We Still Love Vaporwave (Part 2)

8 great albums from the grown-up period of the genre (2016–25)

Vaporwave first appeared in the early 2010s, but the genre’s golden age lasted for just a few years.

The aesthetic would get co-opted by the mainstream, but the music – due to its heavy use of unlicensed samples – wasn’t set up for commodification.

By the middle of the decade, the hypetrain moved on.

Some producers stayed dedicated to the original style, developing it further in the depths of the underground.

Others expanded into other genres, rejecting the vaporwave category altogether and/or viewing their work through a wider lens of ambient, drone and electronica.

Both camps would create outstanding bodies of work, but the music press, even the electronic music outlets, rarely took notice.

Below you will find 8 great vaporwave records released between 2016 and 2025 that I still regularly return to.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, start with Part 1 of this post – a brief introduction to the genre of vaporwave and some of the best albums from its classic period from 2010–15.

Infinity Frequencies – Between Two Worlds (2018)

This Californian producer broke onto the scene with three connected albums in 2013/14 (his lauded ‘Computer Trilogy’). He would become most popular for this work though, a playlist of 24 short vignettes – simple but haunting loops of piano, harp, synth or violin with crackling static underneath, loosely resembling a vaporwave version of Leyland Kirby’s fascinating work as The Caretaker.

The cover is a screenshot from a digitized VHS copy of a documentary about a German museum, showing two sculptures by the Italian artist Guilio Paolini in an otherwise empty museum at night. It’s a perfect example for a ‘liminal space’, similar to abandoned shopping malls, empty school hallways or the eerie hotel ballroom from Kubrick’s The Shining. I’ve rarely encountered a piece of music that captures the essence of an image so perfectly.

Mount Shrine – Shortwave Ruins (2020)

Cesar Alexandre, a Brazilian electronic music producer based in Rio de Janeiro, released music from 2014 until his untimely death from COVID-19 in 2021. He was deeply influenced by classic ambient, IDM and video game scores; some of his favorite artists included Akira Yamaoka (composer of the Silent Hill soundtracks), Tim Hecker, William Basinski, Stars of the Lid, Boards of Canada and Burial. You can hear subtle echoes of their music in his style of production.

Shortwave Ruins is a perfect example of the signalwave/broken transmission subgenre, which is based on samples of old radio programmes, often from the Cold War era. On this captivating record, almost unintelligible speaking voices appear over menacing, eerie drones, conveying an uncanny post-apocalyptic atmosphere reminiscent of the dark ambient and industrial of the early 1980s.

Hallmark ‘87 – A T R I U M (2018)

Mallsoft is a subgenre of vaporwave designed to evoke nostalgic feelings about pre-internet temples of hyper-consumption, especially malls and megastores. The songs are typically based on plundered muzak, easy listening and lounge music, and mixed as if played through loudspeakers in an abandoned shopping center.

A T R I U M, the most popular album by vaporwave producer Hallmark ‘87, applies the mallsoft concept to the story of a brutalist hotel building – the cover photo shows the interior of the Marriott Marquis in Atlanta, Georgia, all cold concrete walls and silent glass elevators. The YouTube comments are full of fictive stories about janitors doing night shifts in futuristic skyscrapers.

As usual in the subgenre, drums and percussion are mixed far into the background, reverberating distantly beneath icy synth pads. This haunting listen expands on the mallsoft template but finds its very own distinctive interpretation of the sound, creating an atmosphere of loneliness and longing, reminiscent of the classic cyberpunk movies of Ridley Scott and Wong Kar-Wai.

desert sand feels warm at night – 新世界の弟子たち (New World Disciples) (2021)

UK musician William Hallworth-Cook has been quite prolific at releasing vaporwave since 2018. Drawing inspiration from artists as diverse as Julianna Barwick and dreampunk icons 2814, his elegiac sound might definitely appeal to listeners of more ‘trad’ ambient and electronic music.

