Cherry Stars Collide — Three Records Returning from the Dark of Dream Pop
Cherry Stars Collide: three records — Inrain, Swallow, and the box that gives them their name — bring back to light the forgotten season of dream pop and shoegaze. Hauntology biting its own tail.
They've been resurfacing in waves, between 2023 and 2026, records all from the same season — the dream pop and shoegaze that had 4AD for their capital.
They were buried, then, under the American explosion: grunge, Nirvana, the hunger for dirty guitars and direct rage swept away the music that instead whispered, muffled itself, hid in the reverb. That music hasn't aged. It only waited. And now it returns — not out of nostalgia, but because its moment, missed the first time, is being fulfilled late.
It's the purest definition of hauntology: not the ghost of a past that was, but the ghost of a future that never happened, and that keeps haunting the present, asking to exist. Three releases in 2026 embody it, each with a different form of return.
A handful of recordings that Alison Shaw of Cranes and Rudy Tambala of A.R. Kane cut in the early Nineties in a Stratford studio, after Geoff Travis had brought them together, and that stayed in a drawer for thirty years before Music From Memory pulled them out. Five tracks. One of them, "Biology", doesn't come from then but from 2012, twenty years after the others — and this, more than anything else, says what Rise is: not a time capsule, but an object with a crack in time running through it.
"Grow" opens with guitars breathing that dreamed-up new wave where gaze pushes past the barrier of genre, and Shaw's singing recalls Cocteau Twins without imitating them — the same idea of voice as luminous glossolalia, words that count for their sound before their sense. Drum machine and bass lend it a pop air that's almost a trick: beneath the easy surface there's already all the emotional ambiguity of the duo.
"…and Julie Rose" is the track that throws you most. It starts trip-hop, with an organ stained with the Sixties, and from there something estranging happens: it's as if the Doors landed on a Californian coast and found a teenage Alison Shaw waiting for them, already wrestling with her demons. Her voice doesn't sing — with a cartilaginous quality, not yet ossified, it shapes the matter instead of resting on it. A ghost guitar swells in the volume as in the early New Order.
"Sleep" is a college jingle seen through post-traumatic dread: voice reverbed until it loses itself, arrhythmic percussion over velvet. It's an experimental transition with a precise father, that Pygmalion which schooled all of intimist post-rock — the song dismantled down to its acoustic skeleton, the space between the notes counting more than the notes.
And then "Biology", the 2012 intruder, where a square-wave synth ought to make everything inappropriate and instead the opposite happens. Alison is the lighthouse the songs can't escape, not even in their oblique deviations: the lighthouse that shines regardless. A union can rarely be so wrong and so perfect at once. It's the forgotten beach where we feel safe precisely because no one knows it exists.
"Sleep (Piano Mix)" closes, a digital-only bonus, and it's not a remix that opens the track — it's a remix that closes it further, sinks it into that unconscious from which the duo had drawn its inspiration. The piece returns to where it came from, and Rise ends where a record like this had to end: not in a conclusion, but in a reabsorption. The voice re-entering the dark it had surfaced from thirty years ago, and again in 2012, and now once more, for us.
Artist: Inrain
Album: Rise 2026 (Music for Memory)
Duration: 18'
Genre: dream pop, ethereal wave, trip-hop
Tracklist: Grow, …and Julie Rose, Sleep, Biology, Sleep (Piano Mix) (Exclusive Digi Only Bonus)
The return in time: Inrain — Rise
There's a season that was never photographed well, because it was already fading as it happened: the last fires of 4AD, late Eighties and early Nineties, before the American explosion drew attention elsewhere and left certain records to float in the dark. Swallow's Blow is one of those. It comes out now, inside the collection Blown, like a gem left underwater for thirty years — reconstructed from the original twenty-four-track tapes, remastered in Berlin, restored to a light it hadn't had time to receive in 1992.
"Blow" — one of the two unreleased tracks — is a swan gliding into ethereal pop, and it holds up today as it held up then, when the emotional fervour that generated those sounds was still in the air. As simple as it is beautiful: a shoegaze signed by Cocteau Twins, a few guitar notes first clean — a light chorus, a veil of reverb — then dirtied with distortion, with a touch of Cranes in the tension, held up by synths with an orchestral breadth. "Lovesleep" is more pop in its build: the voice surfaces for a few stretches and withdraws, the cutting guitars make it just as magnetic, and the feedback closes the track leaving the tail open, like a door no one comes back to shut.
