Outrun 2006-2020

History and timeline

On January 9, 2006, Record Makers, owned by Air, releases a vinyl titled “Teddy Boy” on the French market, credited to Kavinsky. The musician's real name is Vincent Belorgey: at the time a low-profile actor, he manages through his connections to land a deal with the label.

Kavinsky is his alter ego and appears on the cover right from the start, in a tracksuit and black jacket, eyes bloodshot. Over the years, through interviews, it emerges that he's a zombie, brought back to life to search for his girlfriend. A thin, all in all pretextual backstory, only hinted at in a few songs, and in any case coming after “Teddy Boy”, which is entirely instrumental.

Given what would follow, this vinyl is now regarded as the birth of a new genre and one of the turning points of contemporary electronic music. Yet, as proof of how much perception is shaped by extra-musical factors, it's not far-fetched to imagine that, had “Teddy Boy” exerted no influence at all, today it would be seen merely as the tail end of a dying french touch, one that was shedding the structures of house music.

Just look at the context: in 2005 Daft Punk had released “Human After All”, which contains tracks now considered classics like “Robot Rock” and “Technologic”, but which actually benefited from the huge critical reappraisal the band enjoyed in the following decade. Upon release, it was instead a resounding commercial flop.

As for the rest, projects like Modjo and Cassius hadn't been heard from in years, while Alan Braxe had never managed to repeat the success of “Music Sounds Better With You” (released as Stardust). “Teddy Boy” slotted precisely into this trajectory of decline, passing largely unnoticed except for a few particularly attentive insiders. The record contains “Testarossa Audiodrive”, the first synthwave track, the genre's sacred text. Perhaps inspired by hearing it, or simply having grown up in the same cultural humus that produced Kavinsky, the following year a group of French musicians based in Nantes formed the Valerie collective: its members included David Grellier (aka College), Frédéric Rivière (Anoraak), the Outrunners, and other lesser-known names.

For a few years, the scene is defined by a group of French producers who, starting from the ashes of french touch, turn back to look at Eighties synth pop (after all, this is the 2000s, the decade of the large-scale synth pop revival). It looks more like a secret society of conspirators than an actual movement.

Things change in 2010, the year some key releases start turning heads (Lazerhawk's debut chief among them), which not only exert a huge influence on the synthwave to come but also establish the social and structural machinery around which it will revolve, effectively lifting it out of the context of a group of French friends and turning it into a worldwide, if still underground, phenomenon.

It's not easy, however, to understand exactly how this happens, and more generally it's hard to pin down the dynamics driving the scene. Documentaries have been made about synthwave, YouTube overflows with videos illustrating it and acting as listening guides, but none of them ever manage to be particularly precise: it isn't clear, for instance, when the term was actually coined (careful, among other things, not to confuse it with "synth-wave", hyphenated, which denotes a specific genre of experimental electronic pop dating back to the Eighties).

The meaning is easy enough to explain, since it's music built entirely on synthesizers, but just how unofficial it all is is shown by the fact that a handful of alternative names have sprung up, which many use in its place: outrun, retrowave, futuresynth, to name just the best known.

This difficulty in getting a grip on synthwave stems from one very specific fact: starting in 2010 the movement becomes a child of the internet. That's the year Rossa Corsa Records is born, a virtual label run by Garrett Hays (Lazerhawk) and Mike Glover (Miami Nights 1984). It isn't even clear whether the two ever met in person to found it: one is from Texas, the other lives on Canada's west coast. After all, synthwave will soon go on to obliterate geographic context altogether. Being internet-based, it has no need for a local scene. It's telling enough that it was born in France and then, at a certain point, was launched on a grand scale by musicians on the other side of the Atlantic, completely unconnected to the original circle, who had probably just heard that music somewhere online.

Rossa Corsa will turn out to be merely the first of a myriad of new labels: from that point on, an endless stream of albums is fed into the internet, often never making it to physical format, all traveling within a specific spectrum of sound (a spectrum that will widen over the following years). A labyrinth of independent releases, first in the hundreds, then eventually in the thousands per year.

The concept quickly becomes clear: anyone with an internet connection can become part of the scene. Add to that the fact that 2010 is also the year the other great digital phenomenon of the new millennium, vaporwave, appears out of nowhere. The chaos is total.

The official critical establishment doesn't even try to bring order to the pandemonium, which thus moves through the decade undisturbed, running practically parallel to the rest of music and absent from any magazine that matters (Pitchfork first and foremost). After all, magazines are used to relying on labels with physical distribution, or at least ones that follow traditional channels, complete with press releases, communication with managers, and so on. Elements entirely foreign to synthwave.

No official body of criticism therefore develops, and this might well be one of its healthiest traits: free from the sociopolitical constraints of contemporary music criticism, it carries on unfazed for years without any need to adapt to outside trends. When it does evolve, it does so by shifting the proportions of the elements already within its own universe.

Synthwave thus gradually develops a community in the virtual underground - among Reddit forums and 4chan - which in turn relies, for distribution, on sites like YouTube, Soundcloud and Bandcamp.

Local scenes aren't the only thing left in pieces: the very concept of the record label loses its meaning. Often it's just simple YouTube accounts that managed to carve out a niche in the chaos thanks to some lucky track (or the algorithm), and which, buoyed by the audience they've built, attract producers looking for a bit of visibility, generating a virtuous circle.

One thing is certain: from 2010 onward, synthwave will no longer have labels that fund the artist, sign them to contracts, or manage their image. There will simply be distribution channels that receive finished products from artists and pass them on, at no extra cost, to audiences worldwide, just a click away.

By 2020, little has changed in terms of mechanics, except that the scale has gradually grown bigger, every time this universe has drawn in outside bodies, bending them to its own aesthetic (and never the other way around).

