Vaporwave

Vaporwave is an Internet music microgenre, aesthetic and meme that emerged in the early 2010s. It is defined partly by its slowed-down, chopped and screwed samples of smooth jazz, elevator music,

Characteristics#

Vaporwave is a hyper-specific subgenre, or “microgenre”, that is both a form of electronic music and an art style; however, it is sometimes suggested to be primarily a visual medium. The genre is defined largely by its surrounding subculture, with its music inextricable from its visual accoutrements. Academic Laura Glitsos writes, “In this way, vaporwave defies traditional music conventions that typically privilege the music over the visual form.” Musically, vaporwave reconfigures dance music from the 1980s and early 1990s The name derives from “vaporware”, a term for commercial software that is announced but never released. It builds upon the satirical tendencies of chillwave and hypnagogic pop, while also being associated with an ambiguous or ironic take on consumer capitalism and technoculture. incorporates 1990s Web design and imagery, glitch art, and cyberpunk tropes, and 3D-rendered objects. VHS degradation is another common effect seen in vaporwave art. Generally, artists limit the chronology of their source material between Japan’s economic flourishing in the 1980s and the September 11 attacks or dot-com bubble burst of 2001 (some albums, including Floral Shoppe, depict the intact Twin Towers on their covers).

Precursors#

Pitchfork reviewed the album Life’s a Gas (1996) by German musician Wolfgang Voigt under the name Love Inc. as evoking “the approach vaporwave producers would take 15 years later, stripping bits of ephemeral radio pop down to ghostly patinas and examining our relationships with the stray songs that rattle around in our memories.”

Origins#

Vaporwave originated on the Internet in the early 2010s as an ironic variant of chillwave It was one of many Internet microgenres to emerge in this era, alongside witch house, seapunk, shitgaze, cloud rap, and others. Vaporwave coincided with a broader trend involving young artists whose works drew from their childhoods in the 1980s. Around the same time, Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never) uploaded a collection of plunderphonics loops to YouTube surreptitiously under the alias sunsetcorp. that presaged vaporwave in its concern for “spacey” electronic music and GeoCities web graphics. The musical template for vaporwave came from Eccojams and Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual (October 2011). Eccojams featured chopped and screwed variations on popular 1980s pop songs, According to Stereogums Miles Bowe, vaporwave was a fusion between Lopatin’s “chopped and screwed plunderphonics” and the “nihilistic easy-listening of James Ferraro’s Muzak-hellscapes”. A 2013 post on a music blog presented those albums, along with Skeleton’s Holograms (November 2010), as “proto vaporwave”.

Early scene#

Vaporwave artists were originally “mysterious and often nameless entities that lurk the internet,” Adam Harper noted, “often behind a pseudo-corporate name or web façade, and whose music is typically free to download through MediaFire, Last FM, SoundCloud or Bandcamp.” Vaporwave found wider appeal over the middle of 2012, building an audience on sites like Last.fm, Reddit and 4chan. On Tumblr, it became common for users to decorate their pages with vaporwave imagery. In September, Blank Banshee released his debut album, Blank Banshee 0, which reflected a trend of vaporwave producers who were more influenced by trap music and less concerned with conveying political undertones. while Ash Becks of The Essential noted that larger sites like Pitchfork and Drowned in Sound “seemingly refused to touch vaporwave throughout the genre’s two-year ‘peak’.”

