Dream pop is a subgenre of alternative rock that developed in the 1980s. The style is typified by a preoccupation with atmosphere and texture as much as melody, often resulting in an ethereal or dream-like sound. The term was coined in the late 1980s by Alex Ayuli to describe the music of his band A.R. Kane and later adopted by music critic Simon Reynolds to describe the nascent shoegazing scene in the UK. In the 1990s, dream pop and shoegazing were regionally dependent and interchangeable terms.