Swedish indie-pop duo Club 8 may have run out of surprises a few records back, but few groups can match Johan Angergård and Karolina Komstedt when it comes to consistently producing thoroughly beautiful, immaculately crafted albums. The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Dreaming, their sixth album in just shy of a decade, follows the pair’s familiar footsteps through twelve tracks of gentle, melancholy guitars and Komstedt’s stunningly recherché vocals. If not much has changed since 2003’s Strangely Beautiful, no one is the worse for it; to squander such a reliably magnificent approach for the sake of experimentation would be a sin.

Instead, the listener is treated to an evenly balanced heaping of songs driven to a more upbeat tempo by shakers and rolling bass lines (as with the infectious “Heaven”) on the one hand and a generous serving of sedate, introspective slow-burners on the other.What The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Dreaming really does is further solidify Angergård’s standing as one of the most important figures in the contemporary indie music scene. In addition to his role here, Angergård helps run the phenomenal Labrador Records label, has a solo project–essentially the more masculine counterpoint to Club 8–in The Legends, and is a founding member of the ever pleasing and ironically named Acid House Kings. To call Angergård a a musical visionary is putting it mildly; the truth is that he has, with a little bit of help, given rise to a very specific international musical movement.

That said, the main attraction with Club 8 remains Komstedt, a singer whose vocals somehow manage to strike a breathtaking equilibrium between sexy sultriness and sweet naïveté. Her words, often set adrift among swirls of reverb, sound tinged by fire and utterly cute in the same breath. It is iconically alluring and unarguably the defining point of Club 8’s sound. Komstedt lends strength to every one of these dozen songs, elevating even the least ambitious parts of the whole, as with the otherwise unimpressive “Where Birds Don’t Fly.” Thankfully, such a need for support is rare on The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Dreaming–most of the songs here would be gorgeous enough to stand on their own, Komstedt or not.

Club 8 continues to be one of those rarest of bands, the kind who never let their listeners down and always deliver a little more than you would expect. The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Dreaming will be sure to please their increasingly large fan base and is a solid second choice for newcomers before their flawless 2002 release, Spring Came, Rain Fell.

Stream The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Dreaming in its entirety by visiting Club 8’s website.

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