Photo courtesy of Dreams

Of the vast wasteland that the Internet’s become, you can still find a few undiscovered gems if you look hard enough — and Dreams is a perfect example. Hailing from the San Francisco Bay Area, Dreams, the brainchild of keyboardist Rob Shelton, are an expansive indie-pop band who recently set up shop in John Vanderslice‘s Tiny Telephone studios to record their first two songs, “Don’t Want This to Die” and a song inspired by a billboard sign, “With You.”

“‘With You’ was written over the course of two years, so it took a while,” Shelton tells Hive. “We were driving an old orange Volkswagon Beetle and we saw this billboard that read, ‘If you can’t take it with you, you stay longer.’ We all thought it was kind of a cool line, but I decided to take out ‘with you’ to make it darker and more open to interpretation.”

Indeed, the song’s a bit dark — vocalist Emily Ritz sings in the same childlike fashion that lines CocoRosie‘s work, while a potent vibraphone hints at Illinois-era Sufjan Stevens. It’s probably smart to mention that Thao Nguyen of Thao with the Get Down Stay Down provides backing vocals throughout, but that’s a back-burner aspect of this song. “With You”‘s hook is an intricate weave of pop, jazz and funk, with Ritz emoting in a confident, haunting fashion — ultimately, a promising introduction to a band that we shouldn’t sleep on.

Dreams’ debut LP is will arrive in 2012.