A skyfall playlist: The newest vaporwave music is climate-themed

This sub-genre has stayed committedly under the radar. It’s making another ‘comeback’ now, with a focus on the weather channel.

Vaporwave, a sub-genre of electronic music, should ideally be both listened to and watched.

The audio-visual packages serve as a throwback to the lo-fi 1980s and ’90s. The sound is meant to evoke memories of the steely ambience of shopping centres and an era of pixelated Internet interfaces. The imagery is drawn from the TV aesthetic of this era: neon colours, grainy resolution, VHS-style distortion.

Put together, the effect is of an analog dream in the internet era.

Adding to

The gaming industry (and certain apparel brands) have embraced the sub-genre’s retro-futuristic allure. Above, a still from the videogame Vaporwave Road VR.

Commercially, the genre has remained committedly underground. Proponents such as Ramona Langley aka Macintosh Plus aka Vektroid and Daniel Lopatin aka Oneohtrix Point Never aka OPN have indicated that going mainstream would commodify and dilute its message.

Because of this relatively low visibility, the genre is written off every few years, only to make a “comeback” each time.

This time around, the comeback is climate-themed.

Called weatherwave or climatewave, it includes work by artists such as Kana aka Dreamweather, DJ Bloody Sunday and Anima. Vaporwave tends to be lyrics-free, relying on distortions in sound, variations in tone and video to convey its message. Through their music and videos, then, weatherwave artists explore the climate crisis as a direct fallout of hypercapitalist culture.

On his eight-track album Conditions at Hickory (YouTube; June 2023), for instance, Dreamweather uses clips from a weather report from April 1989 merged with lo-fi electronic music, contrasting the present time with an earlier one when the weather was less apocalyptic, and the world less dystopian.

The first track begins with static, as if one were tuning into an early radio broadcast. Sounds of warning, beeping sounds and tornado sirens start to interrupt the music.

Weather channels have been a constant, and once provided a sense of comfort and familiarity in an unfamiliar place, but that is changing and he wanted to reflect that, Dreamweather has said, talking about the video on his YouTube channel.

“The genre’s dreamlike, disorienting quality mirrors the psychological state of living in an era of environmental degradation,” Narayan adds. “The fragmented, nostalgic sounds can be interpreted as a response to the instability caused by climate change and economic crises.”

Base notes

Through the years, the sub-genre has spawned micro-genres too. In 2016, there was a brief Simpsonwave.

Vaporwave itself can be traced to an earlier period of global instability and disillusionment.

The genre has its roots in 2009, as older millennials (those born in 1979-81) experienced their first disillusionments with the workplace and with the workings of late-stage capitalism, particularly in the wake of the US-led downturn of 2008.

As they mourned the loss of the utopias they were promised, artists such as Vektroid began to release those early, distorted audio-visual packages. The term “vaporwave” is attributed to music producer Will Burnett, who first used it in 2011 to refer to this emerging sound (Vektroid released his genre-shaping album, New Dreams Ltd, that year).

The word is a play on “vapourware”, a term for new technology that is promised but never delivered.

Through the years, this sub-genre has spawned micro-genres too.

“Hardvapor” takes a harsher, more brutalist approach, with techno sounds and computer-generated imagery focused on themes of dystopia and rebellion.

In 2016, there was a brief Simpsonwave, a micro-genre made up of YouTube videos that combined clips from The Simpsons (a millennial favourite that’s been running since 1989) with vaporwave music.

The apparel and gaming industries have embraced the sub-genre’s neon hues, glitch art and ’80s-’90s nostalgia. In 2018, Nike released a Vaporwave collection. Meta’s Oculus Quest 2 and Horizon Workrooms feature vaporwave-inspired virtual spaces. Virtual-reality games such as Vaporwave Road VR offer immersive neon worlds. And games such as Sunset Mall, Data Wing and Islands: Non-Places channel the sub-genre’s retro-futuristic allure.

Buying into these can feel a bit like trading in Che Guevara T-shirts. Anyway, the sense of eerie familiarity, dreamlike disconnect and longing are best experienced in the music.