, mountains, and packed alleyways of Hong Kong. The name itself a modest mission statement of the band's intent: lucid in the poetic sense of something bright and radiant.

The group formed as teens in the winter of 2014 in the turbulent weeks just prior to the Umbrella Movement. Listening to their blissful, dreamy compositions, it may come as no surprise that these songs carry the mood of their times of inception. With all members of the band working late-night shifts, this led to a rehearsal and recording schedule that found the band playing between midnight and 4am and then crashing together on the studio floor before returning to work early in the AM.

NME praised the "shimmering guitars and whirring synthesizers," while Drowned in Sound raved about the group's “ethereal grace” and Time Out lauded their "dreamy live performances."
 

Letting Up Despite Great Faults is an American indie dreampop band from Los Angeles, CA and Austin, TX. Making their mark with their acclaimed debut album (self-titled 2009) and Untogether (2012), they carved out a small corner of the dreampop world with their take on electronic shoegaze and indiepop jangle. After taking a hiatus which songwriter Mike Lee hails as their time to "become real adults," they came back with IV (2022) and a new album Reveries (2024) that pushes forward and further like never before, exploring new sounds and structure with a mature patience and confidence emblematic of "real adults."

Lee grew up in L.A. suburbia deeply inspired by 90's music. After graduating UCLA with an economics degree, he of course decided to start a band, but not like his garage band in high school...it had to include sampling, computer production, and analog synths. Quickly finding Kent Zambrana on bass, they started to shape their vision of bedroom dreampop. Fast forward to adulthood, Lee has attained a mastery at fitting complex layers of drum patterns, guitar riffs, and poppy melodies in a seamless menagerie. Now inspired by vastly different genres from drum 'n' bass to post-punk to K-pop, their version of dreampop has become larger and simultaneously very refined. Meticulously mixed by the amazing Melina Duterte (Jay Som), the new album Reveries yet again shows Lee wearing it all on his sleeve.

Taking their name from a mid-century avant-garde photography movement, Seattle’s Fotoform create melodic, gauzy, driving post-punk and darkwave. Their second album, Horizons, pivots from the wall of guitars on their self-titled debut to a more nuanced and cinematic canvas, fusing the textures of shoegaze and dream pop with the angular swing of post-punk. Now a trio of Kim House and Geoff Cox (C’est la Mort) and Michael Schorr (Death Cab for Cutie, Long Winters), Fotoform have further refined their plaintive, bass-driven kinetic swoon in “a riot of ‘80s post-punk.” (The Big Takeover) “Brooding and gorgeous, driving and delicate, atmospheric and urgent... If you’re a sucker for shoegaze, dream pop, post-punk, or any other music that makes you wish you were a teenager in the eighties coated in layers of eyeliner and hairspray, Horizons will scratch several of your itches.” (Tuned Up)
Press
“The excellent new LP from Seattle’s Fotoform pairs the moodiness of goth with drifting dream pop melodies, resulting in bewitching songs.” – Bandcamp New & Notable
“This Seattle band’s second album is a well-crafted blend of post-punk and dream-pop with atmospheric guitars and synths, driving rhythms, ethereal vocals, hypnotic song hooks and lyrics of grief, love and loss.” – KEXP
“One of the finest pleasures for fans is marveling over how a favorite band can regularly top previous releases. Drummer Michael Schorr and bassist/keyboardist/singer Kim House dig hard into hard-swinging, booming post-punk rhythms—simultaneously sonorous and mean—which vaults Geoffrey Cox’s guitar effects battering into cloudbursts of maximum dreampop. House’s pipes have never sounded more convincing, like Lush’s Miki Berenyi soldered into Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell. One of our greatest American Anglo-esque bands. Wow.”
– Jack Rabid, The Big Takeover