Setting the gentle melancholia of shoegaze melodies to sugary indie pop beats, Astral Swans auteur Matthew Swann is an influential and iconoclastic Calgary indie scene mainstay that produced underground alt-pop legends.

In the decade following the release of his debut full-length, Swann has consistently explored an expanding sonic palette, from the stark art folk of 2015’s All My Favourite Singers Are Willie Nelson, through 2021’s definitive Astral Swans. The latter is a feast of spectral, shimmering pop with deliberately crafted chaos interspersed. The record blends that giddy, early ‘60s pop and the factory melancholia of New York avant rock in 1968, tied together with the kind of charismatic ennui that grows pretty naturally on the fertile artistic fringe of the Canadian Prairies’ definitive all-business boomtown.

Astral Swans delicately balances the self-aware beauty of sugary shoegaze pop with noise rock elements that never detract from the craft of Swann’s songs, like watching the wind breathe through the trees with one eye wide open, while seeing the rest of world’s bustle through the kaleioscopic facets of a diamond.

- Mike Dunn