Intro to Synthwave/Retrowave

I'm an 80s kid, and the sights and sounds of the decade and anything which celebrates them are pretty comfy with me. Moving on from my punk/thrash dominated adolescence, I spent most of the last decade listening largely to a variety of electronica, ambient, post-rock music and the occasional bit of minimalist genius. More frequently I found that some vidya OSTs were matching or surpassing anything I'd heard before.

Being a big fan of dystopian scifi I found myself, on one drunken night in 2015, googling "dystopian music". This led me first to "Cyberpunk vs Post-Cyberpunk" which led to myriad other compilations and playlists on Youtube.

Eventually certain tracks started popping up which had a lot more energy, more aggression, than the ambient/electronica sounds featured generally. Looking up the individual tracks and artists led to me discovering Synthwave/Retrowave/Darksynth - a genre(s) which took the 80s sound and aesthetic and pumped it up to 11^11.

So it seems us 80s kids (late Gen-Xers/early Millenials) are beginning to show our age and yearning for younger years. As well as music we're also seeing this show up in movies like the incredible indie production Kung Fury and the influence of Synthwave/Retrowave is obvious in the trailer for Thor: Ragnarok.

Below are a number of single tracks which serve as good examples of the genre, and if you like any of them they're followed by playlists/compilations.

Hope you enjoy.

Followup post (first of many hopefully) can be found here Friday Night Music
Please add/comment any of your own favourite examples of the genre below