The Joke That Became a Genre
On July 27, 2009, the pseudonymous blogger Carles published a post on Hipster Runoff titled “Is WASHED OUT the next Neon Indian/Memory Cassette?” He proposed a list of genre names for a nascent trend: Chill Bro Core, Pitchforkwavegaze, forkshit, CumWave. At the bottom, almost as an afterthought: “Feel like I might call it ‘chill wave’ music in the future.” Carles later admitted he had thrown “a bunch of pretty silly names on a blog post and seen which one stuck.” Alan Palomo of Neon Indian observed that it caught on “because it was the most dismissive and sarcastic” option, arriving when blog-mediated music discovery was at its peak. The term didn’t reach The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times until early 2010. By then the sound already had a shape, a geography, and three names at its center.
Three Bedrooms, Three Records
Ernest Weatherly Greene Jr. was living with his parents in Perry, Georgia, population around 15,000, surrounded by peach orchards. He had a master’s in library science from the University of Georgia but couldn’t find work as a librarian. He retreated to his childhood bedroom, made music on dated software with terrible speakers, downloaded loops from the internet, slowed samples from 1970s and 1980s disco records, and drenched everything in reverb. Feel It All Around was built on a sample of I Want You by Italian disco artist Gary Low, a 1983 hit Greene discovered online. He dropped the tempo from 122 BPM to 86, pitched it down six semitones, and buried Low’s melody under layers of haze. The Life of Leisure EP came out on Mexican Summer in September 2009.
Chazwick Bradley Bundick, born in Columbia, South Carolina, to a Filipino mother and an African-American father, had just graduated from the University of South Carolina with a graphic design degree. Recording as Toro y Moi, he built Causers of This on the DAW Reason with a sampler-heavy, collage-based approach. Then his car was broken into and all the session files were stolen. Only the instrumental bounces survived. He rebuilt the album from those remnants. Causers of This arrived on Carpark Records in January 2010; Kanye West was among the early fans.
Alan Palomo was born in Monterrey, Mexico, moved to San Antonio at five, and enrolled at the University of North Texas in Denton to study film. His father was a Mexican pop singer. In the winter of 2008, Palomo recorded Psychic Chasms in roughly one month, limiting each song to two days of work. His primary instrument was a Dave Smith Prophet ‘08, augmented by Moog synthesizers and flangers. Lefse Records released it on October 13, 2009. Pitchfork awarded it Best New Music.
The Sound of Faded Memories
Chillwave’s palette drew from late-1970s and early-1980s synth-pop, Italo disco, dream pop, and the incidental music of VHS tapes. Cheap analog synths, heavy reverb, pitch-wobbled tape effects mimicking warped cassettes, drum machines mixed low and hazy, vocals buried so deep in processing they became texture rather than focal point. The Roland Juno-60 and Juno-106, among the first affordable analog polysynths with digitally controlled oscillators and a built-in chorus, became totems. Slow LFO modulation on a synth’s fine-tuning simulated the drift of a worn cassette. Compression pushed atmosphere forward while beats receded. The result evoked a half-remembered summer heard through a wall or across a swimming pool.
What separated chillwave from the concurrent “hypnagogic pop” label, coined by David Keenan in the August 2009 issue of The Wire, was accessibility. Keenan’s term described “pop music refracted through the memory of a memory,” often strange and willfully obscure. Chillwave kept the nostalgia but added hooks, even if you had to squint through the fog to find them.
The Blog Machine
By mid-2009, music blogs like Gorilla vs. Bear and Stereogum had become the primary discovery engines for independent music. A bedroom producer could upload a track to MySpace in the morning and have it ricocheting through aggregator sites by evening. Chillwave was perfectly adapted to this ecosystem: the lo-fi production meant anyone with a laptop and a secondhand synth could participate, and the visual branding (faded Polaroid tones, VHS tracking lines, references to surfing and summer) was instantly reproducible.
Dayve Hawk, formerly of the Philadelphia band Hail Social, released music under three overlapping aliases in early 2009: Weird Tapes, Memory Cassette, and Memory Tapes. He settled on Memory Tapes for his debut LP Seek Magic, released September 2009; Pitchfork placed it at number 23 on their year-end list. Brooklyn’s Small Black, whose guitarist Juan Pieczanski ran Pitchfork.tv’s “Juan’s Basement” series, signed to Jagjaguwar and released New Chain in October 2010.
Crossover and Collapse
Greene’s Feel It All Around became the theme for Portlandia, the Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein sketch comedy that debuted on IFC in January 2011. Suddenly chillwave was in coffee shops and yoga studios. Greene signed to Sub Pop and recorded Within and Without with Ben Allen (Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion, Deerhunter’s Halcyon Digest) at Maze Studios in Atlanta. Palomo took Era Extrana to Dave Fridmann, recording in Helsinki and Brooklyn. Bundick abandoned samples entirely for Underneath the Pine, recording at home on a Roland JX-3P, a Squier Bronco bass, and a Rhodes electric piano.
The backlash arrived on schedule. Keenan wrote in 2011 that chillwave had become “shorthand for a cheap form of revivalism and a valorising of bad taste.” Pitchfork’s dismissal of Millionyoung’s Replicants was read as a death certificate. The production process was so simple that oversaturation was inevitable; every blog was drowning in hazy synth demos by artists with names referencing beaches.
Chillwave as a scene withered by 2012, but its influence saturated the decade. Tame Impala evolved into purveyors of glossy electronic pop that one critic called “an ultra-high-definition remaster of chillwave’s faux-analog aesthetic.” Mac DeMarco took the slacker warmth and built a cult around it. The prevalence of synth-pop rather than guitar rock as indie’s default sound through the 2010s owed a significant debt. The three principals moved on: Bundick explored funk, R&B, and house; Palomo released the neon-lit VEGA INTL. Night School in 2015 before recording under his own name; Greene continued through five progressively polished Washed Out albums. The whole arc, from Carles’s blog post to critical burial, took about eighteen months.
Essential Listening
- Washed Out – Life of Leisure (2009)
- Neon Indian – Psychic Chasms (2009)
- Memory Tapes – Seek Magic (2009)
- Toro y Moi – Causers of This (2010)
- Small Black – New Chain (2010)
- Washed Out – Within and Without (2011)
- Neon Indian – Era Extrana (2011)
- Toro y Moi – Underneath the Pine (2011)
- Craft Spells – Idle Labor (2011)
- Blackbird Blackbird – Summer Heart (2011)
- Brothertiger – Golden Years (2012)
- Neon Indian – VEGA INTL. Night School (2015)