Empress Of's fifth album arrives after the 2025 California wildfires burned down her family home. Dream House, released on Major Arcana/Giant Music, transforms that loss into what our source review calls "a gorgeously humid, hopeful album that makes a virtue of her searching nature."

Lorely Rodriguez has cut a restless, inventive figure since the early 2010s. She has slipped from raucous pop to silkier sounds and explored her Honduran-American heritage. On her previous album, she flipped the staple awards-season phrase "for your consideration" into a full-frontal club-pop meditation on uneven relationships. Dream House makes a feature of this searching nature.

The record is about the rebuilding of the physical house — birdsong-dappled field recordings of its construction keep popping up across the album — but it also contemplates what it means to feel at home in yourself and with others, according to the review.

For all the violent loss behind the record, it sounds remarkably airy, free and open-hearted. The directness of For Your Consideration softens into a humid atmosphere bright with hope. Rodriguez's undulating synth lines bubble with impatience and ecstasy as they cushion her soaring voice.

The bangers leap above the fray. SYW, featuring Cecile Believe, elegantly twists EDM to evoke an uncontainable desire. The equally yearning HandsOn sparks with glassy chimes and battering percussion. I Pray 4 U evokes the frisky joy of Jayda G. Machete, dwelling on defiant post-breakup rebirth, slices like a laser through the night sky.

The review positions Dream House as a tender and openhearted rebirth — an album that takes literal devastation as its starting point and finds, in the act of rebuilding, a broader meditation on belonging.