Vaporwave is an Internet-based microgenre that was built upon the experimental and ironic tendencies of genres such as chillwave and hypnagogic pop. It draws primarily on musical and cultural sources from the 1980s and early 1990s while also being associated with an ambiguous or satirical take on consumer capitalism and technoculture. The name derives from "vaporware", a term for commercial software that is announced but never released. Defined for its subversion of dance music from the 1980s and 1990s, the music consists of "brief, cut-up sketches", cleanly produced, and composed almost entirely from samples, along with the application of slowed-down chopped and screwed techniques, looping, and other effects.

Critic Adam Trainer writes of the style's predilection for "music made less for enjoyment than for the regulation of mood", such as corporate stock music for infomercials and product demonstrations. Musicologist Adam Harper described the typical vaporwave track as "a wholly synthesised or heavily processed chunk of corporate mood music, bright and earnest or slow and sultry, often beautiful, either looped out of sync and beyond the point of functionality." The style is defined largely by its surrounding subculture. It extends to visual formats as much as it does music and embraces the Internet as a cultural, social, and aesthetic medium.

The visual aesthetic (often stylized as "ＡＥＳＴＨＥＴＩＣＳ", with fullwidth characters) incorporates early Internet imagery, late 1990s web design, glitch art, and cyberpunk tropes, as well as anime, Greco-Roman statues, and 3D-rendered objects. VHS degradation is another common effect seen in vaporwave art. Generally, artists limit their source material between Japan's economic flourishing in the 1980s and the September 11 attacks or dot-com bubble burst of 2001 (some albums, including Floral Shoppe, depict the intact Twin Towers on their covers).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporwave