Armor For Sleep‘s classic debut LP Dream to Make Believe turned 20 this year, and now it’s getting its first-ever vinyl release to celebrate the anniversary. We’ve got an exclusive opaque white variant, limited to just 350 copies. Check out a mock-up above and pre-order yours in the BV shop.
Armor For Sleep have two upcoming festival appearances scheduled at the moment: Furnace Fest and the 2024 Emo’s Not Dead cruise.
We included Dream to Make Believe in our list of 30 classic emo and post-hardcore albums turning 20 in 2023, and we said:
Armor For Sleep hailed from the fertile NJ scene that seemed to be birthing breakout emo bands left and right in the early 2000s, and they fit right in with the emo-pop boom of the time, but were also going for something a little more atmospheric than some of their peers. The band said they were aiming to sound like “Thursday meets Radiohead” on their debut album Dream to Make Believe, and multiple reviews compared them to ’90s space-rockers Hum, years before it became common to hear Hum’s influence on emo bands. Their interest in dream pop and space rock came through in the lyrics of their debut LP too, which literally tackled subjects like dreaming and outer space, alongside the relationship themes that were commonplace in emo. And their interest in creating something a little more ethereal was assisted by the gracefully-aging production style and synthesizers of Ariel Rechtshaid, who did some of his earliest production work on this LP (before going on to produce Charli XCX, Sky Ferreira, Blood Orange, Vampire Weekend, and more). Armor for Sleep clearly had good taste, but they were also great songwriters, and that more than anything is why Dream to Make Believe continues to hold up so well. Their masterpiece is its 2005 followup What to Do When You Are Dead, but they were already showing signs of greatness on Dream to Make Believe and classic songs like its title track and “My Town” remain some of their best.
Watch the video for the title track below and pre-order our new variant of Dream to Make Believe in the BV shop.