I’ve always had a soft spot for Brittle Stars, a late-90s indie pop band from Gainesville, Florida that broke up far too soon. With just one album and one jumbo-sized EP (twice as long as the album!) under their belts, Brittle Stars don’t have a lot of material out there, and their former label, Shelflife, is going through a reogranization that may have thrown both those releases out of print. But should you manage to track them down, you’ll find some classic indie pop tracks, well before indie meant Bloc Party and Interpol. For starters, the name Brittle Stars perfectly describes the delicate, spacey, synthesizer-driven sound (though in fact it’s a reference to a type of marine life resembling a starfish). On some of the louder tracks there’s a distinct lo-fi shoegazer vibe, though the wall of sound appears to be more like one overdriven, fuzzed-out guitar. But when the band tosses out the guitars altogether, something special happens—they give us a glimpse into a spaced-out kind of indie pop that comes pretty darn close to pure euphoria. “So Unfair” is a case in point: riding on waves of soft keyboard notes and Estelle’s hushed vocals, “So Unfair” is two minutes and twenty-one seconds of bliss—the sort of bliss that conjures up in my mind the feeling of floating in outer space.

Estelle left Florida in 2000 for greener pastures, and by that point another member, Josh, had already filed his two weeks notice. After a couple of farewell shows the band drifted apart. Dan Sostrom (finally a last name for someone!) is still in Gainesville, running the dream-pop label Clairecords with his wife Heather; Estelle, meanwhile, has ended up in New York City playing in a new band called Elephant Parade.