Synthwave is new music built to sound like the 1980s: analogue-style synthesizers, drum machines with big, clipped reverb, and the moods of that decade's thrillers, synth-pop and arcade games. It took shape in France and the rest of Western Europe in the second half of the 2000s and is also sold under the names retrowave and outrun.[1] Much of it is instrumental, a lot of it is self-released, and it is bigger than its reputation: the Frekvenci archive lists 8,105 synthwave releases from 3,756 artists.
That is the short answer. The rest of this page explains where the sound came from, what to listen for, how the scene grew year by year according to the release data, and where to start.
What synthwave is, in one minute
Think of the music a 1980s film would play while a car drives through a neon city at night, then imagine someone making a whole album of it in 2014 on a laptop. That is the core of synthwave. It is not a revival of one real 1980s genre. It is a collage of several, rebuilt from memory: the synth scores of horror and science-fiction films, the gloss of synth-pop, the bright arpeggios of arcade machines.
Three things set it apart from other electronic music:
- The reference point is fixed. Almost every record points back to roughly 1978–1989, in sound and in artwork (sunsets, grids, chrome lettering, sports cars, VHS tapes).
- It is built around melody. Where house and techno grow from a groove, synthwave usually has a theme you could hum, played on a lead synth or sung.
- It treats the past as a film set. A peer-reviewed study of synthwave in film and TV music argues that it works as a kind of shorthand for "the 1980s", often feeling more 1980s than the real thing, and links it back to scores by Tangerine Dream, John Carpenter, Giorgio Moroder and Vangelis.[9]
Where it came from
Nobody can point to the first synthwave record, and no source we trust names who coined the word. What the sources agree on is the setting: French and Western European producers in the mid-to-late 2000s, with Kavinsky and College (David Grellier) among the early names.[1] College's own account has him starting the Valerie mp3 blog in April 2007 among friends mostly based in Nantes; his album Secret Diary followed in November 2008.[2] The genre's year-by-year history follows that thread in more detail. Early press did not call this synthwave yet; the name settled in later.[1]
The roots are older. Sega's arcade racer Out Run (1986), with its in-game radio of breezy tunes, gave the scene one of its names and its favourite image: a car, a coast road and a sunset.[4] The film-score side came from the synthesizer soundtracks of the 1970s and 1980s, the same names the academic study above traces it to.[9]
Then came a run of moments that carried the sound to people who had never heard of it. The film Drive (premiered at Cannes in May 2011) used Kavinsky's "Nightcall" and College and Electric Youth's "A Real Hero" on its soundtrack.[3] Artists who came after say it mattered: Timecop1983 told Vehlinggo he turned to 1980s-style music after hearing Mitch Murder and the Drive soundtrack.[12] Games followed. Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon (2013) shipped with 25 original tracks by the Australian duo Power Glove,[6] and the 2015 short film Kung Fury featured music by Mitch Murder, and its Hasselhoff-sung track "True Survivor" had passed 17 million views by mid-2015.[7] In 2016 Stranger Things put the synth music of Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein, two members of the band Survive, in front of a global TV audience.[5] And The Weeknd's "Blinding Lights", a pop single widely described as synthwave-influenced, reached No. 1 on the US Hot 100 in April 2020 and, by March 2021, had become the first song to log 52 (non-consecutive) weeks in the US top ten.[8]
None of these single-handedly "started" anything. Each one sent a new crowd looking, and the release numbers below show the scene growing steadily through all of them. The archive's view of the same years is in the numbers section below.
What it sounds like
If you put on ten synthwave records, you will hear most of these:
- Drum machines, or drums made to sound like them, with a snare drenched in short, abruptly cut reverb: the "gated" sound popularised in British studios around 1980.[13]
- A pulsing bass line, often eighth or sixteenth notes from a synth, locked to the kick drum.
- Arpeggios: a chord played one note at a time, fast and repeating, the sound most people mean when they say "it sounds like a racing game".
- Warm, wide pads and bright lead lines, often with chorus on them. The Roland Juno family is a common reference: the Juno-106 of 1984 had six voices and a built-in chorus that gives that shimmer.[11]
- Production borrowed from 1980s pop. Sound On Sound's history of a-ha's "Take On Me" lists the kind of studio kit involved, from a Roland Juno to a Yamaha DX7 and a LinnDrum drum machine.[10] Few synthwave producers own those machines; most use software that copies them.
