Dream pop and the specific problem of being a guitar-based genre in an era when synthesizers are the dominant instrument is something current artists navigate in interesting ways.

Dream pop started as a guitar-based genre — the Cocteau Twins, the Sundays, early Mazzy Star. The guitar, heavily processed, was the primary texture instrument. Over time the genre has become increasingly synth-dominant, and a lot of what currently gets called dream pop is primarily synthesizer-based with guitars as secondary elements or absent entirely.

I don't think this shift is a problem — synthesizers can do everything that dream pop needs texturally, and in some ways more. But it does create a generation of dream pop artists for whom the guitar is not the primary creative tool, which produces different compositional instincts.

The guitar-based dream pop that I find most interesting now is usually coming from artists who are making a specific choice to work with the guitar rather than defaulting to synthesizers. The deliberateness produces different music from either pure guitar-based or pure synthesizer-based approaches.