His original music, which is typically sample-free, is usually filed under the slushwave and dreampunk subgenres – ambient-leaning vaporwave that builds upon slowed down beats, phaser and flanger effects, and garbled vocals. For this standout album from his vast catalogue, Hallwort-Cook recorded his own sample source material to create ethereal, uplifting instrumentals. No slowed down 1980s pop samples here, just dreamy, melancholic synth pads and voices with loads of reverb and delay, tons of rain sounds and gentle, feathery percussion.

CMD094 – Ghost Station (2018)

Mikhail Makarenko, a producer from the East of Ukraine, made some outstanding vaporwave and ambient music in the mid- to late 2010s, before tragedy struck both on a personal and a political level: First he temporarily lost his hearing ability as a consequence of contracting COVID-19 in 2021; right at the start of the following year, the Russian army invaded his home country. It’s almost as if he’d foreseen bleak things happening, though his best work always contained slight glimmers of hope.

Luckily he seems to have returned to making music in recent years, but Ghost Station remains a definitive high point of his earlier discography, which has provided a reliable escapist wormhole for me to slip into recently. I’ve caught myself going back to this album a lot, as these eight short soundscapes create a dystopian, but at the same time weirdly comforting atmosphere like rarely any other record I know.

Towers – Towers (2019)

I am regarding this a true classic of modern ambient and drone music, but after all those years listening to this album, I still know next to nothing about it. I don’t know who made it, or how they made it, or why you would even file this under vaporwave. I first discovered it because it was celebrated in a scene forum, but sonically it doesn’t bear much resemblance to the classic vaporwave template. A vaguely hauntological vibe is the single thread that forms a loose connection.

The album’s artwork and title hint at a 9/11 theme (see also: Cat System Corp.’s gorgeous album News At 11); the YouTube comments are full of romanticized notions of self-harm and suicide. Personally, I find this record anything but depressing, though it does sound how a depressive episode can feel like. These four tracks, each around 15 minutes long, combine floating synths with field recordings and eerie drones. Together they form a piece that channels themes of despair and grief, but there’s also a palpable sense of hope and humanity on the horizon.

Macroblank & slowerpace 音楽 – The Era of Information (2025)

A prime new example of the barber beats subgenre that got extremely popular since the pandemic. Bandcamp has been flooded with sloppy, mediocre releases in this style over the last few years, but this album stands out as one of the sound’s most cohesive recent statements.

Monodrone and Slowerpace are two of the most consistent producers of this style, which focuses on editing and rearranging older trip-hop and downtempo tracks to essentially create a darker, more cinematic version of lo-fi beats. On this album, they’re building a very distinctive atmosphere by editing psychedelic chill-out tunes rooted in the Pure Moods aesthetic – think synthesized panflutes and marimbas, vaguely ‘tribal’ percussion, mystic chants and birdsong.

The track titles refer to the “Dead Internet Theory” (the belief that today’s internet is mainly ruled by bots and algorithms in order to manipulate consumers), “Echoes of the Ancients” or “Lost Cultures”. It’s essentially a concept album about looking back on the optimism of the 1990s computer era from a dystopian future, an idea that feels very peak vaporwave.

t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者 – 見送る (2017)

Not exactly a full-length album, but a single longform track that vaporwave prodigy Luke Laurila alias Telepath first released on Soundcloud. The piece had been archived on the brilliant Vapor Memory YouTube channel, but it just recently appeared on his Bandcamp page, which made some scene nerds quite happy, as that is still the genre’s main consumption platform.

Laurila originally pioneered the aforementioned slushwave style, an ambient-leaning vaporwave subgenre, but he stopped producing music in that vein in 2016 to focus on making original synth music as Virtual Dream Plaza, as well as dabbling in various other genres. This one still came out under his Telepath alias, probably because it features slowed-down beats and flanger effects, but some other elements point to his broader ambitions: The addictive bassline feels dubby, there are some very present disco-style strings, and the whole thing has a weirdly catchy 1980s funk vibe.

Not too much variation happens over the course of these 18 minutes, but that’s exactly the point: It’s the ideal of an eternal loop, a groove that could last forever.

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