In 1986, the British music magazine NME released the cassette-only compilation C86, a collection of songs by indie bands from across the UK. The bands represented on that tape -- Primal Scream, the Pastels, the Soup Dragons, the Shop Assistants, the Wedding Present, the Mighty Lemon Drops -- were all young and hungry, and taken together as a whole, they showed that something new was happening. These bands might have taken inspiration from the punk and post-punk explosions, and their thin, lo-fi sound was both an economic necessity and a holdover from that period. But they were interested in sadness and longing and sweet melodies and jangling guitars. They helped usher in a period of hazy, shimmery, heart-on-sleeve underground pop that came to be known as twee. That music helped kickstart underground scenes on both sides of the Atlantic, and pretty soon it became a genre and an aesthetic and then, eventually, a bit of an epithet. In time, it came to apply to bands like Belle And Sebastian who made lush, cinematic music that was connected to those C86 bands in spirit but not in sound. And 12 years after that original big-bang tape came out, the members of Girl Ray were born.