The French Connection
Synthwave did not start in the 1980s. It started in the mid-2000s, in France, made by people who grew up watching 1980s movies on VHS. Vincent Belorgey, born in Paris in 1975, spent his childhood absorbing American action films and their synthesizer scores. In 2006, working under the name Kavinsky, he released the EP Teddy Boy, written entirely on a Yamaha DX7, the keyboard most associated with mid-1980s pop production. Belorgey invented a character for himself: a man who crashed his Ferrari Testarossa in 1986, died, and returned as a zombie in 2006 to make electronic music. The backstory was absurd, but the sound was precise, a lovingly reconstructed version of something that never quite existed.
In Nantes, David Grellier launched the project College in 2007 with the EP Teenage Color, followed by the full-length Secret Diary in 2008 on the Valerie Collective label. Where Kavinsky channeled car chases and neon, Grellier drew from soap opera themes, Italo disco, and the incidental music of after-school television. Secret Diary is fourteen tracks of warm, reverb-heavy synth-pop that sounds like a memory of a decade Grellier experienced as a child. It is one of the earliest records that can be fully classified as synthwave.
Both owed a debt to the French electronic scene that preceded them: Daft Punk, Justice, the Ed Banger Records roster. Kavinsky’s 2010 single Nightcall was co-produced with Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo of Daft Punk, its robotic vocals and brooding bass pointing toward something darker and more cinematic than French house typically allowed.
The Drive Detonation
Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2011 film Drive placed synthwave inside a mainstream hit. Editor Mat Newman suggested Nightcall for the opening credits. Cliff Martinez scored the rest with what he called “a kind of retro, 80ish, synthesizer europop.” Grellier’s collaboration with the Canadian duo Electric Youth, A Real Hero, served as the emotional centerpiece. The soundtrack topped the iTunes chart and reached number 30 on the Billboard 200.
Before Drive, synthwave was an underground concern with a small online following. After it, every music blog had a reason to investigate. The film gave the genre a visual grammar: neon-lit Los Angeles, a satin jacket, a car at night. Kavinsky’s debut album OutRun, released on Record Makers in February 2013, arrived into a world that now recognized the sound.
Hotline Miami and the Underground Explosion
The 2012 top-down shooter Hotline Miami, developed by Swedish studio Dennaton Games, did for synthwave’s darker side what Drive did for its cinematic romanticism. The soundtrack featured Perturbator, M|O|O|N, and Jasper Byrne. James Kent, a Parisian recording as Perturbator, drew from Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and The Running Man. Hotline Miami put his music in front of millions of players and popularized a heavier strain called darksynth.
Franck Hueso, from Poitiers, recording as Carpenter Brut (a pun on champagne house Charpentier Brut and filmmaker John Carpenter), released three EPs between 2012 and 2015, collected as Trilogy. His music merged synthwave with metal’s aggression: distorted bass sequences, blast-speed arpeggios, horror film samples. The two toured together in 2023 on the Leather Sacraments tour, playing to rock audiences who might never have encountered the genre otherwise.
The Gear and the Grid
Synthwave producers gravitate toward a specific palette, whether hardware or software emulations. The Roland Juno-106 provides warm pads and shimmering chorused leads. The Sequential Prophet-5 supplies punchy bass and resonant filter sweeps. The Yamaha DX7 contributes glassy electric pianos and bell tones. Moog synthesizers deliver thick monophonic bass. Drum machines follow the Roland lineage: the TR-808 for booming kicks, the LinnDrum for gated snares. Many producers work entirely with software recreations, achieving the same timbres at a fraction of the cost.
The visual identity is equally codified. The “outrun” aesthetic, named after Sega’s 1986 arcade game, relies on neon-pink and cyan palettes, wireframe grids receding toward a sunset horizon, chrome typography, DeLorean sports cars, and palm tree silhouettes. This language coalesced across album covers, YouTube thumbnails, and subreddit banners between roughly 2012 and 2015.
Synthwave Is Not Vaporwave
The two genres share a fascination with the recent past, but their intentions diverge. Vaporwave, which coalesced around 2010 with releases like Floral Shoppe by Macintosh Plus, slows and chops samples from 1980s corporate music, smooth jazz, and elevator Muzak. Its tone is ironic, engaged in a critique of consumerism. Synthwave is sincere; it celebrates the 1980s rather than deconstructing them. Tempos differ too: vaporwave sits between 60 and 100 BPM, while synthwave ranges from 100 to beyond 150.
The Bandcamp Generation
By the mid-2010s, synthwave had fractured into subgenres and spread worldwide. In Stockholm, Johan Bengtsson, recording as Mitch Murder, had been releasing material on Rosso Corsa Records since 2010. His soundtrack for Kung Fury (2015), a crowd-funded short film parodying 1980s action movies, included a collaboration with David Hasselhoff on True Survivor, which went viral. In New Jersey, graphic designer Seth Haley, performing as Com Truise, released Galactic Melt on Ghostly International in 2011, describing his sound as “mid-fi synthwave slow-motion funk,” a concept record about a synthetic astronaut whose glitchy, slowed-down approach showed how wide the genre’s boundaries could stretch.
Col Bennett, a Scottish producer based in San Francisco, released Atlas as FM-84 in 2016. With vocalist Ollie Wride, he crafted polished pop songs like Running in the Night that brought high-quality singing to a genre that had been largely instrumental. Danish producer Tim McEwan and Atlanta singer-songwriter Tyler Lyle formed The Midnight, releasing the EP Days of Thunder in 2014 and Endless Summer in 2016, layering saxophone, guitar, and earnest lyrics over synthwave beds. The British trio Gunship released their self-titled debut in 2015 with a guest appearance from John Carpenter on the track Tech Noir.
Stranger Things and Beyond
In 2016, Netflix premiered Stranger Things, scored by Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein of the Austin, Texas synth group S U R V I V E. The Duffer Brothers had discovered the band’s track Dirge while cutting a mock trailer to sell the show to the network. Dixon and Stein won the 2017 Emmy for Outstanding Original Main Title Theme Music, pushing synthesizer-driven nostalgia further into popular culture than Drive ever had.
Synthwave persists because it solved a specific creative problem: how to feel genuine emotion about a past you only half-remember, using machines designed to sound like that past. The genre remains active on Bandcamp, at festivals, and through labels like NewRetroWave Records, which launched as a blog in 2011 and grew into one of the scene’s primary curatorial voices. The DX7s and Juno-106s keep humming, whether in hardware or code. The grid still glows.
Essential Listening
- Kavinsky – OutRun (2013)
- College – Secret Diary (2008)
- Perturbator – Dangerous Days (2014)
- Carpenter Brut – Trilogy (2015)
- Com Truise – Galactic Melt (2011)
- FM-84 – Atlas (2016)
- The Midnight – Endless Summer (2016)
- Gunship – Gunship (2015)
- Mitch Murder – Current Events (2010)
- S U R V I V E – RR7349 (2016)
- Power Glove – EP1 (2012)
- Dance with the Dead – Out of Body (2013)