Hardvapour is vaporwave's loud sibling: fast, abrasive, club-shaped music that appeared in late 2015 as a deliberate rebuttal of the genre's slow, soft, muzak-flavoured sound. The Frekvenci archive lists 43 hardvapour releases from 33 artists, first dated 2015. It is one of the smallest tags we cover, and one of the best dated: its founding records have release days.
What is hardvapour?
Bandcamp Daily's 2016 family tree lists hardvapour as a reaction against vaporwave rather than an extension of it, hears gabber and techno in the beats, and notes imagery drawn from Eastern European cultures.[1] Wikipedia widens the list of influences to acid house, big beat, speedcore, noise and drum and bass, and points out the cyberpunk look and the track titles that joke about the genre itself.[2]
Whether it belongs inside vaporwave at all is argued. The Bandcamp author says it shares vaporwave's aesthetic and philosophy while turning the tone upside down.[1] Wikipedia calls the style tongue-in-cheek and says many vaporwave listeners dismissed it as an overworn in-joke.[2] The main vaporwave subreddit went further and banned discussion of it, according to Dazed.[4]
The 2015 backlash
Few micro-genres can be dated this closely. Wikipedia gives 29 November 2015 for End of World Rave by the Canadian producer Wolfenstein OS X (wosX) on Dream Catalogue, the earliest notable hardvapour record, and 9 December 2015 for Vaporwave Is Dead by Sandtimer.[2] Dazed identifies Sandtimer as one of HKE's pseudonyms, and HKE runs Dream Catalogue, so the label's head wrote the manifesto in the form of an album.[4] Bandcamp calls it the formative record and quotes its complaint about vaporwave's "meek softness and self-defeating irony".[1] Writing in November 2016, the same author described the genre as barely a year old.[1]
That makes Dream Catalogue an odd case: the label whose dreamy side became dreampunk also launched the loudest answer to vaporwave. Its head told Bandcamp Daily in 2016 that the releases are linked by dreams in different worlds rather than one style, and the profile names DJ ALINA's MANIAX the label's hardest.[3] The archive supports the Sandtimer date: Vaporwave Is Dead is listed under 2015 on Dream Catalogue.
A scene with an invented backstory
Part of the appeal was fiction. Dazed describes a mythology of made-up Slavic characters, the Kroko Krew among them, who played drug dealers on social media.[4] Wikipedia adds that several producers, including wosX under another alias, DJ Alina and Krokodil Hunter, falsely claimed Russian or Ukrainian identities.[2] wosX framed the Slavic references as a counterweight to vaporwave's heavily Asian-influenced look.[4] Quoted by Simon Reynolds, he described the music as the near opposite of vaporwave: fast, not sample-based, darker and anti-nostalgic.[5]
A label called Antifur gathered the early scene. Its compilation Hardvapour., assembled by DJ VLAD, runs to more than fifty tracks across techno, industrial and trap.[2] Wikipedia reports that Hong Kong Express, the name it gives for the Sandtimer record, answered critics by comparing the genre to Dr. Strangelove: a serious message told with dark humour.[2] That mix of joke and menace explains why listeners split.
The sound
- Fast tempos and programmed drums. Thick synths over beats borrowed from hard techno, hardstyle and speedcore, per Wikipedia.[2]
- Distortion and noise. The loudness is the point; it is the opposite of vaporwave's soft focus.
- Satire, not sincerity. Titles such as "Long Live Hardvapour" make the joke explicit.[2]
- Wider colours. Dazed also hears chiptune, dial-up square waves and Balkan accordion in later records, and a trap undercurrent.[4]
Hardvapour sits near vapornoise, the Bandcamp branch built on heavy manipulation of source material and static, and far from the soft end of the family such as slushwave. The archive shows both: seven hardvapour releases also carry the slushwave tag, seven eccojams, and ten dark ambient, so the tag holds more than one mood.
Hardvapour in the archive
This is a tiny tag, so read it as a list of records, not a trend: never more than nine releases in a year.