Wider popularity#

In November 2012, seapunk aesthetics were appropriated in music videos by the pop singers Rihanna and Azealia Banks. The exposure catapulted the subculture to the mainstream, and with it, vaporwave. That same month, a video review of Floral Shoppe, published by the YouTuber Anthony Fantano, helped solidify the album as the representative work of vaporwave, but was also credited as a pivotal moment in the decline of the genre. Soon after vaporwave was spotlighted in the mainstream, it was frequently described as a “dead” genre. Such pronouncements came from the fans themselves. Joe Price of Complex reported that “most of the subgenres faded away, and many didn’t make sense to begin with…. The visual aspect formed faster than the sound, resulting in releases that look the same but fail to form a sonically cohesive whole.” In 2013, YouTube began allowing its users to host live streams, which resulted in a host of 24-hour “radio stations” dedicated to microgenres such as vaporwave and lo-fi hip hop. The Swedish rapper Yung Lean and his Sad Boys collective inspired a wave of anonymous DJs to create vaporwave mixes, uploaded to YouTube and SoundCloud, that appropriated the music and imagery of Nintendo 64 video games. Titles included “Mariowave”, “Nostalgia 64”, and "" Dazed Digitals Evelyn Wang credited Lean with “allowing vaporwave to leak IRL and encouraging its unholy coupling with streetwear”. She cited their associated fashion staples as “frowny faces, Japanese and Arabic as accessories, sportswear brands, Arizona iced tea, and the uncanny ability to simultaneously communicate in and be a meme.” At the end of 2013, Thump published an essay headlined “Is Vaporwave the Next Seapunk?”. The album I’ll Try Living Like This by Death’s Dynamic Shroud.wmv was featured at number fifteen on the Fact list “The 50 Best Albums of 2015”, and on the same day MTV International introduced a rebrand heavily inspired by vaporwave and seapunk, Tumblr launched a GIF viewer named Tumblr TV, with an explicitly MTV-styled visual spin. Hip-hop artist Drake’s single “Hotline Bling”, released on July 31, also became popular with vaporwave producers, inspiring both humorous and serious remixes of the tune. The scene also maintained a dedicated following on communities such as Reddit. Despite their objections to the label, serious artists of the movement continued to be tagged as vaporwave. In September, he organized the first-ever vaporwave festival, 100% ElectroniCON, in New York City, where various artists associated with the genre such as Saint Pepsi, Vaperror, Nmesh, 18 Carat Affair, and Clanton himself performed live, most of them for the first time in their careers.

Political appropriations#

In December 2012, Dummy published what was considered the “definitive” article on vaporwave, authored by Adam Harper, in which he equated the genre to accelerationist political theory. The article inspired “a wave of content ambiguously celebrating a dystopian capitalism”. In early 2016, the satirical publication Rave News reported that prominent vaporwave producers had scheduled an emergency summit in Montreal to discuss “creeping fascism” in the scene. Although the article was facetious, its comment section attracted many vaporwave fans who defended such political beliefs. In 2017, Vice Penn Bullock and Eli Penn reported on the phenomenon of self-identified fascists and alt-right members appropriating vaporwave music and aesthetics, describing the fashwave movement as “the first fascist music that is easy enough on the ears to have mainstream appeal” and reflective of “a global cybernetic subculture geared towards millennials, propagated by memes like Pepe the Frog, and centered on sites like 4chan”. In 2026, CBC News reported that 47th U.S. president Donald Trump had published fascist vaporwave edits, known as “fashwave”, to the White House’s social media account, with some edits referencing Right Wing Death Squad.

Parody, subversion, and genre#

Vaporwave was one of several microgenres spawned in the early 2010s that were the brief focus of media attention. Also from Pitchfork, Patrick St. Michel calls vaporwave a “niche corner of Internet music populated by Westerners goofing around with Japanese music, samples, and language”. Vice writer Rob Arcand commented that the “rapid proliferation of subgenres has itself become part of the “vaporwave” punchline, gesturing at the absurdity of the genre itself even as it sees artists using it as a springboard for innovation.” Speaking about the “supposedly subversive or parodic elements” of vaporwave in 2018, cultural critic Simon Reynolds said that the genre had been made redundant, in some respects, by modern trap music and mainstream hip hop. He opined: “What could be more insane or morbid than the subjectivity in a Drake record or a Kanye song? The black Rap n B mainstream is further out sonically and attitudinally than anything the white Internet-Bohemia has come up with. Their role is redundant. Rap and R&B… is already the Simulacrum, is already decadence.” In a 2018 Rolling Stone article that reported the Monkees’ Mike Nesmith’s enthusiasm for the genre, author Andy Greene described vaporwave as a “fringe electronic subgenre that few outside irony-soaked meme enthusiasts have even heard of, let alone developed an opinion on.” Nesmith praised the genre and attributed its sound to be highly reminiscent of psychedelic trips. Music critic Scott Beauchamp wrote that vaporwave’s stance is more focused on loss, the notion of lassitude, and passive acquiescence, and that “vaporwave was the first musical genre to live its entire life from birth to death completely online”. He suggested that expressions of hypermodulation – precisely tuned “micro-experiences” resulting from social media algorithms funneling different people with similar interests into obscure topics – inspired both the development and downfall of vaporwave.