A major leap into the wider world happens in 2011, with "Drive", the film by Nicolas Winding Refn, which features both already-released tracks ("Nightcall" by Kavinsky, "A Real Hero" by College and Electric Youth) and an instrumental score in that same style. This is when people outside the small circle of early fans start talking about this kind of music.

In 2012 it's the video game industry that enters the picture, with "Hotline Miami", from the Swedish indie studio Dennaton, which draws on synthwave for both its visual identity and its music. The following year it's even a major title's turn: "Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon", from Ubisoft.

Full consecration arrives, however, in 2015, with the hugely successful "Hotline Miami 2" and with two independent films - the second of which is actually amateur - the Canadian "Turbo Kid" and the Swedish "Kung Fury", which becomes a cult object the world over.

From that year onward, the genre's popularity skyrocketed, with Google searches for related terms surging dramatically. The influence this had on mainstream music within just a few years is nothing more than a direct consequence of the genre's pervasiveness in terms of reach, even while it remained far from the spotlight.

The press, in spite of all this, has stubbornly remained immune to the phenomenon, even after The Weeknd – certainly the popstar with the most refined ear – sent its sound to the top of the charts worldwide with "Blinding Lights".

(F. Romagnoli)

Aesthetics and Sound

Wikipedia defines synthwave as a genre of electronic music influenced by the soundtracks of 1980s films and video games. The sources are accurate, but it's debatable whether it's just a genre of electronic music: synthwave carries with it an entire aesthetic, one that started with the covers of its earliest albums but has since proven capable of standing on its own, without the music. It's easy to come across independent artists across various online forums who post landscapes and visual compositions inspired by synthwave, with no music attached whatsoever. Some of them even have Patreon accounts they use to get funded: in short, there are people who have managed to turn it into an actual job.

One of the alternative terms used to describe the movement, as already mentioned, is "outrun". Within the community there's debate over whether the two words are perfectly interchangeable or not. There are at least three schools of thought on the matter: those who consider them synonyms (the majority, though not an overwhelming one); those who believe the two terms meant the same thing only at the start, before the genre expanded, and that afterward outrun should be regarded as just one of its many subgenres; and finally those who think it would be more appropriate to use "synthwave" for the music and "outrun" for the accompanying aesthetic.

"Outrun" was the title of a historic arcade video game released by Sega in 1986. It consisted of a series of car races, whose most famous level had players speeding past palm trees and beaches in a landscape reminiscent of Miami Beach.

Looking at the covers and videos of many synthwave projects, or indeed the landscapes shared across various forums, you'll notice a heavy presence of cars, often framed with the same visual perspective as the video game in question, alongside palm trees and seaside backdrops. For this reason the title was lifted wholesale to name the movement (or at least its aesthetic), though here too, in the absence of any official record, it's impossible to pin down exactly when this usage began.

Whether you call it synthwave or outrun, it's an aesthetic that can be considered in constant expansion: when it was born, for instance, it didn't have the cyberpunk connotations it would later take on (connotations that, incidentally, were entirely absent from the original video game as well), and even once those arrived, a large wing of the movement would remain completely untouched by them.

Over time, the community began splitting releases into an endless series of subgenres. While this may have been useful at first, it didn't take long to degenerate into an outright mess, with even half a dozen records enough to spawn a brand new offshoot, following that hypertrophic naming habit that has always affected (or rather, plagued) electronic music. We won't waste time describing the various sweatwave and sexwave scenes, to name just a couple of the more far-fetched examples: suffice it to say they're distinguished by sweaty bodies and erotic poses on their covers.

The most useful labels are the ones that come with an actual sonic identity of their own. Three in particular stand out:

– first-wave synthwave, or outrun, going by the second of the three interpretations already mentioned. This is the foundation of the movement: it includes acts like Kavinsky, Lazerhawk and Miami Nights 1984. The sound reveals the influence of electropop, italodisco and space disco, combined with video-game-soundtrack-style arpeggios and mid-range synthesizers – sometimes polyphonic, sometimes monophonic – with aggressive tones. Still, the sound comes across as fairly compact, if not quite minimalist, since it doesn't overdo it with delay and reverb: broadly speaking, it still lacks the grand, dreamlike architecture that would later become typical of the genre. The tracks are built around the repetition of one or a handful of riffs, with dynamics driven by the alternation of sparse and dense passages;

– darksynth, the harder, darker subgenre: the tones grow saturated, the rhythms torrential, the covers lean toward cyberpunk, and the arrangements edge closer to the most symphonic strain of electro-industrial. It includes Perturbator, Dance With The Dead, Mega Drive and Carpenter Brut;

– dreamwave, the more romantic and nostalgic flip side of the coin: sunsets, blurred lights, relaxing rhythms, softly floating keyboards. Com Truise, Timecop1983, Home and Fm-84 are among the best-known names.

Among the more minor offshoots, though ones that do have a reason to exist, worth mentioning are shredwave (tracks featuring electric guitar solos, but with a sound closer to 1980s arena rock than industrial), with anthems like "Red Eyes" by Zombie Hyperdrive and "Accelerated" by Miami Nights 1984, and spacewave (mainly focused on space exploration and sounds tied to that theme), which would include acts like Dynatron and Night Runner.

Finally, it's worth noting the existence of a borderline area, in which the atmospheres described above are wedded to music usually devoid of a rhythm section, akin to the horror synth of the Eighties (soundtracks by John Carpenter above all) and to the progressive electronic of Germany's Tangerine Dream (particularly their poppier phase, as heard on the "Risky Business" soundtrack). This special feature, however, has only touched on it marginally, since it's often music closer to the ambient universe.

Once again, due to the lack of any official literature, the breakdown outlined above is just one of several possible ways of dividing things up, attempting to follow the most widespread schools of thought: there will nonetheless be those who disagree. Some, for instance, believe a further distinction should be drawn between dreamwave and retrowave, even though the latter term is also used as a synonym for synthwave as a whole. As you'll have gathered, splitting hairs is always just around the corner.

