The 10 Best Chillwave Albums

Revisiting the nostalgic bedroom pop of the late aughts

“Chillwave is when you're at a South Carolina beach with friends and while wading in the ocean far, far from the shore someone asks 'we need to head back soon?' And you have work in the morning, an 8 a.m. meeting maybe, but you emulate the quiet ripple of the tide and you say 'naw, we'll make it back,' and you're right. You do make it back.”

This quote comes from a woman named Christy Mullins, who’s a friend of the musician Chaz Bear alias Toro Y Moi. During a day trip together, she’d taken a photo of Chaz fueling up at a gas station, which he used as the cover of his 2010 single Leave Everywhere. Then she posted this heartfelt note on her blog.

Toro Y Moi, Leave Everywhere (2010)

Speaking more concretely, chillwave was a form of dreamy, sun-soaked indie pop, made by one-man band projects like Toro Y Moi, Washed Out, Neon Indian and Memory Tapes, in the late aughts and into the 2010s.

Remember when everyone first got on Instagram, how people were using this filter app, Hipstamatic, to make their photos look like old, faded Polaroids? This is what the music sounds like, but in a good way.

At the time, various terms were thrown around to describe the music: Chillwave, glo-fi, dreambeat, hypnagogic pop or h-pop. Chillwave was the one that stuck.

It was essentially the result of bedroom beatmakers trying to write indie pop songs, and indie rockers trying their hand at making lo-fi beats.

Spiritual predecessors can be found in the hazy nostalgia of Boards Of Canada’s Music Has The Right To Children (1998), the warped drones of avant-garde guitarist Christian Fennesz’s albums Endless Summer (2001) and Venice (2004), even the dusty, raw soul loops of the late J Dilla’s Donuts (2006).

The movement was implicitly political, because it was a reaction to the 2008 global financial crisis – think college kids retreating into memories of their carefree childhoods in the face of economic collapse. Realizing they would never be able to pay back their student loan debt, they didn’t get angry and break stuff but resorted to making laid-back tunes that felt like a soundtrack to a never-ending, grainy Super 8 family vacation film. Call it resignation. I’d rather frame it as acceptance. Collapse now, and avoid the rush.

In the early 2010s, critics were arguing whether chillwave was complete, utter bullshit (Jon Pareles in the New York Times) or “the most interesting and vital, stupid indie phenomenon” of its time (Brandon Soderberg in The Village Voice). Most of the leading chillwave artists left chillwave territory behind when their sophomore albums were due on a slightly bigger indie label with a bit more budget, often to the detriment of their music.

2009’s “summer of chillwave” has since become the same distant memory that the music once evoked. But it became hugely influential not just to its most direct subgenre successor, vaporwave, but also to the pop and electronic music of the following decade. Find below a roundup of 10 chillwave albums (and EPs) that still hold up today.

1. Panda Bear – Person Pitch (2007)

In 2005, Noah Lennox alias Panda Bear of the experimental rock band Animal Collective moved to Lisbon, Portugal. When his guitar was held up in customs, he had just a Boss Dr. Sample SP-303 at his disposal for a few months after the move overseas. He’d bought it because the hip-hop producer Madlib had reportedly used it on his classic Quasimoto album, The Unseen (2000).

Not having his guitar around, Lennox experimented with layering his characteristic, Brian Wilson-inspired vocal harmonies over sampled loops, edited and manipulated on the SP-303. The results of these experiments would inspire a whole generation of indie musicians and songwriters to try out working with samplers and electronics, essentially kickstarting the chillwave movement. And yes, this album came out roughly two years before the genre term was even coined.

2. 18 Carat Affair – Spent Passions (2009)

You can hear echoes of Person Pitch in the cocktail of psychedelic sounds bubbling up in the blogosphere at the time, such as Denys Parker’s early recordings as 18 Carat Affair. Some of the Kansas-based musician, songwriter and bedroom producer’s works apparently go all the way back to 2005; these 30 demo songs were self-released as a collection of MP3s to burn to a CD-r in 2009.

Parker had a background in jazz composition and would become an important figure in the early vaporwave scene. Apparently he records most of his music live on hardware (synths, tape recorders and drum machines), because he wants his tunes to have this spontaneous, momentary snapshot quality. On these early works, he’s still moving on firm chillwave grounds, singing over warped hip-hop breaks, filtered basslines, yacht rock loops and droning guitars. Brilliant stuff.

3. Matrix Metals – Flamingo Breeze (2009)

Flamingo Breeze is a strange record by any means. Its hypnotic synth loops have fittingly been called “alien lounge music” and “hypnagogic kosmische” by David Keenan. I also love how Tyler Craig of the blog Tiny Mix Tapes (rip) described it as “the perfect soundtrack to the shittiest summer of your life.”

The late Sam Mehran recorded these three long suites under his Matrix Metals alias. The A-side starts out like the memory of a French filter house track overheard from the club toilet, while the B-side spirals off into more noisy and weirder territory. It occupies the experimental end of the chillwave/hypnagogic pop movement; a bit further leftfield, you’d find James Ferraro’s lo-fi ambient stuff from 2008/09, which has been called chillwave too. I find that somewhat of a stretch.

