Slushwave is what vaporwave becomes when the slowing never stops: a sampled song dragged far past recognition, soaked in reverb and filters, and stretched into long, drifting tracks with little or no drum beat. The Frekvenci archive lists 470 slushwave releases by 250 artists, and unlike most vaporwave branches it was still climbing in 2024, its peak year so far.
What is slushwave?
The plainest definition is on Wikipedia's vaporwave page, which calls slushwave the ambient branch of the genre, with tracks that often run past ten minutes. It names t e l e p a t h, SOARER and desert sand feels warm at night as artists, and mentions the label Geometric Lullaby for its many slushwave albums.[1] Vaporwave itself is described there as built almost entirely from slowed-down samples, so slushwave takes the central vaporwave move and pushes it as far as it will go.[1]
We found no documented account of who coined the word or when, so treat any origin story as unconfirmed.
How slushwave is made
Three techniques do most of the work.
- Extreme slowing. Vaporwave already slows samples; slushwave stretches a short phrase until a few seconds fill minutes. Pitch drops and the original source becomes a texture.
- Reverb and delay as the main instrument. The tails matter more than the notes. Wikipedia lists heavy reverb, repetition and chopped-and-screwed slowing among vaporwave's basic tools, drawing on Glitsos's work.[1][3]
- Filtering and softening. Low-pass filters and mild distortion take off the bright edges, which is often why slushwave sounds like music heard through water or a wall. That is the general production logic, not a claim about any one record.
The difference from mallsoft, with which it overlaps heavily, is the starting material. Bandcamp Daily describes mallsoft as music for an imagined shopping centre, with field recordings and incidental sound filling the space.[2] Slushwave seems to need no particular place; if it has a subject, it is time. The archive shows how closely the two are tied: 63 mallsoft releases also carry the slushwave tag.
Slushwave in the archive
The first listed release is from 2011, and little happens until the late 2010s.
SHOW THE NUMBERS
| Year | Releases |
|---|---|
| 2011 | 1 |
| 2012 | 0 |
| 2013 | 1 |
| 2014 | 3 |
| 2015 | 6 |
| 2016 | 10 |
| 2017 | 5 |
| 2018 | 21 |
| 2019 | 32 |
| 2020 | 58 |
| 2021 | 54 |
| 2022 | 62 |
| 2023 | 53 |
| 2024 | 75 |
| 2025 | 55 |
Releases pass 20 a year in 2018 and 30 in 2019, jump to 58 in 2020, hover between 53 and 62 through 2023, and then reach the peak of 75 in 2024. That looks like a scene that expanded in the pandemic years and kept going, though the data cannot tell us whether lockdowns were the cause. Wikipedia says many vaporwave offshoots declined in popularity after 2012, and slushwave is a visible exception in our figures.[1] The format is the album: 316 of 470 releases are LPs, and only 39 are singles.
SHOW THE NUMBERS
| Label | Releases |
|---|---|
| Underwater Computing _ | 48 |
| Geometric Lullaby | 24 |
| global pattern | 14 |
| s00000 | 14 |
| The Faerie Circle | 13 |
| Valkyrie Tapes | 12 |
| No Problema Tapes | 12 |
| FOTOSHOPPE CO. | 11 |
Underwater Computing _ is the leading label, with 48 slushwave releases of its 90 listed, about half its catalogue. Geometric Lullaby, the label Wikipedia names, has 24 of 60.[1] Two small labels are essentially slushwave houses: The Faerie Circle has 13 of 13 and s00000 has 14 of 16. By contrast DMT Tapes FL, with 9, is so large that slushwave is a rounding error there. A further 72 releases are self-released.
One artist stands out. desert sand feels warm at night, listed under Great Britain, has 28 of the tag's 470 releases, 28 of 33 in the artist's own catalogue, about 6% of the tag. Country is known for 60% of the releases: the United States has 108, Great Britain 32, Sweden 25, Russia 19 and Peru 13.
Companion tags show what neighbours it: ambient on 271 releases, experimental on 217, plunderphonics on 75, lo-fi on 69, new age on 61, dark ambient on 47 and drone on 27. The 45-release overlap with the phaserwave tag may mean that name covers the same family of sounds, but we have not confirmed that.
Slushwave, ambient and new age
If slushwave is so close to ambient, why keep the separate name? The honest answer is origin. Ambient music is composed or improvised; slushwave is made by processing someone else's recording, so the original song is always present as a ghost. Glitsos argues that vaporwave's pull is the feeling of memory itself, and slushwave takes that idea to its end: a song stretched this far is more a feeling of a song than a tune.[3]
That is also why it overlaps with so many tags. New age sits on 61 releases and dark ambient on 47, so the same sound can come across as soothing or ominous depending on the source sample and the label. The artist t e l e p a t h, one of the names Wikipedia gives for slushwave, also co-founded the duo 2814 with the Dream Catalogue founder, which links this page to What is dreampunk? Vaporwave's dark, cinematic dream; 109 dreampunk releases carry the slushwave tag.[1][4] If vaporwave strikes you as too busy, slushwave is where it quiets down. If you find it too empty, step across to What is barber beats? The vaporwave micro-genre named after one prolific artist, where similar samples get a beat.
Tracks of more than ten minutes are normal here, according to Wikipedia,[1] so judge an album by its first few minutes, not its first few seconds. For a wider view of how the family branches, start from What is vaporwave? A guide to the internet's slowed-down mall music; if you came from synthwave, Synthwave vs vaporwave: same neon, different music explains the difference.
Records to start with
Mostly albums, spread across the years. The first two are tied to artists Wikipedia names.
- Computer Dreams · 2011 · Geometric Lullaby · EPThe oldest listed slushwave release, a 2011 EP on Geometric Lullaby.
- t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者 · 2013 · self-released · LPA 2013 self-released album by t e l e p a t h, one of the artists Wikipedia names.
- MindSpring Memories · 2015 · Elemental 95 · LPA 2015 album by MindSpring Memories on Elemental 95.
- VAV-31 · 2018 · Underwater Computing _ · LPA 2018 album on Underwater Computing, the tag's biggest label.
- E U P H O R I A 永遠の · 2020 · Gorgeous Lights · LPA 2020 album, from the first year the tag passed 50 releases.
- Illusionary ドリーミング · 2021 · the Tidal Charm · LPA 2021 album by Illusionary, a Swedish artist with 10 slushwave releases.
- memorykeeper7 · 2024 · Wave Racers Collective · LPA 2024 album by memorykeeper7, who has 15 slushwave releases.
The radio on Frekvenci follows synthwave moods, but the slow ones, Dreams station (88.1 FM) and Deep station (98.5 FM), are the nearest in feel while you browse the archive.
Sources
- Vaporwave (used as a map to its references) · Wikipedia
- Genre As Method: The Vaporwave Family Tree, From Eccojams to Hardvapour · Simon Chandler, Bandcamp Daily, 21 Nov 2016
- Vaporwave, or music optimised for abandoned malls · Laura Glitsos, Popular Music 37(1), 2018
- Dreampunk (used as a map to its references) · Wikipedia