SHOW THE NUMBERS
| Year | Releases |
|---|---|
| 2015 | 6 |
| 2016 | 9 |
| 2017 | 4 |
| 2018 | 8 |
| 2019 | 5 |
| 2020 | 2 |
| 2021 | 0 |
| 2022 | 1 |
| 2023 | 3 |
| 2024 | 1 |
| 2025 | 4 |
The tag opens with 6 releases in 2015, peaks at 9 in 2016, and has a second bump of 8 in 2018. Then it thins: 5 in 2019, 2 in 2020, none in 2021, one each in 2022 and 2024, 3 in 2023 and 4 in 2025. The 2018 bump is mostly one artist: b e g o t t e n, from the United States, has 7 listed releases, all in this tag, and 5 of them are from 2018. The 2015 start is also concentrated; all four of wosX's listed releases date from that year. Almost everything is an album: 35 LPs, 6 EPs, 1 single and 1 compilation.
The labels are not where you would expect.
SHOW THE NUMBERS
| Label | Releases |
|---|---|
| Geometric Lullaby | 8 |
| Dream Catalogue | 3 |
| Floyd Records | 3 |
| DMT Tapes FL | 2 |
| Cityman Productions | 2 |
| FOTOSHOPPE CO. | 2 |
Geometric Lullaby leads with 8 releases of 60 listed, followed by Dream Catalogue with 3 of 42 and Floyd Records with 3 of 7. Geometric Lullaby also tops our slushwave table, which is a reminder of how mixed the hardvapour tag is. Five releases are self-released. One wosX record sits on the giant DMT Tapes FL, which has two hardvapour releases in all. Country is known for 58% of the releases; the United States has 17, Great Britain 3 and the rest one each.
Records to start with
A short list that follows the tag from its first weeks to the newest entries, with the dated records first.
- Sandtimer · 2015 · Dream Catalogue · LPThe 9 December 2015 album that Bandcamp calls the formative hardvapour record, on Dream Catalogue.
- wosX · 2015 · DMT Tapes FL · LPA 2015 album by wosX, whose name Wikipedia lists among hardvapour artists, on DMT Tapes FL.
- runescape斯凱利 · 2017 · Geometric Lullaby · LPA 2017 album on Geometric Lullaby, the tag's top label.
- saneLIV · 2018 · Occasionally Tapes · LPA 2018 album on Occasionally Tapes.
- Sea of Voices · 2019 · Cityman Productions · LPA 2019 album on Cityman Productions.
- ＳＨＡＲＥＤ ＳＹＳＴＥＭＳ 有限 · 2020 · Cityman Productions · LPA 2020 album, also on Cityman Productions.
- b e g o t t e n 自杀 · 2023 · Geometric Lullaby · LPA 2023 album by the tag's most prolific artist.
Quick answers
Is hardvapour a joke or serious music?
Both. The scene wrapped invented personas around real, hard-hitting dance records, and its defenders say the message was serious.[2][4]
Is it the same as vapornoise?
No. Vapornoise, as Bandcamp maps it, is about mangling the sample; hardvapour leads with rhythm. Five hardvapour releases carry both tags.[1]
Is it related to synthwave?
Hardly. Two hardvapour releases carry the synthwave tag. For the difference between the two worlds, read Synthwave vs vaporwave: same neon, different music, or start from the whole family on What is vaporwave? A guide to the internet's slowed-down mall music. For the other beat-led branch, see What is vaportrap? When vaporwave met trap drums.
Sources
- Genre As Method: The Vaporwave Family Tree, From Eccojams to Hardvapour · Simon Chandler, Bandcamp Daily, 21 Nov 2016
- Hardvapour (used as a map to its references) · Wikipedia
- Label Profile: Dream Catalogue · J. Edward Keyes, Bandcamp Daily, 20 Jun 2016
- Inside 'hardvapour', the internet's latest microgenre · Matt Broomfield, Dazed, 28 Apr 2016
- Hardvapour, or feel-bad rave music on shitty drugs · Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash, May 2016