“Dream More Vivid” is just grounded enough to make you wonder if the dream ever ended.
What hits first is that Silver Liz know exactly how to make chaos sound graceful. “Dream More Vivid” is all shimmering edges and soft collisions—trip-hop textures rubbing against shoegaze haze, while Carrie’s voice floats like it’s trying to remember something half-forgotten. There’s a pulse that feels almost like late-’90s nostalgia, yet the whole thing moves with the precision of someone who’s spent hours tweaking the tiniest frequencies until they hum just right. You can almost hear the domestic intimacy of it—a song built in a Brooklyn apartment, but carrying the expanse of a city dreamscape.
The song’s theme feels deliciously human: the high-school-reunion type, that person who can’t help but tear others down to mask their own disappointment. But instead of leaning into cynicism, Silver Liz turn the story into something empathetic—a portrait painted in synth and fuzz, suggesting that behind every “hot mess”, there’s just another person trying to dream more vividly, to rewrite what’s already been lived.
Production-wise, Matt Wagner’s restlessness is everywhere. The Sweet Trip-style glitches, chopped breakbeats, and harp samples give the track a sense of endless movement. You get the feeling he didn’t want the song to stop morphing—and maybe that’s the point. “Dream More Vivid” is about becoming something else, refusing to stay still, even when the world says you should.
About Silver Liz:
If you’ve followed Silver Liz through their evolution—from the jangly charm of “I Can Feel the Weight” to the shimmering experimentation of “It Is Lighter Than You Think“—you’ll hear “Dream More Vivid” as a leap and a homecoming. Matt and Carrie Wagner’s story—meeting over a stray mention of The Strokes, surviving Chicago winters, and now shaping soundscapes in Brooklyn—reads like a love letter to indie persistence. Their upcoming album, “III“, promises to be their most idiosyncratic yet: electronic, emotional, and unmistakably them.
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