The tempo spans a lot of ground. Night-drive records sit in a steady mid-tempo; the heavy, horror-film branch called Darksynth is louder and faster; the dreamy end is slower and softer. Many records are instrumental, but not all: The Midnight and GUNSHIP are two well-known acts built around songs and singers.
How big it is: the archive in numbers
Most explainers stop at the history. We can show the size. The Frekvenci archive is built from MusicBrainz and Discogs data; it lists 23,898 releases across synthwave and its neighbouring styles. Records tagged with synthwave or one of its sub-genres make up 8,105 of them, about 34% of the archive, on 2,077 different labels.
SHOW THE NUMBERS
| Year | Releases |
|---|---|
| 2005 | 19 |
| 2006 | 13 |
| 2007 | 21 |
| 2008 | 11 |
| 2009 | 33 |
| 2010 | 47 |
| 2011 | 46 |
| 2012 | 133 |
| 2013 | 191 |
| 2014 | 318 |
| 2015 | 441 |
| 2016 | 639 |
| 2017 | 819 |
| 2018 | 895 |
| 2019 | 842 |
| 2020 | 963 |
| 2021 | 763 |
| 2022 | 581 |
| 2023 | 472 |
| 2024 | 419 |
| 2025 | 267 |
What the curve says:
- Before 2009 there is very little. The handful of records from the early 2000s that taggers filed under synthwave are often ambient or Berlin-school electronic music, not the modern sound.
- 2012 is the first real jump, to 133 releases from 46 the year before. Labels that later became the scene's busiest, such as RetroSynth Records and NewRetroWave, have their first releases in the archive in 2011 and 2012.
- The peak is 2020, with 963 releases. 2018 is next at 895.
- Since 2021 the yearly count is lower. Part of that is probably real cooling after the boom, and part is likely catalogue lag: databases like MusicBrainz and Discogs keep filling in recent years for a long time. We will update this chart as the archive grows. (2026 is left out because the year is not over.)
Synthwave is also not alone. Here is how the archive's genre families compare:
SHOW THE NUMBERS
| Family | Releases |
|---|---|
| Vaporwave | 10,473 |
| Synthwave | 8,105 |
| Popwave | 2,678 |
| Darksynth | 1,803 |
| Dreamwave | 833 |
| Cyberpunk | 6 |
The surprise for many readers is that Vaporwave is the bigger family. It shares the 1980s palette but is a different music, mostly built from slowed and looped samples; the synthwave vs vaporwave guide explains the difference, and the What is vaporwave? A guide to the internet's slowed-down mall music covers the genre itself. The pop-leaning cousins (synth-pop, italo disco, nu-disco) sit together as Popwave.
Who releases it? The busiest labels for synthwave in the archive are RetroSynth Records (152 releases), NewRetroWave (115) and FiXT Neon (98). But labels are only part of the story: 1,939 synthwave releases in the archive are self-released, a sign of how many artists put their music out themselves.
Where are the artists from? Country is on file for 61% of these releases. Among those, artists from the United States lead with 1,493 releases, then the United Kingdom (544) and France (497), the country where it started.
The family: sub-genres and neighbours
Synthwave has a few branches with their own names. People use them loosely, and sources do not always agree where one ends and the next begins.[1] The Synthwave sub-genres explained: a map with real counts page sorts them out, and each row below has a guide of its own: Outrun music: the racing-game sound of synthwave, Retrowave: the name, the sound and where it overlaps synthwave, Spacesynth: the cosmic, Italian-rooted corner of synthwave and Dreamwave: synthwave's soft, nostalgic side.
| Branch | What it means here | Releases in the archive |
|---|---|---|
| Outrun | The driving, sunset-and-sports-car strand named after the arcade game | 120 |
| Retrowave | Often a synonym for synthwave; as a tag, used for brighter, poppier records | 429 |
| Spacesynth | Cosmic, melodic, with roots in 1980s European disco | 115 |
| Darksynth | Heavy, distorted, horror and metal influenced | 1,803 |
| Dreamwave | Soft, slow and nostalgic | 833 |
One thing the numbers make clear: in the data, plain "synthwave" is by far the most used tag. The sub-genre names are real, but most artists and labels simply call the music synthwave. The darksynth count above includes the archive's darkwave-tagged records, which is a different, older genre; Darkwave vs darksynth: two dark genres people mix up untangles the two, and the What is darksynth? The heavy, horror-lit side of synthwave covers the modern heavy strand.
