Synthwave

What is synthwave?

Synthwave is electronic music and visual art that recreates the sound and imagery of 1980s films, TV and video games. It took shape in the mid-2000s with producers, several of them French, such as Kavinsky and College, who made instrumental tracks that sounded like the score of an action movie that was never filmed.

Its other names point at its sources. Outrun comes from Sega's 1986 arcade racer OutRun, where you drive a red convertible along a coast road under a blue sky, and retrowave stresses the nostalgia.

How did synthwave go mainstream?

Through the film Drive (2011), which played Kavinsky's Nightcall and A Real Hero by College and Electric Youth over its night-driving scenes and set its titles in hot pink script. After it came Kung Fury (2015), a crowdfunded short made entirely in the style, the Stranger Things theme by Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein in 2016, and The Weeknd's Blinding Lights in 2019.

What makes an image look synthwave?

Nearly every synthwave picture is built from the same layers. At the bottom, a glowing wireframe grid in magenta or cyan runs to the horizon, like the floor of an early computer graphics demo. On the horizon sits a big sun shading from yellow to pink, cut by horizontal gaps that widen toward its base. Above is a dark purple sky, sometimes with wireframe mountains, and on top sits chrome lettering with the sunset reflected in it, or a line of neon script.

The striped sun does a practical job: the gaps let the grid and sky show through, so a flat disc reads as something sinking. The palette is narrow, with magenta, cyan and purple carrying most of it and orange and yellow kept for the sun. Almost every bright edge glows, as if the whole scene were made of neon tube or seen on a phosphor screen.

Synthwave or vaporwave?

Both borrow from the 1980s and both like pink and cyan, so they get mixed up. Synthwave is sincere about the era: it loves the action films, sports cars and arcade cabinets and rebuilds them carefully, at night, in neon on black. Vaporwave takes the era's ads, malls and elevator music and leaves them pastel, washed out and a bit eerie. If the picture is dark and sharp, it's synthwave.

Building a synthwave title and frame

Neon Text Generator starts on a pink tube font, Monoton, that flickers on a seeded schedule, which covers the title. Put a finished frame through CRT Filter on its Arcade preset, Curvature 0.15 and Scanlines 0.4, and it looks like a grab from a 1980s monitor. Light Trails Generator's Neon preset draws six glowing streaks that can run behind a car or under a title. Sunburst Background Generator's Retro sun preset gives an orange ray burst for a poster backdrop.