British synthwave comes in two halves that rarely share a stage. One is song-based, with singers, guitars in the background and a rock band's sense of a chorus, and Gunship is its best-known name. The other is a large, mostly independent vaporwave and future funk crowd, which makes up more than a quarter of the British catalogue in the Frekvenci archive: 337 of 1,205 listed releases by 328 artists with the United Kingdom on file.
A country that already knew synth-pop
The vocal half has deep roots at home. Britain's 1980s synth-pop era produced Depeche Mode from Basildon, the Human League from Sheffield and Soft Cell, and the A.V. Club's history of the style notes that Gary Numan's "Are 'Friends' Electric?" was a 1979 number one single.[4] The same piece stresses that songwriting mattered more than the synthesizers themselves.[4] That tradition is one reason the archive's British catalogue skews towards songs: 143 releases carry the synth-pop tag, and the popwave family has 186 releases, which is where the singing acts sit. Our Synthpop and synthwave: where the 1980s sound meets the revival guide explains where the two meet.
GUNSHIP is the modern case. In the band's own 2015 interview, the self-titled album came together when the rock group Fightstar took a break; Dan Haigh and Alex Westaway, both of Fightstar, made it with drummer Alex Gingell, learning synths from scratch.[1] Haigh traces his first spark to Power Glove's "Hunters". The record has ten songs and three remixes, by Miami Nights 1984, Carpenter Brut and Makeup and Vanity Set, and a claymation video for "Tech Noir" that John Carpenter narrates.[1] The archive lists 18 Gunship releases, six of them in 2018, and the band's own label, Horsie in the Hedge, holds 12 listings. For similar records, see If you like GUNSHIP: artists to try next.
London's dreamier export
The other half starts, in good part, with a label. Dream Catalogue is UK-based, and its release pages list London. It is led by HKE, who keeps his identity private, and most of its artists are anonymous or aliases of one another.[2] Its stated aim is a "lucid dream" feeling for headphones, and its breakthrough, 2814's 新しい日の誕生, was also the label's first vinyl release.[2] The profile also records a harsher turn: MANIAX by DJ ALINA, which followed a wave of copycat "hard vapor" after End of World Rave.[2] Our What is hardvapour? Vaporwave's loud, fast backlash covers that branch. Bandcamp Daily's family tree of vaporwave puts ten branches on the map, from eccojams to hardvapour, and future funk is the upbeat one that mixes in disco and soul.[3]
In the data, the vaporwave share breaks down like this: 96 releases carry the vaporwave tag, 94 future funk, 45 mallsoft and 32 slushwave. If you want the longer view of any of them, What is vaporwave? A guide to the internet's slowed-down mall music and Future funk: vaporwave's dance floor, explained are the places to start.
What the British numbers can and cannot say
British artists make up about 8.4% of the releases that have any country on file, from 255 labels, and 303 of the 1,205 are self-released. Country is on file for only some of the archive, so a British act with no country attached is missing from every figure here. Genre families come from community tags, which fans apply unevenly; the vaporwave count in particular spreads across many micro-genres. And a release year can be a reissue date. That is why entries such as Saint Etienne's 2000 album, filed under synthwave, sit before the scene existed.
SHOW THE NUMBERS
| Year | Releases |
|---|---|
| 2010 | 3 |
| 2011 | 2 |
| 2012 | 10 |
| 2013 | 27 |
| 2014 | 44 |
| 2015 | 79 |
| 2016 | 83 |
| 2017 | 107 |
| 2018 | 140 |
| 2019 | 140 |
| 2020 | 142 |
| 2021 | 127 |
| 2022 | 89 |
| 2023 | 76 |
| 2024 | 63 |
| 2025 | 42 |
- Slow until 2012. No more than ten listed releases a year up to and including 2012.
- The climb is 2013 to 2018. From 27 to 140 in five years.
- A long plateau. 140 in 2018 and 2019, 142 in 2020 (the peak) and 127 in 2021.
- Then a steady decline: 89, 76, 63 and 42 in 2025. Some of that is catalogue lag, and 2026 (14 so far) is a part year. Treat recent years as provisional.
London has 47 artists on file, Manchester 15, Glasgow 13 and Brighton 9. Another 129 give only "United Kingdom". Compare the shape of the curve with Synthwave in the USA: the biggest scene in the archive, where the count has not fallen away, and with Swedish synthwave: a small country with a big sound, where a few busy acts bend the line.
Who, and on which labels
SHOW THE NUMBERS
| Family | Releases |
|---|---|
| Vaporwave | 10,473 |
| Synthwave | 8,105 |
| Popwave | 2,678 |
| Darksynth | 1,803 |
| Dreamwave | 833 |
| Cyberpunk | 6 |
The family split is 544 synthwave, 337 vaporwave, 186 popwave, 85 darksynth and 53 dreamwave. Darksynth is a small slice here, 85 of 1,205 releases, against 118 of 926 in French synthwave: from French touch to darksynth.
The artists with the most British releases are prolific rather than famous: US Golf 95 (43, with eight each in 2024 and 2025), Occams Laser (33), desert sand feels warm at night (33), W O L F C L U B (26), DEADLIFE and Strawberry Station (24 each). Among better-known names, Gunship and Futurecop! have 18 each. Volume says how often someone releases, not how many people listen.
NewRetroWave is the biggest single outlet, with 72 of its 203 listed releases by British artists. Then comes Aztec Records (28 of 108), DMT Tapes FL (23 of 1,192), TimeSlave Recordings (17 of 37) and FiXT Neon (16 of 113). Only some are British companies; the archive counts labels by where the artist is from, not the label.
Records to start with
Ten records, one for most of the data's years, picked to cover the song side and the vaporwave side, one per act.
- GUNSHIP · 2015 · Horsie in the Hedge LLP · LPThe 2015 debut album: songs with vocals, a rock band's approach to synthwave.
- GUNSHIP · 2023 · Horsie in the Hedge LLP · LPThe 2023 album, listed as synthwave and released on the band's label.
- American Online · 2015 · DMT Tapes FL · LPA 2015 signalwave album on DMT Tapes FL, a vaporwave-side pick.
- New Arcades · 2023 · TimeSlave Recordings · LPA 2023 synth-pop album on TimeSlave Recordings.
For the pop end of British synthwave, tune the Dreams station (88.1 FM); for the rest of the family, browse Vaporwave. The wider map of the genre is in What is synthwave? A plain guide, with the numbers.
Sources
- Interview with Gunship · Vehlinggo, 27 Aug 2015
- Label Profile: Dream Catalogue · Bandcamp Daily, 20 Jun 2016
- Genre As Method: The Vaporwave Family Tree, From Eccojams to Hardvapour · Bandcamp Daily, 21 Nov 2016
- Where to start with '80s U.K. synth-pop · The A.V. Club, Annie Zaleski, 26 Feb 2015