White Poppy

White Poppy

Paradise Regained

Not Not Fun

Crystal Dorval’s dream-pop journey as White Poppy spans over a decade, the last half of which has centered on a song-writing cycle called ‘Paradise Gardens,’ documented across a trilogy of LPs: Paradise Gardens (2020), Sound Of Blue (2023), and Ataraxia (2024). Its muse is a fusion of bedroom shoegaze and bleached bossa nova, with shades of new age, private press pop, and outsider tropicalia. Paradise Regained collects 11 outtakes, B-sides, and alternate mixes from the ‘Paradise Gardens’ vaults to showcase the flux and exploration of Dorval’s process. Melodies simmer and resurface in different windswept moods, changing with the seasons. Each song lives a small lifetime between conception and final arrangement, billowing and shapeshifting like threads of dreams still unwoven.

White Poppy

Ataraxia

Not Not Fun

The concept for and palette of Crystal Dorval aka White Poppy’s ‘Paradise Gardens’ trilogy first germinated in 2016 as a notion of “paradise music” combining new age, bedroom shoegaze, and bossa nova into “transcendental Tropicalia.” As she filled tapes of recordings exploring the idea, many of the songs gradually gravitated towards the hermetic dream pop her project is best known for, becoming the albums Paradise Gardens (2020) and Sound Of Blue (2023). Dorval describes these collections as a sort of “emotional purging or shadow work,” before arriving at “the state of inner paradise:” Ataraxia. As the third, final, and most purist realization of the original ‘Paradise Gardens’ vision, Ataraxia delivers. Nine instrumentals of nimble guitar, elevated bass, clean rhythm, and clear light, gliding like swans on a shimmering pond. There’s a sense throughout of playful tranquility, of serenades at sunset, of kisses of blissful Muzak wafting along a boardwalk. But behind the music is a patience, grace, and levity born of Dorval’s personal journey with spiritual healing that paralleled the trilogy. A process of transmuting pain into beauty, day by day, melody by melody, cleaving the darkness from the soul and re-entering one’s rightful home in the Garden.

White Poppy

Sound Of Blue

Not Not Fun

From the grey-skied isles and horse farms of British Columbia comes the second volume of Crystal Dorval aka White Poppy’s “Paradise Gardens” trilogy: Sound Of Blue. Originally conceived back in 2016, the album was then recorded, finessed, abandoned, resurrected, overdubbed, and finally mixed into nine refinements of daydream shoegaze and therapeutic pop, born from bedroom epiphanies and long winters of the heart. From slowdive reverie (“Apathy,” “Melancholic Serenity”) and color wheel psychedelia (“Time”) to spiral chorale (“Happy”) and finger-picked drift (“Wiser”), Dorval’s songcraft moves between escape and acceptance, tracing delicate melodies from undercurrents of loss, light, and solitude. It’s music for memory gardens and pastel horizons, dreaming of bliss and distance, but bound to the here and now: “Thinking about leaving here forever / thinking about leaving here for good / but I keep holding on for something / hoping that it could get better than this / what’s one more night?”

White Poppy

Paradise Gardens

Not Not Fun

British Columbia dreamer Crystal Dorval’s latest and lushest kaleidoscope-pop long-player took root four years ago as a hazy notion of “new age shoegaze bossa nova.” Across reflective summers and long winter nights in a thin-walled shack on a remote rural horse farm the vision evolved, eventually centering on a mythical muse, Paradise Gardens, somewhere between utopian sanctuary and decaying tropical apartment complex. Though the songs began as attempts to “transcend darkness,” over time they absorbed shadows and sorrows of their own, becoming lessons in coexistence: “learning to be with it all.” The album evokes overlapping vignettes within this layered fantasia: fading flowers along a balcony, distant birds above the surf, light glittering off a courtyard pond, sunset skylines darkening to lavender night. It’s a place of healing but also heaviness, fragile peace contoured with pains of the past.  White Poppy’s music has always been mirage-like but here her voice, guitar, keys, and soft-focus siren designs feel uniquely potent and distilled, weathered and wizened by years and yearning, the weight of memories of memories. These are melodies of psychic questing and self-discovery, at the edge of illusion and insight, glimpses of heaven half-remembered and half-imagined: “Paradise is a place within.”

White Poppy

Natural Phenomena

Not Not Fun

Crystal Dorval from Vancouver, Canada, has been making healing, distorted rug-gaze music from a coastal mindset all her own since 2011. Natural Phenomena is her second album, and it echoes 2013’s self-titled effort in its isolationist origins, as the record emerged slowly across a nine-month retreat alone on a farm on Vancouver Island: “Some days I would only add one tiny guitar line or keyboard texture and that would be it for the day… it was a long process.”  However grueling and gradual the method, what accrued is gold—ten of Dorval’s deepest dreamdives, starry ambient pools and dissolved guitar designs, ghosted through a lens of grey-skied pop. Songs wax and wane across faded rainbows of guitar, sunrise keyboards, looped percussion and vocal ocean-spray.  Behind Dorval’s gauze of warm noise glows something pure and newer than new age: “My hope is that these positive feelings will be communicated sonically, or in essence, and will be enriching for listeners.” A high height for a climbing talent; White Poppy blooms on cliffs of light.

White Poppy

S/t

Not Not Fun

White Poppy, the “experimental therapeutic pop” project from British Columbian inner-peacenik Crystal Dorval, has been evolving fresh forms for a couple years now. Last winter, packing a satchel full of four-track tapes, she ventured out from her bedroom haven and boarded a boat across the Strait of Georgia to the town of Ladysmith, on Vancouver Island, to The Noise Floor Recording Studio, to mastermind and mix the ten deluxe, delirious dream-gaze gems comprising her self-titled full-length debut. Fusing the warm, washed tonalities of her earliest cassette-blurred lotus meditations with a richer range of glittering guitar gestures, sky-way keyboard cascades and neon-violet vocal refractions, White Poppy captures the catchy, dizzy fuzz and textured, opiated heights of Dorval’s deceptively vulnerable songcraft. The see-sawing balance of faded, forlorn freefalling (“Emotional Intelligence,” “Existential Angst”) with buoyant, blissed independence-pop (“Wear Me Away,” “Without Answers”) conjures a real rainbow mood ring three-dimensionality, a kaleidoscope of intimate drifter soul. True-gaze for a newer age.

White Poppy

I Had A Dream

Not Not Fun

From out of the coastal, cloud-covered conifer forests of Canada’s coolest west coast enclave (Vancouver, BC) comes this blithe slice of exploratory gauze-pop majesty by one-woman guitarist-looper-siren-producer White Poppy (aka Crystal Dorval), I Had A Dream. The moniker conjures her soundworld astutely. The spiraling, sunblind ascent of “Wish & Wonder,” “In The Window”, and “Free” feel like levitating over fields of poppies, opiated pollen glowing gold in the air, while a scrappy, early 4AD/Rough Trade 7” obscurity’s rhythm section rides a lock-groove somewhere down by a glittering stream. Deeper in, “In Over” out-Cocteau Twins the CT’s (in terms of delay pedal sensuality), while “I Had A Dream” and “Treeforts” both percolate and pirouette dizzy blurs of electric guitar, practice-amp bass fuzz, cardboard drums and skywashed vocal mists. A lot of the songs have this beautifully bewitching ‘fantasy band’ vibe that makes the project feel less solitary and 4-track-y than its origins. A mesmerizing debut and hopefully a harbinger of things to come.