Dream pop and the question of what role lyrics should play is something I come back to constantly.

The genre's production approach — the buried vocals, the textural treatment of the voice — creates a specific relationship to lyrical content. If nobody can hear the words clearly, what is the point of having specific words? Why not just use phonemes as pure sonic elements?

The answer I keep arriving at is that the lyrics matter even when they're not fully audible because they shape the emotional content of the vocal performance. When a singer is actually saying something specific, the delivery carries information about what that something is even through the production haze. The lyrics affect the prosody, the emphasis, the emotional register of the vocal even when you can't decode the semantic content.

This creates an interesting situation where dream pop lyrics can do their best work without being heard. The specific words aren't as important as the fact that specific words are being sung — they create the specificity of feeling that phonemes alone couldn't.