Orchids - What About It

During their inception, shoegaze and dream pop were genres for the lovelorn, wistful inhabitants of art schools across England, Ireland, and the United States. The Jesus and Mary Chain crooned for their sweethearts on songs such as “Just Like Honey”, while my bloody valentine began their first album, Isn’t Anything, with the sugar sweet “Soft as Snow (But Warm Inside)”. 

However, while the legions of chain-smoking, stylish hipsters making it have remained largely the same, the genres have undergone a radical transformation. The endlessly-chic wave of nugaze has cast aside the melodramatic romance of yesteryear, embracing dour songs to cross your arms to. Swervedriver and Should, previously second-tier classics, have skyrocketed in popularity. Their dense, grinding sounds are heard everywhere in the likes of TAGABOW, Nothing, and Whirr, while the jangly, twee-and-brit pop inspired sounds of Chapterhouse and Lush have fallen out of vogue.

What About It, the single by Philly dream pop act Orchids, turns that entire paradigm on its head. Saccharine and sunny, it is a testament to the brief period of time where Asobi Seksu and Rumskib dominated shoegaze and dream pop in the early 2000s. 
Even still, Orchids is not regurgitating more seldomly sourced influences. Instead, they blend critical elements of shoegaze and dream pop’s zeitgeist (i.e. heavy utilization of post-production effects, pitch shifting vocals, and other modulation) to create a sound all their own. Nostalgic without being reductive and candied without becoming glacé, What About It is just the strongest entry in what is already shaping up to be a strong catalog for Orchids.