Future funk is the upbeat, danceable branch of vaporwave. It keeps vaporwave's habit of sampling old records, but speeds them up and puts a beat under them, drawing on disco, funk, soul and retro Japanese pop, with bright anime-inspired imagery on the cover. Bandcamp Daily calls it the "extroverted cousin of vaporwave".[1] In the Frekvenci archive it is the second-largest vaporwave branch, with 1,538 listed releases, and one label alone accounts for about a quarter of them.
What a future funk track does
Start with a few seconds of a 1980s city pop or disco track. Cut it into a loop, run a filter that swells and drops across the bar, lay a four-on-the-floor kick under it and give the bass some bounce, and you are close to the standard recipe. Where vaporwave slows a sample until it turns eerie, future funk uses the sample to make you move.
Bandcamp Daily's profile of Yung Bae adds the mood. It describes sunny, bass-driven tracks and a "parallel universe" of anime figures, poolside scenes and endless summer, and ties the feeling to natsukashii, the Japanese word for fond longing for the past, in a happy rather than gloomy form.[1] The same piece notes that producers hunt for obscure source records that nobody has reworked yet, and that Yung Bae's newer work has moved towards original material, including a children's choir, a live band and an orchestra. "I'm trying to make my own future funk," he says.[1]
Three streams run into it
City pop. City pop is Japanese pop from the economic boom of the 1970s and 80s, blending new wave, synth pop, disco and jazz.[3] Open Culture credits YouTube's recommendations with carrying Mariya Takeuchi's "Plastic Love" (1985) to an audience far beyond Japan, with more than 20 million views by October 2018.[3] The AFP report describes the revival abroad as starting in niche internet circles.[4] Wikipedia says most future funk samples come from 1980s and 1990s city pop.[5] The country-level picture is in Japan, city pop and vaporwave: the scene in data.
French house and disco. Wikipedia's vaporwave article calls future funk a French house-inspired offshoot.[5] The tags in our data point the same way: "disco" appears on 131 future funk releases, "nu disco" on 98 and "french house" on 96.
Anime imagery. Wikipedia says the genre draws its visuals from 1980s and 90s anime, and names the Sailorwave series by Macross 82-99, from 2013, as a pioneer.[5] The archive lists SAILORWAVE under 2013.
A tag check shows how the genre sees itself. Nearly every future funk release (1,531 of them) also carries the plain vaporwave tag, 125 carry synthwave and 108 chillwave, while "city pop" appears on only 30. The Japanese link lives mostly in the samples, not in how listeners label the records.
Names, dates and the first wave
Pinning down a start is hard, and we have not found a reliable source for an exact origin date, so we give none. What the sources do show is a scene forming as vaporwave grew. By the time Bandcamp Daily mapped vaporwave in November 2016, it listed future funk as one of ten branches and pointed to Saint Pepsi's Hit Vibes and bl00dwave's Distance as examples of nostalgic hedonism built on 1970s disco and soul samples.[2] The archive has Distance, dated 2016 and on Business Casual.
Yung Bae's own path gives the human scale. He released his first mixtape, Bae, in 2014, after dropping out of college a year earlier; a roommate had introduced him to early vaporwave such as Macintosh Plus and Saint Pepsi, and he learned production from online tutorials.[1] By 2019 the Welsh label My Pet Flamingo was reissuing BAE 2 on cassette and vinyl, and he was playing a first Coachella.[1]
Future funk in the archive
The branch has 1,538 releases by 684 artists on 133 labels, about 15% of the vaporwave family.
SHOW THE NUMBERS
| Year | Releases |
|---|---|
| 2012 | 1 |
| 2013 | 11 |
| 2014 | 44 |
| 2015 | 189 |
| 2016 | 135 |
| 2017 | 149 |
| 2018 | 233 |
| 2019 | 203 |
| 2020 | 221 |
| 2021 | 153 |
| 2022 | 79 |
| 2023 | 54 |
| 2024 | 27 |
| 2025 | 29 |
The curve has a clear shape. The archive holds just 11 releases in 2013, then 44 in 2014 and 189 in 2015. It peaks at 233 in 2018, holds near 200 through 2020, and then falls hard: 79 in 2022 and 27 in 2024. That is a much sharper fall than the vaporwave family as a whole, which has kept rising. Some of the drop is the usual lag in recent database entries, but it is steep enough that we would not put it all down to lag. 2026 is a part year.
154 future funk releases are self-released, roughly one in ten. Country is known for 66% of releases; the United States leads with 471, then the United Kingdom (94) and Japan (70).
The labels that built it
Future funk is unusually concentrated. DMT Tapes FL has 376 future funk releases, about a quarter of the branch (its profile covers the label). business casual has 65, and First Class Collective has 61 of the 67 releases it has listed in total, which makes it nearly a pure future funk label. After them come DMT Records, Verbatim Consciousness Recordings and My Pet Flamingo. The ten busiest labels together account for 702 releases, nearly half of the branch. More on one of them: business casual: label profile and where to start.
Among artists, the most prolific are Desired (40 releases, Russia), an artist known only by an ID in our data (39, Germany), Titan (28, United States), Sakura Lee (24, Peru) and Sui Uzi (22). Night Tempo, one of the best-known names, has 16 listed releases, from South Korea; if you like his work, If you like Night Tempo: artists to try next has next steps.
Listening routes
- Follow the Bandcamp trail: Bae by Yung Bae, then bl00dwave's Distance, then What is vaporwave? A guide to the internet's slowed-down mall music for the sampled family behind them.
- Follow the label: First Class Collective is almost wholly future funk in the archive, so its 2019 and 2022 releases make a tidy tour of the later sound.
- Go back to the roots: the 2013 Sailorwave records, then Synthwave vs vaporwave: same neon, different music to see how this branch relates to synthwave's own dance-floor side.
If you arrive from synthwave, What is synthwave? A plain guide, with the numbers and Synthwave sub-genres explained: a map with real counts show where the neighbouring genres sit.
Records to start with
Picked to run through the branch's years, with one record per label or artist where possible.
- MACROSS 82–99 · 2013 · Fortune 500 · LPThe 2013 album Wikipedia points to as a pioneering future funk series.
- Yung Bae · 2014 · Neoncity Records · LPA 2014 LP by the producer Bandcamp profiled as taking the sound mainstream.
- bl00dwave · 2016 · business casual · LPNamed as an example by Bandcamp Daily's 2016 family tree.
- おかげ Magician · 2017 · DMT Tapes FL · EPA 2017 release on DMT Tapes FL, the branch's biggest label.
- 「𝐒𝐔𝐍𝐒𝐄𝐓𝟖𝟓 グループ」 · 2019 · First Class Collective · LPA 2019 release on First Class Collective.
- Kouek · 2024 · My Pet Flamingo · LPA 2024 release on My Pet Flamingo, the Welsh label that reissued Yung Bae.
For the larger family it grew out of, read What is vaporwave? A guide to the internet's slowed-down mall music.
Sources
- Yung Bae: Meet the Introvert Producer Taking Future Funk Mainstream · Zoe Madonna, Bandcamp Daily, 24 Apr 2019
- Genre As Method: The Vaporwave Family Tree, From Eccojams to Hardvapour · Bandcamp Daily, 21 Nov 2016
- How YouTube's Algorithm Turned an Obscure 1980s Japanese Song Into an Enormously Popular Hit · Open Culture, 3 Oct 2018
- City Pop: the soundtrack to Japan's boom years goes viral · AFP via The Korea Times, 22 Feb 2022
- Vaporwave (used as a map to its references) · Wikipedia