Treasure

Treasure (1984) is Cocteau Twins at their most complete — Elizabeth Fraser’s voice treated as pure texture, Robin Guthrie’s guitar processed into something that operates more like reverb than like an instrument. The 4AD label understood that certain kinds of beauty require a particular quality of blurriness, and Treasure is the fullest expression of that understanding.

The aesthetic genealogy running from Treasure forward is long: shoegaze as a movement is substantially descended from what Guthrie was doing with reverb and delay here, and the cold, gauzy quality that Johnny Jewel built the Italians Do It Better label around is the same thing filtered through an Italian-disco and David Lynch prism. Treasure is one of the records Jewel absorbed; the Symmetry material is one of the places it ended up.