(F. Romagnoli, G. Rivoira)

Sources and philosophy

Outrun does carry a dose of nostalgia for the Eighties, but also, and perhaps above all, for the idea of the future that the Eighties created through mass communication. An idea evidently betrayed by the reality we're living in today. Similar regrets also drive the parallel movement already mentioned, vaporwave, which resolves them by conjuring an illusion of the Eighties to immerse yourself in, in order to relive that decade and the feelings its memory has left behind.

For outrun, the solution is different: not recreating the past, but an alternative present to our own, one that matches what the Eighties had promised. A present, that is, that looks like the future, rather than the eternal standstill we get the sense (mistaken, but unavoidable) of being trapped in. To put it simply, if vaporwave is the Eighties seen from the new millennium and deconstructed, outrun is the new millennium seen from the Eighties and painstakingly recreated, going beyond the technical limitations of that decade. The creative process is essentially the polar opposite (after all, vaporwave is mostly built on sampling, while synthwave relies on instruments and programming), even though they share the same ingredients and play on the very same feelings: this explains why the two movements share most of their audience, and why some artists have tried their hand at both.

Outrun's vision naturally rests on all the pop-culture clichés tied to the future and technology: neon lights, phosphorescent colors (fuchsia pink especially, one of the omnipresent shades in the genre), spaceships, exaggerated firearms. Being a vision of the future born in the Eighties, it naturally reflects the values of that era, which touched on two opposite poles: on one side the hedonistic optimism fueled by the illusion of unchecked neoliberalism (hence luxury cars and gym-toned bodies), on the other the terror of nuclear threat and totalitarianism (hence the darksynth wing and its dystopian imagery, heavily influenced by the films and music of the aforementioned John Carpenter).

It isn't a straightforward nostalgia, but a layered one: it doesn't only affect those who can genuinely feel it having lived through that era, but also those who, at the time, were far from being born. Among the genre's followers, in fact, there's a sizeable share of kids born from the 2000s onward, mostly male (another element that would deserve an in-depth sociological study).

Scrolling through the comments on YouTube (and the fact that one has to resort to such a method to analyze a musical genre says a lot about the innovation it has brought in terms of dynamics and distribution), you do notice a recurring type of comment, which could be roughly summed up as: "I wasn't even born in the Eighties, but this music still makes me nostalgic for that time."

The reason lies in the epic yet melancholic undertone implicit in this kind of music and imagery. Epic because the reality depicted is indeed better than our own (or worse, as in the case of darksynth, though mitigated by the heroic element of having to confront it, following the action-movie stereotype that crystallized precisely in the Eighties and still holds true today). Melancholic because it skillfully draws on that set of symbols tied to feelings of yearning, reflection, or dreamlike suspension, such as sunset and night (it's no coincidence that one of the main colors in outrun's palette is dark blue).

It's precisely the contrast between a positive feeling (the energy conveyed) and a negative one (the sadness of shattered expectations for those who lived through the era; the fact of not having experienced that period firsthand, for those born later) that generates that all-encompassing sense of no longer being able to board a train that has already left, but of at least being able to admire it in the artistic creations of others.

(F. Romagnoli)

Thirty synthwave records – Instructions for use

Below is a selection of thirty records (one per artist) among those that have garnered the greatest response. Some are milestones of contemporary electronic music, others show clear weaknesses, but all of them have, in some way, made their presence felt. The order is purely chronological: it's then up to each individual review to lay out the album's stylistic and qualitative coordinates, bearing in mind that the latter also depend on the writer's own taste.

The handful of landmark singles that never made it onto an album have nonetheless been mentioned in the review of the relevant artist. In this introduction, then, only a couple will be brought up, produced by artists we wouldn't otherwise cover: "So Electric" by French artist Lifelike (aka Laurent Ash), from 2007, and "Dust" by New York's M|O|O|N (Stephen Gilarde), from 2012. Neither fits especially well within the synthwave canon, considering their body of work as a whole, which leans heavily toward house, but with these two tracks they left a deep mark on the scene.

For convenience, and for anyone wanting to dig deeper, here's a list of useful YouTube channels: 80s Ladies, The '80s Guy, ThePrimeThanatos, LuigiDonatello, NewRetroWave and neros77.

Finally, worth mentioning are the labels Blood Music, Rosso Corsa Records, Future City Records and Future 80's Records.

(F. Romagnoli)

Anoraak – Nightdrive With You (2008)

Frederic Riviere, aka Anoraak, belongs to that generation of electronic producers active in the late 2000s who converged around the Valerie Records collective. Like the work of his labelmate College, "Nightdrive With You" shares a minimalist approach to production. The intent is presumably to craft an indie reimagining of old-school synth-pop, but the tendency to stretch out the instrumental phrasing places the EP squarely within the coordinates of the movement examined in this feature. The frequent vocal incursions set Anoraak apart from College and much of the synthwave to come; Riviere's subsequent career, more devoted to electronic pop in the strict sense, would shed light on his true inclinations.

(G. Rivoira)

College – Teenage Color Ep (2008)

Founder of Valerie Records, David Grellier is one of the earliest synthwave musicians: when the genre didn't even exist yet, he was already playing it. He debuted, in fact, in 2008, well ahead of the genre's future classics, releasing in short order both the album "A Secret Diary" and the EP "Teenage Color". It's above all in the smaller scale of the latter that his sound - straddling the french touch of the past and the dream-tinged synthwave yet to come - manages to shine without falling into needless repetition. The characteristic midtempos, with beds of synth bass, pad textures and soft leads, would define the French artist's entire career, eventually bringing him success with "A Real Hero", the standout track from the "Drive" soundtrack, made in collaboration with Electric Youth.

