In May 2015 a Swedish action-comedy short called Kung Fury premiered at Cannes and went online days later, and its retro-synth score was soon in front of millions of viewers.[2] The same year, the Frekvenci archive jumped: 1,317 listed releases dated 2015, up 87% on 2014. For the first time, the vaporwave family (614 releases) outnumbers the synthwave family (441).
Kung Fury and the composers around it
The score came from several composers, including Mitch Murder and Lost Years. In an interview that July, Mitch Murder called having David Hasselhoff sing on his track "True Survivor" a surreal experience, and he put the film's views at about 19 million and the song's at about 17 million at that point.[1] Those are July 2015 figures and have certainly moved. For more in his lane, see If you like Mitch Murder: artists to try next; for how films and the style fit together, Synthwave and 1980s film scores: Carpenter, Vangelis and the sound of the screen.
A second marker landed the same month. The Dutch producer Timecop1983 told Vehlinggo that he had turned to 1980s-style music after hearing Mitch Murder and the Drive soundtrack, and that his album Reflections was due on 3 July 2015 on NewRetroWave.[4] One scene feeding the next. The If you like Timecop1983: artists to try next page follows where it led.
One label, an eighth of the year
DMT Tapes FL released 167 records in 2015, out of 1,192 listed overall. That alone is about 13% of the year's 1,317. A second DMT-named label, DMT Records, adds 45. After them the table looks more familiar: Werkstatt Recordings with 22, business casual with 17, Retro Promenade with 15 and Future City Records with 10.
So part of the 2015 jump is a few prolific tape labels deciding to publish more. The year has 810 artists on 290 labels, which is why we count releases and artists separately: 1,317 releases from 810 artists. 282 are self-released. Formats: 643 LPs, 380 EPs, 185 singles and 50 compilations.
The family count
SHOW THE NUMBERS
| Family | Releases |
|---|---|
| Vaporwave | 614 |
| Synthwave | 441 |
| Popwave | 155 |
| Darksynth | 78 |
| Dreamwave | 29 |
Vaporwave 614, synthwave 441, popwave 155, darksynth 78 and dreamwave 29. Synthwave still grew by about 39%, which is steady, but it no longer set the pace. The pace-setter among tags was future funk, which Bandcamp Daily describes as an upbeat offshoot of vaporwave built from disco, funk, soul and Japanese pop samples.[3] It had one tagged release in 2012, 44 in 2014 and 189 in 2015, making it the third most-used tag of the year after synthwave (404) and vaporwave (263). Synth-pop has 82, signalwave 65 and darkwave 65. The Future funk: vaporwave's dance floor, explained covers the style.
Russia moves up
Country is known for 62% of the year. The United States leads by a long way with 370 releases, then the United Kingdom (79), France (63) and Russia (38) in fourth place. Russia was not in the top ten in 2012. The Russian synthwave and sovietwave: the scene in data page tells that scene's story in more detail.
The busiest names, and a data wrinkle
Desired, from Russia, has 16 releases, the most. After that come waterfront dining (14), then three acts with 13 each: the US-based 「ｎｅｗｔｙｐｅ」, 仮想夢プラザ, and the DMT Tapes FL label itself, which appears as an artist too, the sort of wrinkle that comes with databases built by volunteers. Of the year's artists, 614 are listed for the first time.
Few of these names will be familiar to synthwave listeners. The year's busiest sit mostly in the vaporwave family and tape-label culture, a different world from the one that produced Kung Fury. Every year from 2015 to 2025 stays above 1,300 releases in the archive, so 2015 is the point where the scene reached a size it has not dropped below since.
Ten records from 2015
A mix of the film-adjacent, the label-driven and the obscure.
- Mitch Murder · 2015 · self-released · LPFrom the composer who scored the year's most talked-about short film.
- Timecop1983 · 2015 · TimeSlaves · LPThe album Timecop1983 said was due on NewRetroWave in July 2015.
- Gummy Boy · 2015 · YOUTH 1984 · LPA first appearance in the archive, tagged retrowave, on YOUTH 1984.
- Lapses · 2015 · 30th Floor Records · EPA short synthwave record on 30th Floor Records, new to the archive this year.
- WLDV · 2015 · Giallo Disco · EPFrom Giallo Disco, whose name points at Italian horror cinema.
- DJ ｉＴｕｎｅｓ · 2015 · business casual · LPA future funk LP on business casual, the tag that grew fourfold in a year.
- Vista Kid Cruiser · 2015 · business casual · LPA vaporwave LP from the same busy label.
Sources
- Catching Up With Mitch Murder, King of the 80s Revival · Vehlinggo, 26 Jul 2015
- Kung Fury (used as a map to its references) · Wikipedia
- Yung Bae: Meet the Introvert Producer Taking Future Funk Mainstream · Bandcamp Daily, 24 Apr 2019
- What Does the Future Hold for Timecop1983? · Vehlinggo, 1 Jul 2015