Chillwave was a short-lived but influential indie style of the late 2000s in the United States. Its songs sounded like half-remembered 1980s pop heard on a worn cassette: vintage synthesisers, filtered drum machines, slowed-down samples, mellow vocals buried in reverb, and lyrics and artwork full of summer and the beach. The name itself began as a joke, coined in July 2009 by Carles, the pseudonymous writer of the satirical blog Hipster Runoff, before music magazines adopted it in earnest.
Its leading names were Washed Out, whose Feel It All Around was built largely on a slowed sample, Toro y Moi and Neon Indian, with Memory Tapes and Nite Jewel close by. The style had faded by the early 2010s, but its soft-focus nostalgia fed directly into vaporwave, which began as an ironic variant, and into the hazy, filtered textures that lo-fi listeners know today.