(G. Rivoira)

Lazerhawk – Redline (2010)

"Redline", the debut of Texan artist Lazerhawk, fully embodies synthwave's retrofuturistic side, with its obsession for speed and racing cars, evoked quite bluntly by the speedometer on the cover art. Its feverish needle, hopelessly pinned in the red zone of the vehicle's top speed, becomes a powerful meta-musical suggestion on the title track, where the relentless use of a synth's portamento knob simulates the roar of an engine. Unlike much of the synthwave that would follow, which would offer music with a cinematic, epic or dreamy sweep, the sounds on this record are mostly monophonic, with aggressive basslines running in eighths or sixteenths (recalling the Hi-Nrg of Giorgio Moroder), drum machines with a rigid pulse, distorted, acidic lead synths; even the pads feature very few softening effects like reverb or delay. The vocoders that color the driving "Electric Groove", "Dream Machine" and "Pedal To The metal" create a rare, almost unique hybrid of electroclash and french touch, while charging tracks like "Overdrive" or "Activation" pave the way for a decade of synth-only rampages.

(G. Rivoira)

Com Truise – Cyanide Sisters (2010-11)

New York-based Seth Haley, better known as Com Truise, made his debut with this low-quality mp3 EP back in 2010. Released by the fledgling Czech digital label Amdiscs, the record wouldn't really start circulating until the following year, when it was distributed by the American label Ghostly International in a revised and expanded version: a higher bitrate, four extra tracks, and two of the original tracks slightly extended (including the title track). The EP essentially serves as the blueprint for everything the artist would do afterwards (admittedly not the most imaginative figure on the scene): a low BPM count, harmonies built on the interplay between narcotic synth bass and glimmering keyboards, and atmospheres bordering on chillwave.

(F. Romagnoli)

AA. VV. – Drive (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (2011)

It was thanks to the stir caused at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival that the career of cult Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn took its definitive leap forward: "Drive" managed to reshuffle the deck of the crime movie, with its evocative existentialist silences and a depiction of violence free from the pulp excesses that had dominated the genre's on-screen representation for at least two decades. It wasn't just Ryan Gosling's iconic scorpion jacket and the vintage sports car chases - above all, it was the soundtrack that set the pace for the entire movement, both in terms of popularity and aesthetics. The combination of Cliff Martinez's original score - the veteran composer having been active in the field since the early Nineties - with songs by independent artists produced memorable sequences, elevating tracks like Kavinsky's "Nightcall" and College and Electric Youth's "A Real Hero" into genuine synthwave anthems. The partnership between Martinez and Refn would go on to yield even more interesting results in terms of synthesizer sound design, with "The Neon Demon" and the recent TV series "Too Old To Die Young".

(G. Rivoira)

Symmetry – Themes For An Imaginary Film (2011)

Canadian Johnny Jewel is one of the most prolific figures in the North American underground of the third millennium. He has worked on numerous projects, all united by one common thread: an obsession with an indie/lo-fi reinterpretation of the most disparate Eighties sounds. Although he has touched on synthwave in virtually every one of its incarnations ("Digital Versicolor" with Glass Candy, "Under Your Spell" with Desire, "Tick Of The Clock" with Chromatics), it's only under the Symmetry moniker that he makes an album that can be broadly classified within the genre. "Themes For An Imaginary Film" stretches out over more than two hours, favoring, instead of the immediacy typical of outrun melodies, an exploration of sound textures that eventually grows exhausting.

(G. Rivoira)

Dynatron – Escape Velocity (2012)

Nebulae, constellations, space travel: there's no doubt about the imagery Dynatron wants to evoke through his work. It's under this pseudonym that Danish artist Jeppe Hasseriis began releasing music on SoundCloud in 2012; he was soon noticed by the French indie label Aphasia Records, which operates through Bandcamp and specializes in retro atmospheres. "Escape Velocity" is the synthwave equivalent of 1970s German cosmic music, and its flagship track "Pulse Power" can boast some ten million views on YouTube. Jean-Michel Jarre meets italo-disco phrasing in the midtempo "Space Operators", while booming arena-rock power chords shatter dreamy space atmospheres in "Fireburner". The debt to German electronic music pioneers like Tangerine Dream or Cluster becomes tangible in "Aurora Nights" or "The Pulsating Nebula", sprawling instrumental tracks halfway between outrun and progressive electronic. In 2016 Dynatron joined BloodMusic, a label usually devoted to reissuing obscure metal material or aggressive darksynth.

(G. Rivoira)

Makeup And Vanity Set – 88:88 (2012)

An interesting indie short film directed by one Joey Ciccone, "88:88" has earned a small but passionate cult following, struck in particular by the music accompanying its end credits. That would be "A Glowing Light, A Promise", an instrumental by Makeup And Vanity Set, aka Matthew Pusti, from Nashville. A bizarre example of a soundtrack three times as long as its corresponding film, "88:88" translates the short's unfathomable atmospheres into the reverbs that wrap the title track like fog, into the synth-sequencer crescendo of "The Cross", into the rarefied harmonies of "No Regrets". A record capable of crafting evocative instrumental passages (above all the contemplative stillness of "Homecoming"), though at times it struggles to rise above the status of pleasant background music.

(G. Rivoira)

Miami Nights 1984 – Turbulence (2012)

Mike Glover, known as Miami Nights 1984, is a Canadian producer and co-founder of the digital label Rosso Corsa Records. His debut album, "Early Summer" (2010), is one of the records that launched the label, but it's this second effort that caused a stir, particularly thanks to the tropical space-disco anthem "Ocean Drive", a continuous crescendo that flows into a refrain colored with virtuosic flourishes. Sadly, it would be his last album. In 2015 the single "Accelerated" came out, a genuine masterpiece of guitar-driven synthwave with a nocturnal outrun video: a track that alone could explain the genre to anyone who'd never heard of it. It seemed to herald a new album, but instead Glover stopped making music from that point on, without explanation. A silence that persists to this day.

