REVIEW: Sugar Plant – one dream, one star

Dream pop veterans celebrate 30 years with one of their best records to date

43:15 // March 18th, 2026 // KiliKiliVilla

Sugar Plant are one of dream pop’s best kept secrets – and they’ve held that title for so long that at this point they’re also among its more enduring veterans. Their ‘90s discog is an understated goldmine for all things sentimental and soothing, from their slowcore roots to the psychedelic reveries of their 1996-1998 middle years to their lounge-pop opus Dryfruit: each release marks a clear aesthetic evolution from the one before, but they’re nothing if not consistent in their hazy memories and tender disclosures, never shying away from the purity of simple emotions. The band’s Bandcamp accurately places them within the orbit of Yo La Tengo and Galaxie 500, while professing that they were born out of shared love for the most lethargic American songwriters of the ‘60s --- and whatdyaknow, even their adorable cover of the Flaming Lips’ “Turn It On” sounds several steps closer to the Velvet Underground’s “Pale Blue Eyes” than the scuzzy banger of its source text.

If that’s not proof enough of consistency, then just look at how they barely missed a beat from one side of an 18-year recording hiatus to the other! Their 2018 comeback Headlights is hardly their defining record in terms of songwriting, but it’s remarkable how inspired their engagement with the sound still sounded: Headlights could just as easily have dropped in 2001, a year on from Dryfruit, and its lush tones would have sounded no less at home within the band’s palette.

Now eight years on from Headlights, the same is true for Sugar Plant’s new record one dream, one star, their eighth in 30 years of activity. From a purely aesthetic standpoint, this record is as good as it gets for dream pop past or present: any given second is gorgeous lushness, its tones redolent of the same twilit ‘90s-vintage bedroom psych you’ll associate with the likes of Mazzy Star or Yo La Tengo’s seminal And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out but mixed for the best of contemporary hi-fi. The album’s reverb layerings are an absolutely perfect balance of maximum resonance vs. minimum sacrifice of clarity — you could transcribe every note of this record by ear without particular exertion, and how often can you say that of any record pigeonholed as dream- anything? The light percussion presence allows ample breathing space for the band’s melodious arsenal of guitar/keys/bass, while vocalist Chinatsu Shoyama’s performance is velvet to the point that she’s barely recognisable as the same young dreamer who once strained and pined over the lo-fi guitar clangings of the band’s early material. From start to finish, one dream, one star is the work of a band who have long since mastered their engagement with the form and still take evident joy in what they do.

What marks the album out (and immediately sets it above Headlights for me) is the character that each track brings to the table. This much is clear from the pivot between opener “sunrise”, a lackadaisical psychedelic cut reminiscent of the band’s Happy era, and “calling”, a mid-tempo cruiser that begs for rainy nights and delirious hand-in-hands; from here, the tracklist beats any allegations of dream pop homogeny with its changes of pace and variegated songwriting templates. The slow tracks in particular benefit from this: “only to know you”s a misty-eyed slow dance would likely fly under the radar in an album-long lull, but on this tracklist it lands as one of the most affecting and memorable moments, while “travelling”’s winding slowcore coda and the syrupy tone of “flow”’s bossa-adjacent verse phrasings also land for their singular qualities where other acts might have played them for mooch.

However, the greatest prize owes little to situational placement and boasts the kind of bulletproof songwriting that can hold its own on just about anyone’s terms: “blue submarine” rides on the kind of chord-for-chord precision that hearkens as far back as vintage Beatles, but its lethargic pacing and the stately jam of its coda both sound quintessentially Sugar Plant. So much the better: a beautiful song through and through.

There’s only so much analysis to be done before we’re left scratching our elbows with little to dissect beyond the chance to bliss out and be grateful — one dream, one star’s palette is rich enough to be studied, but the scope of this music is intuitive enough not to bear scrutiny. It’s a little moot to consider how well the record will stand the best of time when it’s expertly compiled from tones, stylings and heartfelt sentiments that have already done exactly that, and while I wouldn’t set it quite on bar with Dryfruit, it’s beyond encouraging to hear Sugar Plant drop one of their strongest end-to-end releases to date after a long period of inactivity. In a field so often associated with Peter Pan-isms, with unmade beds and a young adult romantic worldview filtered through endless rewatchings of Twin Peaks (God bless), perhaps it shouldn’t be so surprising that the most enduring reveries come suffused with this kind of maturity.

8/10

Further listening:

Sugar Plant – Dryfruit
Yo La Tengo – And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out
Lightning Bug – A Color of the Sky
Mazzy Star – Among My Swan