Dream pop and the question of whether it's a genre or a production aesthetic is one I find genuinely difficult to answer.

If dream pop is a genre, there should be compositional or structural characteristics that define it independent of production — a specific approach to melody, harmony, or song structure that you could recognize in a stripped-down performance. I'm not sure this is true. Most of what I'd describe as dream pop depends significantly on production choices: the reverb, the layers, the specific approach to the mix.

If dream pop is a production aesthetic, then any music with those production qualities is dream pop regardless of the underlying composition. This seems too permissive — a rock song recorded with heavy reverb is not automatically dream pop.

My current thinking is that dream pop is a combination: a specific production aesthetic applied to music that has certain emotional and compositional tendencies — a preference for melody over riff, a concern with atmosphere and texture, a lyrical register that is more abstract than confessional. Neither element alone is sufficient; both together start to define the space.