(F. Romagnoli)

Dance With The Dead – Out Of Body (2013)

Dance With The Dead is the name of the Californian duo made up of Justin Pointer and Tony Kim. Although they emerged a year after pioneers like Carpenter Brut, Mega Drive and Perturbator, they quickly established themselves among the best-known names in the darksynth subcurrent. With their torrential rhythms and synthesizers so saturated they blur into electric guitars, the pair delivered anthems such as "Robfeast", "Blind" and "Only A Dream". Their subsequent albums, while successful, would gradually lose the genuineness of this debut, unable to vary the formula, and accompanied by a sharp decline in the surrounding aesthetic (just compare the cover of "Out Of Body", which looks like the poster for a horror film from around 1980, with those of the following albums, glossy with Photoshop polish).

(F. Romagnoli)

Kavinsky – Outrun (2013)

"Outrun" (nomen omen) is Kavinsky's arrival at the album format, a compendium of a musical career that began in 2006 with the historic "Testarossa Audiodrive". It's a fantastical concept about a young man who died in 1986 in an accident aboard his Ferrari Testarossa (the mother of all fetish race cars for the entire movement) and turned into a zombie to protect his beloved. Even the famous "Nightcall" takes on its full meaning once you know the story it serves as the climax of. Co-produced with Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, this aching ballad for synth, vocoder and female voice is the only underground synthwave song to have become a pop classic outright, the subject of countless covers and samples. The rest of the album offers epic synthwave ("Protovision"), robotic voices ("Odd Look"), incredible flirtations with the urban world ("Suburbia"). Also included are some tracks the French artist had released over the years, such as the aforementioned "Testarossa", or "Deadcruiser" and the nocturnal "Grand Canyon", both of which first appeared on the EP "1986". An unfair omission, however, is the sprawling "Pacific Coast Highway", featured on the EP "Nightcall".

(G. Rivoira)

Quixotic – Palm Ep (2013)

Krisztián Miklósy, based in Budapest and better known as Quixotic, is the author of "Palms", one of synthwave's anthems. Released on his own YouTube channel in August 2013, complete with a music video (which used clips from "Miami Vice" and images from the most hedonistic parts of the Eighties), it only really exploded a couple of weeks later, when LuigiDonatello reposted it on his own channel, this time with a simple static backdrop of palm trees, sea and sunset. It's a relaxed electro-funk track, with syncopated little guitars, an italo-disco bassline and abstract vocal samples. The EP that contained it also featured "Elan" and "Apology" (the latter in multiple versions), two pleasant tracks that nonetheless failed to match the iconic power of the other.

(F. Romagnoli)

Rob – Maniac (2013)

"Maniac" is a film by French director Franck Khalfoun, presented at Cannes in 2012, a remake of the film of the same name by William Lustig, dating back to 1980. Khalfoun's version, however, failed to win over either critics or audiences, ending up a resounding flop. If it can boast a modicum of cult status today, it's thanks to Elijah Wood's starring role and to the music by Robin Coudert, also French, now known simply as Rob. Active since the days of French touch, he has managed to reinvent himself as a composer for film, moving between ambient music and horror synth. Deprived of the images it was meant to accompany, however, on long listens the record suffers from the near-total absence of a rhythm section.

(F. Romagnoli)

Home – Odyssey (2014)

Randy Goffe is a kid from Chicago who in 2014, at the age of eighteen, popped up out of nowhere, like so many others, via the Electronic Gems channel. The track, titled "Resonance", quickly became the most famous instrumental in all of synthwave, racking up tens of millions of plays on both YouTube and Spotify. The reason isn't entirely clear (was it simply a case of being in the right place at the right time?), but it's certainly a beautiful listen: a calm, floating track, boasting layers of keyboards that spread out like slow waves over a sticky, intermittent riff. The rest of the album follows the same coordinates, moving blissfully through post-Balearic atmospheres and brushing up against chillwave in several places. Perfect as background music for studying or working.

(F. Romagnoli)

Mega Drive – 198XAD (2014)

The Sega Mega Drive was one of the most important video game consoles of the twentieth century, known both for its sleek, futuristic black design and for its formidable Yamaha audio chip. Maligned at the time by a critical press all too deferential to Sega's rival Nintendo, the Mega Drive's sound has proven extremely influential on subsequent electronic music, to the point that today it's cited as a direct influence across the most disparate fields, from Flying Lotus to Fatima Al Qadiri. The area that feels its influence most strongly, however, is synthwave, an entire wing of which can be considered a more or less direct offshoot: specifically darksynth, with its saturated, violent tones just a step away from electro-industrial. One of the genre's best-known artists actually calls himself Mega Drive, leaving no room for doubt. About this mysterious producer we know only that he works out of Texas and is particularly prolific: ten albums and two EPs between 2012 and 2019. The best of these is "198XAD": an hour of android charges through a merciless cyberpunk world, perfectly captured by the cover art.

(F. Romagnoli)

Night Runner – Starfighter (2014)

Of Alex Diosdado and Tabique Malévolo, only their names and their hometown are known, Morelia, in central Mexico. They debuted as Night Runner in November 2014, self-releasing this album via Bandcamp and Soundcloud, but public attention only arrived a few months later, when The '80s Guy featured the album on his YouTube channel. Some argue it was actually the channel that benefited, given the duo's growing cult status (they're even cited as a source of inspiration on the famous video game show Game Grumps): wherever the virtuous cycle began, "Starfighter" remains to this day the most-viewed release on The '80s Guy. Deservedly so, as it's one of synthwave's most accomplished and varied records, spanning epic guitar solos ("Almost There"), darksynth saturation ("The Sentinels"), electro charges that sound like they're lifted from a PC Engine CD soundtrack ("The Driver"), menacing space disco ("Murder In Miami"), slow post-Vangelis marches ("Roses & Blood"), and even relaxed moments evoking the typical outrun sunsets ("Starlight"). Their second album, "Thunderbird" (2017), and the EP "Storyteller" (2020), follow the same path.

