Chamber pop

Chamber pop (also called baroque pop and sometimes conflated with orchestral pop or symphonic pop) is a music genre that combines rock music with the intricate use of strings, horns, piano, and vocal harmonies, and other components drawn from the orchestral and lounge pop of the 1960s, with an emphasis on melody and texture.

During chamber pop's initial emergence in the 1960s, producers such as Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Burt Bacharach, Lee Hazlewood. Other highly influential and formative musicians of the genres are the Beatles with "Yesterday" and the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson. Wilson's productions of the Beach Boys' albums Pet Sounds and Smile are cited as particularly influential to the genre. Another influential artist in the genre was Van Dyke Parks, who worked on Smile with Brian Wilson and released his own album, Song Cycle in 1968.

From the early 1970s to early 1990s, most chamber pop acts saw little to no mainstream success. The genre's decline was attributed to costly touring and recording logistics and a reluctance among record labels to finance instruments like strings, horns, and keyboards on artists' albums.

In the mid-1990s, chamber pop developed as a subgenre of indie rock or indie pop in which musicians opposed the distorted guitars, lo-fi aesthetic, and simple arrangements common to the alternative or "modern rock" groups of that era. In Japan, the movement was paralleled by Shibuya-kei, another indie genre that was formed on some of the same bedrock of influences. By the 2000s, the term "chamber pop" would be inconsistently applied to a variety of bands whose work attracted comparisons to Pet Sounds.