You are curled up in soft socks by the window, wearing that jumper that has gone slightly oversized after one too many washes (you know you shouldn't tumble-dry it, but here we are). The headphones — the big, ear-swallowing kind — have finally found their way into your everyday style. You are sipping hot chocolate with a marshmallow melting slowly on top. And every so often, the headphones shift just slightly on your head — that is the music doing it. We know exactly what is playing. It is dream pop.

So, what actually is dream pop? Think pop or alternative rock where the atmosphere matters almost more than the song itself. The vocals tend to float, half-submerged in the mix; guitars swim through reverb and delay; synths stretch out into a soft, blurred background; and the lines between individual instruments dissolve on purpose. The term was coined back in 1980, tied to the British duo A.R. Kane, who used it to describe their own blend of psychedelia, dub, post-punk, and experimental sound.

You won't find them on this particular playlist, though — if someone ever wrote the definitive dream pop syllabus, they would sit right at the very beginning of it. The real backbone of that syllabus would be Cocteau Twins — Heaven or Las Vegas.

From there: Night Tapes — Dream — the more modern, electronic-leaning edge of dream pop. yeule — Don't Be So Hard on Your Own Beauty — territory where dream pop starts bleeding into glitch, electronic and experimental pop. Jay Som — Anak Ko — a warmer, more intimate indie-dream-pop take — less otherworldly than Cocteau Twins, more like a hand on your shoulder.

So if you are after the perfect background hum for staring out the window and quietly working through your to-do list — press play.