But what makes Blown more than a fine reissue is its doubleness. Blowback — the second disc — is Blow remade by the band themselves, unhappy with how the production had smoothed their intentions: the same tracks taken apart into dissonant, instrumental, ambient versions, "Oceans and Blue Skies" and "Head in a Cave" returning stripped of the voice, "Peekaboo" turning to dub, the melody withdrawing and giving the field over to texture. It's the same record twice, dressed and then undressed — and to hear them back to back is to hear a band quarrel with its own ghost, to recognise that the right form of a song is always the one that wasn't cut the first time.
It's hauntology without anyone calling it that: a sound returning from a time that never had its moment, recognised only now that the season which bore it is definitively past. Blown asks to be heard as what Swallow wanted to be and couldn't — finally, and too late, which is after all the only time certain things arrive.
Artist: Swallow
Album: Blown 2026 (4AD)
Duration: 93'54"
Genre: dream pop, ethereal wave, shoegaze
Tracklist: Lovesleep, Taste Like Honey, Sugar Your Mind, Mensurral, Peekaboo, Lacuna (Instrumental), Oceans & Blue Skies, Follow Me Down, Halo (Instrumental), Cherry Stars Collide, Head in a Cave, Blow, Lovesleep (Vocal Version), Oceans and Blue Skies (Blowback Version), Head in a Cave (Blowback Version), Taste Like Honey (Instrumental), Peekaboo (Dub), Sugar Your Mind, Follow Me Down (Excerpt), Mensurral (Instrumental), Cherry Stars Collide (Instrumental)
The return in form: Swallow — Blown
And then there's the monument. Cherry Stars Collide – Dream Pop, Shoegaze & Ethereal Rock 1986-1995 is the collection Cherry Red put out in 2023 to fix that season in four discs — Mazzy Star, A.R. Kane, Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil, Slowdive, Lush, Dead Can Dance, Julee Cruise, and dozens of half-lit gems beside the names everyone knows. An act of canonisation: to take a current no one had then wanted to give a stable name — dream pop was a vague formula, an umbrella term more than a genre — and tell it, at last, this is what you were.
The box sold out. And in 2026 it was re-pressed, because the hunger for that season won't settle: the more it's gathered, the more it's wanted. It's the third kind of return, and perhaps the most vertiginous. Inrain returns in time; Swallow returns in form; Cherry Stars Collide returns as history — the season looking at itself in the mirror, cataloguing itself, making itself a book, and then having even to reprint its own book because they keep asking for it.
But there's a detail that closes the circle with a precision that seems written by fate. On the fourth disc of Cherry Stars Collide, at track number three, there's a song by Swallow. It's called "Cherry Stars Collide". The box that gathers the whole season takes its name from a song by one of the records we've watched resurface on this very page — and that song is inside the box, giving its title to the monument of its own era.
It's the point where hauntology bites its own tail. Dream pop no longer returns only from the past: it returns from itself, quotes itself, gathers itself, reprints its own collection. The season that never had its time now finds it multiplied — in the resurfacing of the single records, and in the canon that contains them and bears the name of one of them. Not a past that returns, but a present that no longer knows how to do anything but return. The cherry stars keep colliding, thirty years on, and they give off more light now than they did then.
Artist: Various Artists
Album: Cherry Stars Collide 2026 (Cherry Red Records)
Duration: -
Genre: dream pop, ethereal wave, shoegaze
Tracklist: 65 tracks across 4 CDs — an anthology of the dream pop, shoegaze and ethereal rock scene, 1986-1995 (Cocteau Twins, Mazzy Star, Slowdive, A.R. Kane, Swallow and others).
The return as canon: Cherry Stars Collide
Rise (Music From Memory, 2026) · Blown (4AD, 2026) · Cherry Stars Collide – Dream Pop, Shoegaze & Ethereal Rock 1986-1995 (Cherry Red, 2023; reissue 2026)
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