vaporwave

Vaporwave is an internet music genre and visual style from the early 2010s: slowed-down 80s and 90s muzak, pink-and-teal sunsets, Roman busts, palm trees, old computer graphics and Japanese text, all with a heavy dose of irony.

What vaporwave means

As music, vaporwave takes smooth jazz, elevator music, R&B and lounge tracks from the 1980s and 1990s, then slows, loops and chops them until they sound dreamy and slightly wrong. As a look, it pastes together 90s web design, glitch art, Greek and Roman statues, Memphis Design shapes, 3D renders and anime.

Online, “vaporwave” often just means that look: a neon grid, a marble bust, a sunset, and text spaced out wide like Ａ Ｅ Ｓ Ｔ Ｈ Ｅ Ｔ Ｉ Ｃ. A lot of it is a sly comment on consumer culture, the malls, ads and tech promises of decades past, played back hazy and strange.

Examples

• “The whole album cover is vaporwave: pink sky, palm tree, Roman bust.”
• “My desktop went full vaporwave in 2014 and never recovered.”
• “If it sounds like a shopping mall at 3 a.m., it’s probably vaporwave.”

Where it came from

Vaporwave grew out of chillwave and other internet-born scenes around 2010 and 2011. Producers Daniel Lopatin and James Ferraro made early records in the style, and Ramona Langley’s 2011 album Floral Shoppe, released as Macintosh Plus, set the template. Fans gathered on Last.fm, Reddit and 4chan, and new artists put out music on Bandcamp under pseudonyms.

After the mid-2010s, vaporwave was often declared dead and treated more as a meme than a genre, which annoyed plenty of producers. The visual style never really went away, and it spawned offshoots such as future funk and mallsoft.

Related terms

• Frutiger Aero: glossy mid-2000s tech optimism.
• Y2K: the look of around 2000.
• Liminal space: eerie photos of empty places.
• Analog horror: horror styled like old TV.

More looks with names are in our aesthetics guide.