(F. Romagnoli)

Timecop1983 – Journeys (2014)

Forced to make a virtue of necessity, Dutch artist Jordy Leenaerts from Eindhoven creates an alter ego and, armed with a computer, synthesizers, and the odd guitar, produces from his own bedroom one of the most celebrated albums among synthwave fans. "Journeys" was self-released in 2014, a year of great ferment for the genre, and later reissued by the label NewRetroWave. The bombastic stage name, Timecop1983, stems from nostalgia for the Eighties, the decade that saw Leenaerts born (in 1983, fittingly). It's no coincidence, then, that the album's mood is hazy and romantic, with dream-pop echoes celebrating, in idyllic tones, the memory of his own childhood and of the synthetic decade par excellence. Musically, the album expands on some approaches previously adopted by College: carpets of arpeggiated eighth-note basslines form a solid yet seductive backbone for pad frequency manipulations, arpeggiators and lead synths, along with the inevitable stereo tom fills. Within a very cohesive album, the female-voiced midtempo "Dreams" and the sparkling title track stand out.

(G. Rivoira)

Various Artists – Kung Fury (2015)

In May 2015, Swedish director David Sandberg released a short film funded via Kickstarter, with a budget of $630,000. The title is "Kung Fury", and he made it in his own garage with the help of a group of friends, a green screen, and plenty of CGI work. It's a summary, taken to the nth degree, of every stereotype of Eighties American action and sci-fi cinema, both a parody and a heartfelt declaration of love toward it. While the film opened new doors for independent cinema, its soundtrack established itself as one of the most important synthwave albums. Several producers took part, with the lion's share of the work going to Mitch Murder (aka Johan Bengtsson, from Stockholm). Also featured are Lost Years (Magnus Larsson), Betamaxx (Nick Morey) and Highway Superstar (Alex Karlinsky), respectively Swedish, American and Israeli, confirming the genre's international character. For the collection's best-known track, "True Survivor", a spectacular electronic arena-rock anthem, none other than David Hasselhoff, one of the kitschiest icons of the Eighties, was brought in to sing.

(F. Romagnoli)

Carpenter Brut – Trilogy (2015)

From the cover art alone, "Trilogy" conjures up an entire universe, a comic-book-styled tableau where Grand Guignol, pop art, and the ghosts of the Eighties all coexist. It's a fitting aesthetic counterpart to the ambitious work of French artist Carpenter Brut, aka Frank Hueso, a favorite among genre fans. Though it's a collection of three EPs released in 2012, 2013 and 2015 respectively, the record plays as a compact, monolithic eighty minutes (fittingly enough...), a frenetic summa of nearly every outrun trope. Hyper-compressed synths build stunning walls of sound, at times epic ("L.A. Venice Bitch", "Division Ruine", "Looking For Tracy Lu"), at times brutal ("Wake Up Mr. President", "Le Perv"). This is music that lives in a constant search for emotional tension, as if it were the soundtrack to a particularly frantic video game. Its power and its straight, obsessive rhythm make many tracks well-suited to a club setting, but unlike contemporary dance music, accustomed to building dynamics by haphazardly alternating build-ups and breakdowns, the compositional architecture here is closer to classic rock, even in its more sophisticated forms. It's not off the mark, for instance, to invoke prog rock when faced with the brutal synthesizer that suddenly tears through the sacred organ theme of "Turbo Killer" (accompanied by a video straight out of a Third Millennium Fulci film). Here and there, synth-funk grooves emerge: chief among them the lethal groove of "Zombi Disco Italy", quite possibly the synthwave song Prince would have written, had he ever tried his hand at the genre.

(G. Rivoira)

GosT – Behemoth (2015)

A leading figure of the darksynth strand, American artist GosT does absolutely nothing to hide the esoteric, horror-driven nature of his inspiration. In promotional photos, interviews and live shows, he can be seen heavily made up with white face paint and smudged black eyeliner, à la Misfits, or wearing skull-shaped masks. These horror/splatter/demonic suggestions come to fruition in tracks dominated by aggressive sawtooth-wave synthesizers, whose characteristic buzzing sound builds low-frequency walls of sound comparable to heavy electric guitar riffs ("Genesee Avenue", "Master", "Bathory Bitch"). To further emphasize the grim violence of his music, the Luciferian title track even features effective samples of Gregorian chant. Where instead he aims for atmosphere, the darker bass tones and sinister lead synths recall the film scores of John Carpenter ("Night Crawler").

(G. Rivoira)

Gunship are one of the few actual bands in synthwave. Hailing from London, they're made up of singer Alex Westaway, keyboardist Dan Haigh, and drummer Alex Gingell. They're known for their iconic album covers (featuring eclipses and segmented suns), for the fact that nearly all their songs feature vocals, and for having some of the most polished music videos in the genre. This debut album boasts two of them: "Tech Noir", which employs claymation and a striking spoken-word intro from John Carpenter (a guest whose presence is certainly no accident), and the digitally animated "Fly For Your Life". The songs themselves, however, don't quite shine for originality: pleasant as they are, they hew a bit too faithfully to synth-pop conventions.

(F. Romagnoli)

FM-84 – Atlas (2016)

The moniker behind which Scottish-born, California-adopted Col Bennett hides offers proof of the centrality of the United States in the genre's cultural connotation. FM-84 is in fact a clear evocation of the musical imagery that swept through the radios of half of America between the late Seventies and the Eighties. It's precisely to that aesthetic that "Atlas" harks back, an album tinged with a romantic nostalgia in many ways similar to the one adopted by TimeCop1983 (who indeed guests on "Let's Talk"). Released on NewRetroWave, the album splits between minimalist instrumental dream tracks and sentimental songs: it's in the latter that the revival effect comes across as rather overdone.