Capitalism and technology#

Vaporwave is cited for espousing an ambiguous or accelerationist relationship to consumer capitalism. Numerous academic books have been published on this subject, a trend that was provoked by Adam Harper’s 2012 Dummy article and its attempt to link the genre to punk rock and anti-capitalist gestures. Philosopher Grafton Tanner wrote, “vaporwave is one artistic style that seeks to rearrange our relationship with electronic media by forcing us to recognize the unfamiliarity of ubiquitous technology… vaporwave is the music of ’non-times’ and ’non-places’ because it is skeptical of what consumer culture has done to time and space”. Commenting on the adoption of a vaporwave- and seapunk-inspired rebrand by MTV International, Jordan Pearson of Motherboard, Vice technology website, noted how “the cynical impulse that animated vaporwave and its associated Tumblr-based aesthetics is co-opted and erased on both sides—where its source material originates and where it lives”. Michelle Lhooq of Vice argued that “parodying commercial taste isn’t exactly the goal. Vaporwave doesn’t just recreate corporate lounge music – it plumps it up into something sexier and more synthetic.” In his 2019 book Hearing the Cloud: Can Music Help Reimagine The Future?, academic Emile Frankel wrote that vaporwave was reduced to “a commercial shell of itself” by those who fetishized the 1980s and “retro synth-pop”. He likened the scene to PC Music, a label that “was seen to warp from an ironic affirmation of commercialism, to become just regular pop…. Anything that uses irony as a method of critique runs the risk of misrecognition.”

Eccojams#

Eccojams (also known as echo jams ) is a microgenre and early progenitor of vaporwave originally coined by musician Daniel Lopatin with the release of Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1 (2010). According to Lopatin, the style began as a simple exercise in looping a slowed-down segment of a song while adding vibrating echoes. It would become an influence on early vaporwave artists such as b0dyg0d, Ramona Langley, INTERNET CLUB, MediaFired and EEGPROGRAMS, with Lopatin describing the style as “a DIY practice that didn’t involve any specialized music tech knowledge”.

Vapor#

In 2025, the Vaporwave News Network stated that the term “vapor” was an umbrella genre, citing Rate Your Music’s entry for the term, or a “meta-genre”, while citing writer Roy Shuker’s book Popular Music Culture: The Key Concepts ’ definition of “meta-genre”. The publication stated that vapor “unites around the digital appropriation of recontextualized signifiers and sounds. It points to something greater than the formation of a static music genre- it’s like a cloud of particles that when grouped together form something you can almost see, feel, and touch but is also destined for entropy and will eventually scatter into many different directions”.

Future funk#

Future funk is a French house-inspired offshoot that expands upon the disco and house elements of vaporwave. with reference points including Urusei Yatsura, Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Kimagure Orange Road, and Sailor Moon. Most of the music samples are drawn from Japanese city pop records from the 1980s and 1990s, and the genre has led to an increased exposure of city pop music to Western audiences. Yung Bae, and Night Tempo.

Simpsonwave#

Simpsonwave is an Internet aesthetic and YouTube phenomenon that emerged in the mid-2010s. In late 2015, user Spicster uploaded an edit of the American animated television series The Simpsons to the song “Resonance” by HOME onto Vine. The video went viral and sparked a trend featuring scenes from The Simpsons paired with various vaporwave tracks.

Late night lo-fi#

Late night lo-fi (or late-nite lo-fi) is a subgenre featuring slowed-down 1980s pop and jazz that emulates recorded programs on old 4:3 televisions.

VHS pop#

VHS pop is a more upbeat variant of late night lo-fi characterized by a richer sound and vibrant, nostalgic aesthetics.

Utopian virtual#

Utopian virtual is an offshoot of vaporwave originally coined by musician James Ferraro with the release of Far Side Virtual (2011), which showcased Ferraro’s concept of a “virtual life soundtrack,” combining crisp, unreal early 3D computer graphics with vaporwave textures. The style later became associated with the Frutiger Aero Internet aesthetic.

Signalwave#

Signalwave (or broken transmission) samples and distorts radio broadcasts, television programs, and station idents, particularly from The Weather Channel. Representative artists include 猫シ Corp and CT57.

Slushwave#

Slushwave is the ambient branch of vaporwave, creating immersive soundscapes with extended tracks often exceeding 10 minutes. Notable artists include t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者, SOARER, and desert sand feels warm at night.

Genre family: 2010s in music, 2020s in music, 21st-century music genres, American styles of music, Electronic music genres, Experimental music genres, Indie music, Internet music genres, Retro-style music, Visual arts genres