REVIEW: Meltt - Pathways

A splash of color

47:30 // June 12, 2026 // Nettwerk

If I didn’t know what “dream pop” as a genre typically signifies, I’d feel like Meltt’s third album qualifies perfectly. This Canadian band embraces the kind of shimmery neo-psych stylings that I typically like but rarely love, full of bouncy rhythms, easy grooves, and charming synth hooks, but with Pathways, the group has embraced both an exuberant, grand psychedelic pop sound and an immersive, dreamlike vibe.

Since recently discovering them, I’ve found Meltt to be a cut above most of their competitors - 2019 debut Swim Slowly was absolutely gorgeous, and if 2023 follow-up Eternal Embers felt a bit too generic, it was still a solid effort. Nonetheless, the third time is indeed the charm, and Pathways truly feels like the collective coming into their own.

There’s a bit of a contradiction at the heart of this new record. On the one hand, Pathways is as accessible and irresistible as anything I’ve heard this year - a more vigorous song like “Up All Night” is ludicrously catchy, while even a slower-paced ballad like “In Your Arms” feels vast, a super-sized soundscape one can live inside. On the other hand, though, Meltt embraces a moodiness here which stands apart from the easy-going vibes which dominated their earlier work. Even the song titles (“Another Elegy”, “Goodbye”, etc.) hint at a sense of departure, a navigation of change, and there’s certainly a sense of seriousness here. A song like “By Your Side”, with its reminiscence on carefree youthful days, summons up a sense of longing and loss, and the alt-pop sheen of closer “In Good Time” doesn’t cover up its mournfully rustic foundation.

So yeah, Pathways feels like an evolution for Meltt, but its key success is besting their prior albums at their own game. These songs are groovy without fail, and balance catchiness with sublime sense of build-up and collapse. The album is “vibrant” and “lush” and all the other words you might ascribe to Meltt’s music in general, but all those descriptors feel more apt than ever here, and there are some transcendent moments to be found within, like the opening of “Never Let Go”, which is both otherworldly beautiful and more than a little eerie.

In those flashes, Pathways feels close to perfection for this style of neo-psych music. That the album doesn’t quite stick that landing most comes down to an aura of “same-iness” throughout. Meltt offers a variety of “modes” here, but many of the songs are, while reliably gorgeous, a bit hard to distinguish from each other. Mostly, that’s not a complaint - this kind of album is most suitable to throw on and pull yourself into a wonderful daydreaming trance state - but it still suggests to me that the best is yet to come for Meltt.

8.0/10