4. Washed Out – High Times & Life Of Leisure EPs (2009)

Ernest Greene grew up in Georgia and rose to fame on MySpace. Within the span of just a week in September 2009, he self-released the seminal EPs High Times and Life of Leisure under his chosen artist name, Washed Out. Both are collections of somewhat demo-like, wistful indie pop songs interspersed with a bunch of lo-fi hip-hop instrumentals.

Based on a looped sample from a 1983 Italo disco tune by Gary Low, Greene’s smash “Feel It All Around” (off Life Of Leisure) became the definitive chillwave anthem. The song would get another life when it was picked as the intro tune to the TV series Portlandia, fittingly enough a satirical portrait of hipster culture. Also, I just learned through YouTube comments that the infectious High Times opener “Belong” blew up a decade later due to its inclusion in the video game Bear.

5. Memory Tapes – Seek Magic (2009)

Dayve Hawk was the ex-frontman of a blog-era indie rock band when he started making solo music under several similar-sounding artist names – Memory Tapes, Memory Cassette and Weird Tapes. His 2009 album Seek Magic has been dubbed “the greatest chillwave album of all time” by Stereogum’s Ian Cohen, and I wouldn’t necessarily disagree. It’s an album of proper dance pop songs shrouded in nostalgic haze and tape hiss, half New Order and half Guided By Voices, full of creative ideas, riffs and hooks, melodies and counter-melodies. Greatest chillwave album of all time? I don’t know. It’s definitely up there with the best.

6. Neon Indian – Psychic Chasms (2009)

Like most other chillwave ‘bands’, at first Neon Indian was mainly the solo project of a lone songwriter and producer, Mexico-born and Texas-raised Alan Palomo.

We’re still in peak chillwave territory – the crunchy drum machine beats are here, the analog synth arpeggios and the layered vocal harmonies. The songs have titles like “Should Have Taken Acid Wth You”, “Terminally Chill” or “Deadbeat Summer”. The whole album is carried by an vague sense of melancholy, nostalgia and longing. If you’ve never heard about chillwave, you might as well start here.

7. Toro Y Moi – Causers Of This (2010)

At the beginning of his career, the South Carolina musician Chaz Bear alias Toro Y Moi made indie pop with an underground hip-hop beat-making approach. Influenced by producers such as the late J Dilla or Flying Lotus, he combined experimental hip-hop beats with detached falsetto vocals and almost incidental, gorgeous melodies.

He’d release a few singles and loosies during the summer of chillwave, and then follow up properly with his debut album Causers Of This. Tracks like “Imprint After” or “Talamak” encapsulate that loose post-genre feel that was prevalent from the L.A. beat scene to the UK’s post-dubstep circuit at the time; they’re also just very good songs at their core. Just a classic album really, regardless of genre.

8. Games – That We Can Play EP (2010)

Between 2009 and 2011, Daniel Lopatin alias Oneohtrix Point Never and his former high school buddy from Boston, Joel Ford of the indie group Tigercity, created some brilliant music together, first as Games and then as Ford & Lopatin. This one’s a bit more synth pop than chillwave, but it does live somewhere inbetween those poles. It was all just a jumble of exciting new sounds anyways.

The duo once listed their influences in a Pitchfork interview:

“DJ Paul, DJ Screw, Aphex Twin, Italo disco, the Weather Channel, Weather Report, Return to Forever, Boards of Canada, James Ferraro. [Gang Starr's] Moment of Truth and [Miles Davis'] On the Corner are huge records for us. DJ Premier and Teo Macero are two of our favorite producers. Their cuts and edits always recontextualize performances and samples in the most psychedelic way.”

This EP is my favorite from their catalogue because it’s bookended by two hypnotizing electro-pop tunes, “Strawberry Skies” (featuring perfect girl-next-door vocals courtesy of a young Laurel Halo) and “Shadows In Bloom”. Both remind me of those warm, long summer nights when I’d just moved to Berlin, riding my old, battered bike home across Warschauer Brücke while the sun slowly came up.

9. Surfing – Deep Fantasy (2012)

Chillwave came and went, even though it existed a bit longer and had more staying power than most other internet microgenres of the time. It developed in 2008 and was over by 2011, when the blogosphere slowly started embracing a new style of sample-based experimental electronic music that would soon be dubbed vaporwave (the Wall Street Journal once called it “chillwave for Marxists”).

Vaporwave’s early pioneers – like Vektroid, Internet Club or Luxury Elite – were deeply influenced by chillwave. The Australian duo Surfing, who came from a band and a production background, combined a solid chillwave/synth pop foundation with early vaporwave’s glitchy electronic grooves. Their debut album Deep Fantasy remains a bonafide classic that I still regularly return to; despite sounding extremely of its time, it has proven its timeless qualities.

10. Whitewoods – Spaceship Earth (2013)

The enigmatic Virginia duo Whitewoods first got recognition on Tumblr, Soundcloud and Youtube in late 2010: Their catchy tune “Beach Walk” sounded like a warped tape that had been baking in the summer sun too long, even for chillwave standards. In addition, there was a sense of irony in their approach that had never really prevailed in chillwave. It mirrored the movement on the verge of dissolving, but it was fun.

Three years later, Whitewoods would release their debut album on the netlabel Business Casual, a collection of sample-based lo-fi pop still clearly rooted in chillwave’s DNA but with vaporwave’s sonic hallmarks. This record closes the loop for me, as it shows how the sound would keep evolving – chillwave was definitely over by that time, but some of its key elements kept living on in a different form.