Ten records to start with
These are not "the best" synthwave records; they are ten clear doors into it, spread across its first decade and its main moods. Each links to its page in the archive, where you can find the label, the formats and where to get it from the artist.
- The College and Electric Youth song that Drive later made famous; dreamy, slow and sung.
- Kavinsky · 2010 · Record Makers · EPThe other Drive song: a vocoder voice, a slow heavy beat, and a night drive in four minutes.
- Lazerhawk · 2010 · Rosso Corsa Records · LPAn early outrun album from 2010: fast arpeggios and open-road melodies.
- Perturbator · 2014 · Blood Music · LPWhere synthwave gets dark: dense, loud and cinematic.
- Carpenter Brut · 2015 · No Quarter Prod · COMPThree EPs in one set; the heavy, horror-film end of the scene at full speed.
- Mitch Murder · 2015 · self-released · LPBright, playful and very 1980s TV, from one of the composers behind Kung Fury's score.
- GUNSHIP · 2015 · Horsie in the Hedge LLP · LPBig-chorus synthwave with vocals; a good start if you like songs more than instrumentals.
- Timecop1983 · 2015 · TimeSlaves · LPSoft, romantic dreamwave from the Dutch producer; good late at night.
- The Midnight · 2016 · Studio C4 · LPSaxophone, vocals and summer nostalgia; one of the most loved records in the vocal style.
- Survive · 2016 · Relapse Records · LPAnalogue, slow and moody, from the band whose members scored Stranger Things.
Where to listen
You do not need to know any of the names above to start. Frekvenci's radio plays Creative Commons synthwave free, with the artist and licence shown for every track, on nine stations split by mood rather than sub-genre. For classic synthwave, start with the Night Drive station (92.0 FM); for the heavy side, the Dark station (94.6 FM); for the soft side, the Dreams station (88.1 FM). To dig through the catalogue itself, browse all synthwave releases by year, label and mood, or start from an artist such as Perturbator and follow the links to who they released with.
To go further: The best synthwave albums, and what the lists agree on and 25 essential synthwave artists, and where to start with each are the next lists to read, How synthwave is made: the sounds, the gear, the tricks explains the gear, and Synthwave for night drives: the sound, the stations and 10 records is a route for the road. For the first big jump in the counts, see Synthwave in 2012: the year in the archive.
If you make videos or streams, every track on the radio shows its Creative Commons licence; check what that licence allows before you use a track, and credit the artist the way the licence asks.
Sources
- Synthwave (used as a map to its references) · Wikipedia
- Valerie Stories: 10 Years of College's Essential LP 'Secret Diary' · Vehlinggo, 26 Nov 2018
- Drive (2011 film) · Wikipedia
- Out Run · Wikipedia
- S U R V I V E, Synths, and the Music of 'Stranger Things' · Bandcamp Daily, 5 Aug 2016
- The Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon Soundtrack Fits Like A Glove · Game Informer, 24 Apr 2013
- Catching Up With Mitch Murder, King of the 80s Revival · Vehlinggo, 26 Jul 2015
- The Weeknd's Blinding Lights sets US Top 10 chart record · Official Charts Company, 9 Mar 2021
- More 1980s than the 1980s: Hauntological and Hyperreal Meanings of Synthwave Soundtracks · Mattia Merlini, Sound Stage Screen 3(1), 2023
- Classic Tracks: A-ha 'Take On Me' · Sound On Sound, Mar 2011
- Roland Icon Series: The JUNO-106 Synthesizer · Roland
- What Does the Future Hold for Timecop1983? · Vehlinggo, 1 Jul 2015
- Gated reverb (used as a map to its references) · Wikipedia