(G. Rivoira)

The Midnight – Endless Summer (2016)

American songwriter Tyler Lyle and Danish composer Tim McEwan join forces as the duo The Midnight in 2012, and four years later release the successful "Endless Summer". The gentlest, synth-pop-leaning side of the Eighties lives again across the album's twelve tracks, roughly split evenly between songs and instrumental pieces. It's precisely among the latter that the record's most evocative and dreamlike moments can be found, particularly on numbers such as "Equaliser (Not Alone)", which showcases fine work on tone and production. The lingering over extremely melodic, crystalline vocal lines and the lead saxophone, on the other hand, grows a bit cloying over time.

(G. Rivoira)

Robert Parker – Crystal City (2016)

Swedish artist Robert Parker appeared on the scene in 2014, and two years later was already on his fourth album, not counting his numerous EPs. The backing of NewRetroWave changed the course of his career, making "Crystal City" one of the scene's best-known albums. Almost entirely instrumental, save for the synth-pop of "'85 Again" (sung by the mysterious Miss K) and "Sweet Nothings" (whose faintly surfacing vocals are little more than an embellishment), the record contains both fully programmed tracks and interesting instrumental flourishes, from bass slap ("Love Theme") to keytar solos ("Generation '82"). The styles range from the nocturnal jazz-funk of "Seasons Of Lust" to the steroid-pumped chiptune of "Arcade Oliver".

(F. Romagnoli)

Perturbator – The Uncanny Valley (2016)

Among the few millennials of synthwave, Frenchman James Kent (son of the celebrated critic and musician Nick Kent) began publishing self-produced music online barely past his teens. In 2012, his contribution to the OST of cult video game "Hotline Miami" and the album "I Am The Night" earned him the attention of a wide audience, drawn to his darksynth tones. It would, however, be the subsequent "The Dangerous Days" (2014) and "The Uncanny Valley" (2016) that cemented his status. Both are genre classics: we've opted for the latter here, on account of its high-definition sound and the presence of "Sentinel", the artist's best-known single. Perturbator's aesthetic obsessions — cyberpunk (especially of the anime variety), retro video games, eroticism, horror — find their counterpart in the albums' artwork, in the music videos, and in the decadent atmospheres of tracks such as "Death Squad", "Neo-Tokyo", "Disco Inferno", "The Uncanny Valley", all dominated by the sound of the Prophet-6 synthesizer. Alongside the disco/industrial blasts — imaginative soundtracks for nightclubs populated solely by vampires — there are also intriguing atmospheric interludes, such as the ambient noir of "Femme Fatale".

(G. Rivoira)

Scandroid – Scandroid (2016)

While it's true that synthwave has managed to become a home for more than one metalhead convert to the cause, the case of Scandroid — the latest incarnation of Scott David Albert, a multi-instrumentalist of New York origin — remains a singular one. For a long time Albert went by the name Klayton, and between the Eighties and Nineties he consistently played in thrash and industrial metal outfits, without ever achieving the fortune he sought. He gained a certain notoriety playing electro-industrial under the pseudonym Celldweller, but it's with the Scandroid project that this artist, born in '69, became the oldest successful synthwaver around. The self-titled debut sounds a bit like a hypothetical outrun album by historic synth-rock bands such as Depeche Mode, Duran Duran, Tears For Fears (fittingly paid tribute to with a cover of "Shout"). Vocal filters reminiscent of Nine Inch Nails wrap Scandroid's baritone timbre in long rides through distorted synthesizers and saturated digital electric guitars ("Neo-Tokyo", "Aphelion", "Eden").

(G. Rivoira)

S U R V I V E – RR7349 (2016)

A mysterious title shrouds the second and most celebrated album by Survive like a fog. This is a quartet from Austin, whose members share an inordinate passion for analogue synthesizers and vintage drum machines. Their interest in atmospheric instrumental music comes through clearly across the record's nine tracks, admittedly somewhat airless reworkings of John Carpenter's soundtracks and certain horror atmospheres à la Goblin. Two of Survive's members, Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein, would go on to achieve considerable popularity writing the official soundtrack for "Stranger Things" — a spotlight whose glow also reflected back onto the band itself.

(G. Rivoira)

Zombie Hyperdrive – Hyperion (2016)

The intimate nature of outrun is well symbolized by the case of Zombie Hyperdrive: little to nothing is known about him, other than that he operates out of Halle, Germany, but his "Red Eyes", first released in 2014 and relaunched by the influential YouTube channel NewRetroWave, has become a cornerstone of the genre, surpassing ten million views. With its tireless ascending circular arpeggios, frequent rhythmic shifts, and a memorable electric guitar solo with tones close to melodic hard rock, "Red Eyes" is about as close to prog-rock as synthwave has ever come. Two years later the single would become the centerpiece of the album "Hyperion", which lays bare the operation's science-fiction aesthetic through its homage to the same-titled 1989 novel by Dan Simmons, and a cover art with a distinctly UFO-like feel. Throughout the record, compositional ambition and the inspiration poured into its various melodic themes manage to make up for any lack of "played" dynamics. Worth noting is also the ternary time signature used in "Genesis", a solution rarer than rare within the movement.

(G. Rivoira)

Satellite Young – Satellite Young (2017)

Always masters at reworking Western pop culture, Japanese musicians have not failed to offer their own personal take on the outrun movement. It's Tokyo's Satellite Young, in fact, who make an entirely sung album feel natural while still unmistakably belonging to the genre's canon. In which other synthwave albums, after all, have such feverish syncopated slap bass lines been heard as in "Break! Break! Tic! Tac!"? The meeting of Japanese tradition and Anglophone electronic pop produces striking results: thus the Akina Nakamori of "Fushigi" meets the mid-Eighties Pet Shop Boys in "Al Threnody", or FM radio sounds run through layers of synthesizers à la Yellow Magic Orchestra in "Jack Doushi", "Nonai Muchoo", "Sniper Rouge". "Dividual Heart" is a conceptual experiment that pushes retromania to the extreme, with an ascending key change on the final chorus repeat, a technique hugely popular in Seventies-Eighties pop but then drastically abandoned. "Sanfransokyo Girl" is the arrival point of dreamlike outrun: Emi Kusano's crystalline yet vocoder-filtered voice and the colorful anime music video compose a joyful picture of purity.

