Working for a music site, I’m constantly inundated with press releases and review submissions. After a while, it all starts to bleed together, like a never-ending Pandora station with messed up seeds that plays in the background.

But every once in a while, something grabs my attention, like a nugget of gold in the muddy silt of a riverbed. As a mineral, Gypsum may not be very valuable, but the band that bears its name was enough to make me feel like an old timey prospector.

Their debut record came across my inbox and, after ignoring it until the week it was out, I was instantly enraptured by the genre-bending songwriting, rich atmospheres, kinetic grooves, and engrossing harmonies.

Every so often a record comes out that scratches a very specific itch that you didn’t know you had, and then proves the only balm for that ailment. For me, one of those records is Warpaint, the self-titled record from the LA-based, all-female indie rock quartet of the same name. That record’s blend of shoegaze, post punk, alt-rock, and flirtations with R&B and Pink Floyd-y prog created an alchemical reaction in me that I no other record came close to—even in the rest of Warpaint’s discography. I’ve returned to it many times in the eight years since its release to get the same buzz that record gives me.

And while I don’t want to be reductive toward Gypsum, themselves an all-female indie band from Los Angeles, I can’t accurately talk about this record without mentioning that it scratches the exact same itch as Warpaint’s self-titled.

I don’t mean this in terms of sonic similarity or derivative songwriting—not one bit. Sure, they employ a similar arsenal of intricate grooves, acrobatic bass lines, and spacey guitars to accompany their wafting, soulful vocals, but those sonic touchstones aren’t unique to either Gypsum or Warpaint. It’s not just that it sounds similar—plenty of albums use the same sort of sounds. It feels similar.

Much of this feeling has to do with the ethos with which Gypsum and Warpaint approach the records. They are beautiful, haunting, and just plain cool, yes, but. There is also a playfulness that takes it from sounding nice to being irresistible. Songs like “Snow White” with its trap-like drum machine tick, “Margaret“with its Kim Gordon-esque spoken word monotone, or the driving “Lungs” are gorgeous, but also fun in a way that much similarly gossamer music can’t reach.

Much of this playfulness is likely due to the origins of the band: the members spent years playing together in weekly low-stakes jam sessions before they decided to form an official project and start writing their own songs. Additionally, the chemistry formed in those early jam sessions is present on every song on the disc.

In all, it’s a brilliant and charming record, especially for a debut—and more people need to hear it. The way I heard the band being discussed early on, it felt like they had a massive hype machine behind this release, which was set to explode. But as of this writing, their biggest single on Spotify has a measly 3,000 plays. Only two tracks from this record breached the 1,000-play threshold required to have their play count show up—and not by much. If you’ve been reading this blog but don’t always listen to the albums I cover here, do yourself a favor and please, please, please change that for this record. You won’t regret it.