Over the last five years The Reds, Pinks & Purples have released six albums and countless singles & EPs, all breathing fresh life into the cerebral, leftfield pop that animated the gloomy teens, college DJs and record store clerks of the 80s and 90s. Such touchstones as The Go-Betweens, The Smiths, Magnetic Fields, and Felt are obvious inspirations, but their prolific, prodigious talent for mood and melody have virtually created their own genre, and "Unwishing Well" is its purest embodiment yet.

Channeling sold gold influences like The Pastels, Comet Gain, Orange Juice and The Aislers Set, The Umbrellas represent the fertile San Francisco Bay Area scene at its most pop-tastic. "Fairweather Friend" follows-up their surprise-hit 2021 debut in fine fashion, featuring sterling songwriting and arranging, bigger and more nuanced production, and terrific, assured vocals all around. The Umbrellas have swung for the fences with this new album and it's a bold, beautifully-executed success.

SF Bay Area textural pop group Torrey delve deep into a translucent dreamworld on their self-titled sophomore album. Bending classic shoegaze, rainy day indie rock sounds, and 90s alt rock flair into more intricate forms, the band uses these guitar-forward songs to shape-shift between gentle drifting and noisy breakthroughs. Some touchstones might include Lush, Drop Nineteens, Cocteau Twins and The Breeders, but Torrey have a deft grasp of their craft and a forward-thinking studio approach that places them very much in the NOW.

New Jersey's Lightheaded have conjured, through some mysterious alchemy, a distinctive flavor of pop that draws as much from 60s Brill Building, garage-pop and folk-pop as it does from the DIY indie explosion of the 80s/early 90s. Their debut EP "Good Good Great!" shows that band core Cynthia and Stephen are clearly students of pop in all its permutations, but they wear their influences lightly -- a typical Lightheaded song could have been released in 1966 or 1986, but in fact sounds just right in 2023! The sound has just right amount of elemental murk, drawing to mind a mythical collab between Phil Spector and Curt Boettcher's Sagittarius, working their way through the Goffin & King songbook.

Oakland CA's Blue Ocean blend elements of shoegaze, pop, noise rock and electronics, striking a precarious balance between noise and melody that recalls forebears like Disco Inferno, Bark Psychosis and Flying Saucer Attack. "Fertile State" shows the band at their noisy best. Reverberating guitars swirl around what is at it's heart a lovely pop song, erupting into peels of feedback a la early Jesus & Mary Chain. It's a bracing, intoxicatingly fresh take on noisy pop from a band to watch.

"Perfect Worlds," the newest album by San Francisco's mysterious lo-fi pop legend Tony Jay, delivers an intimate record of thirteen dreamy, assured arrangements that further cements Tony Jay's status as a dejected crooner of the quotidian par excellence. Drawing inspiration from failed relationships, lack of sleep, a bicycle injury, and depression, Tony Jay (helmed by SF scene mainstay Michael Ramos) pairs catchy melodies and hushed vocals with ethereal instrumental tracks.