Heavenly voices: the ethereal wave canon

The record that fixes the whole vocabulary. By 1984 Robin Guthrie's guitar had become pure halo and Elizabeth Fraser had abandoned plain English for a private language. Track titles like "Lorelei" and "Pandora" are the closest thing to a lyric sheet you'll get. Everything ethereal wave does later, it does because Treasure did it first.

Their 1990 peak, and the one to start with if you start anywhere. The fog lifts just enough that you can almost make out words, and Fraser, pregnant and then a new mother across the sessions, sings with a warmth the earlier records held back. 4AD's biggest seller, and still the genre's most beloved single album on RYM.

Not a band so much as Ivo Watts-Russell directing the 4AD house as a repertory company. The 1984 debut turned cover versions into something funereal and weightless: Tim Buckley's "Song to the Siren," sung by Fraser over Guthrie's guitar, is the moment most people remember. This is where the studio itself becomes the lead instrument.

The 1986 double album, longer and stranger than its predecessor, drifting between vocal set-pieces and instrumental tone poems. Less consistent than the debut, more ambitious. This is where This Mortal Coil stops being a covers project and starts sounding like a séance. Go here once the debut has its hooks in you.

Their 1985 turn away from post-punk and toward the cathedral. Lisa Gerrard's contralto, and her invented language-less vocal lines, meets cello and timpani and a sense of medieval grandeur. RYM tends to file it under neoclassical darkwave, but this is the record where ethereal wave grows a spine.

1987, and the most severe thing in the catalog. Brendan Perry's gothic baritone holds one side of the album, Gerrard's wordless flights the other, an orchestra strung between them. It moves like a funeral procession and never once apologizes for being this solemn. The high-water mark for the lineage's grand-scale ambition.

The forgotten 4AD instrumentalists, mostly wordless by design, dub-inflected, all texture and atmosphere. This 1985 LP is what the label's signature sound looks like with the voice taken out entirely, which makes it the clearest X-ray of the form anywhere. Robin Guthrie produced; the Cocteaus were clearly paying attention.

Alison Shaw's child-like, helium soprano is the most divisive voice in this whole guide. You surrender to it or you bounce off it hard, no middle ground. The 1991 debut wraps that voice in slow, heavy, almost doom-paced arrangements. Proof the ethereal could be unsettling instead of pretty.

4AD's first American signing, recorded in a Michigan bedroom and assembled by Ivo from Warren Defever's home tapes. The 1990 debut is fragmentary and dreamlike, Karin Oliver's vocals floating in and out of focus. The hinge record: where the British house style crosses the Atlantic and starts to mutate into something looser.

The American underground's answer, formed in Arizona in 1988. Mike VanPortfleet's 1991 album runs colder and more glacial than anything on 4AD, drum machines like distant traffic, guitars like wind across an empty parking lot. Ethereal wave rebuilt from the desert up, with all the warmth scraped off.

The title is the thesis. This 1996 double album is Lycia at their most desolate: ninety minutes of frozen, slow-burning atmosphere, with Tara VanFlower's vocals added as a second ghost in the mix. The genre's great winter record, and the one Projekt-era fans defend hardest.

Projekt's flagship act, and the prettiest thing on the label. Suzanne Perry's wordless vocals sit over Ryan Lum's chiming guitar, and the 1992 debut is almost aggressively gorgeous: a direct American descendant of the Cocteaus with none of the menace. This is where ethereal wave becomes purely a balm.

The 1994 follow-up, warmer and more assured, with Perry's voice mixed forward as the lead instrument it always wanted to be. The band drifted toward downtempo and trip-hop on later records, but Ardor is the form held at its most concentrated. The Projekt sound at full bloom.

Another Projekt cornerstone. Dru Allen's operatic soprano over goth-leaning, processional arrangements; the 1991 album leans closer to the darkwave side of the family. The voice-as-instrument logic is identical to the rest of this list, though. Underrated even within a scene that's underrated by default.

Seattle's contribution, and a quieter one. Dara Rosenwasser's voice is breathier and more human-scaled than the genre's usual sopranos, and the 1995 album trades grandeur for intimacy. That makes it the rare ethereal wave record that feels like it's being sung to one person in a small room. A genuine sleeper.

Michael Plaster's one-man project for Projekt, and the saddest entry here by some distance: bare arrangements, a low male voice, a fog that never burns off. The 1994 debut takes the ethereal palette and points it inward at depression. Not pretty so much as quietly wrecked.

The latecomer who proved the form still had life in 2005. Erin Welton's soprano over Scott Ferrell's layered guitar, explicitly a Cocteau Twins descendant and unembarrassed about it. Long after most of the originals had moved on, Autumn's Grey Solace kept quietly perfecting the recipe, one album after another.