(G. Rivoira)

Kensuke Ushio – Devilman Crybaby Original Soundtrack (2018)

Kensuke Ushio is the only name featured in this article who isn't part of the synthwave scene. During one of the many soundtracks commissioned to him by the Japanese animation industry, however, he decided to delve deep into the genre's ins and outs, unpacking every secret it had to offer. The anime that benefited from this experiment is Masaaki Yuasa's "Devilman Crybaby", one of the best of the decade. For the occasion, Ushio produced a staggering amount of music: two CDs, forty-eight tracks, ninety-five minutes in total. Inside, mostly synthwave, but not exclusively: the spectrum ranges from horror synth to minimalism, from neoclassical gothic to space ambient, from house to electro-industrial. All genres that can be considered relatives, if not forerunners, of synthwave, resulting in a flawless amalgam. An encyclopedic work, with which Ushio cements his place among the greats of his field; it may be daunting in size, but it rewards every bit of effort put into listening. Worth noting is "Devilman no uta", a darksynth cover of the theme song from the original "Devilman", released in 1972.

(F. Romagnoli)

Contaminations across global pop

This final section examines tracks influenced by synthwave that come from artists outside its immediate context. There's no pretense of compiling a fully exhaustive list here, but rather of sketching out, in broad strokes, the evolution of a genre that still isn't formally recognized, yet is already, in practice, widely capable of becoming the sonic clothing for arrangements coming from the most disparate fields.

Beyond the synth-pop revival that's now widespread in both independent and mainstream music, that blend of electronic pop, italo disco, video game music and progressive electronic that we've come to know throughout this special has, with a certain frequency, made its way into territories that were alien to it only until the last five years.

It seems, in fact, that 2020 is precisely the year that sealed its definitive breakthrough with the general public too. We've already discussed The Weeknd's "Blinding Lights", the hit dominating the first months of the year, but the entire album it comes from, "After Hours", is also repeatedly linked to the genre (just think of the ballad "In Your Eyes"). After all, the Canadian soulman had already collaborated with Kavinsky back in 2013, lending his unmistakable falsetto to an updated version of "Odd Look". Also from 2020 is "Physical", one of the standout singles from Dua Lipa's "Future Nostalgia", whose interlocking sequencers and enveloping pads can't help but recall a fair few outrun moments.

Listening to the albums chosen for this selection, one might think that synthwave and the urban/soul world are diametrically opposed (as "straight" and white as the former is, the latter is just as groovy and mixed-race), yet there are some examples, some quite significant in terms of impact and following, ready to prove otherwise. The outrun contaminations in "24k Magic" (2016), the album marking superstar Bruno Mars's artistic maturity, are undeniable. "Calling All My Lovelines" in particular flaunts video-game-style sequencers and retro lead synths with heavy modulation, all without losing the Rick James-style funk that defines the record.

Even the South American idol of trap and reggaeton, Bad Bunny, has shown he can venture into outrun territory, particularly on "Notra noche en Miami", a nocturnal track from his 2018 debut, "X100PRE".

It isn't just mainstream pop and urban soul that have occasionally fallen under synthwave's spell: indie music, logically the more natural home for such hybrids, hasn't been immune either. "Currents" by Tame Impala (2015) marked a turning point for the Australian one-man band, both sonically and in terms of international recognition. The record can't quite be called synthwave, leaning too heavily on an electro/psychedelic feel, but in some songs such as "Yes I'm Changing" and "'Cause I'm A Man" you can hear a retro-toned sound typical of dreamwave.

Even the champions of British indie pop The 1975, being omnivorous devourers of pop music, couldn't help but try their hand at dreamwave sounds. One of their most famous singles, "Somebody Else" (2016), features the genre's characteristic bass lines and solo synths, combining them with a delicate r&b melody.

France's M83, led by Antony Gonzales, delivered a genuine mainstream reinterpretation with the famous hit "Midnight City". The musician, however, had already flirted, albeit not overtly, with synthwave sounds on the earlier album "Saturdays = Youth", particularly on "Couleurs". The two tracks mentioned date back to 2011 and 2008 respectively: such an ability to be ahead of the curve, compared to the artists mentioned in this section, is surely down to Gonzales's geographic context, which gave him the advantage of operating within the French indie underground, where the genre actually originated.

With "13", released in 2017, veterans Indochine achieved staggering success across French-speaking Europe: the album contains several songs with imposing walls of synthesizers, and in particular on "Kimono dans l'ambulance" or "2033" the kinship with synthwave is unmistakable.

Italy hasn't contributed much of significance to synthwave in the strictest sense. Lately, though, something has been stirring, albeit from already established musicians rather than from the underground, as one might expect: rap heavyweight Fabri Fibra wove synthwave textures into his 2017 hit "Stavo pensando a te" (arguably his best single ever), while the band The Kolors shamelessly flirted with the genre on "Los Angeles" (2019). The slickly produced video, the retro aesthetic of the single's cover art, the soft synths: it all adds up to a delicate, atmospheric synth-funk, even if Guè Pequeno's verse feels rather out of place.

As for the rest of the world, it's worth focusing at least on Latin America: Chilean singer-songwriter Javiera Mena scored major success at home with her self-titled 2010 album. Some tracks, such as "Hasta La Verdad", prove fully capable of embracing the then-nascent sound, through essential, decisive drum machines as well as polyphonic synthesizers accompanying the main melody. Mexico's Camilo Septimo, a cult band in their home country, also ventured into synthwave atmospheres on more than one occasion, between their 2017 debut "Oleos" and 2019's "Navegantes".

(G. Rivoira, F. Romagnoli)

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02/03/2026