Chillwave is Post-Chillwave

By: Ian Mercer

(This article previously appeared in Volume 3 Issue 2 of No Fidelity)

Don’t go writing a two-page CLAP article about me being an asshole for writing this title.  I promise: this isn’t about Chillwave being shitty; it’s just a few observations on the unique space that the genre occupied in contemporary music history,

 Since nobody can agree on what this genre actually is, I’ll refer to a dictionary: “Chillwave is a genre of music whose artists are often characterized by their heavy use of effects processing, synthesizers, looping, sampling, and heavily filtered vocals with simple melodic lines.”  The term itself was coined by the editor-in-chief (known only as “Carles”) of the music blog “Hipster Runoff.”  This essay will outline the 3 standard-bearers of the movement before entering into a brief discourse on the state of Chillwave today.

 The deepest roots of the movement were modest.  Near the end of 2008, 19-year-old Texan Alan Palomo (AKA Neon Indian) skipped out on an invitation to drop acid with his ex-girlfriend.  After this fateful decision, his immense waves of regret compelled him to express his complex emoting via song, resulting in his magnum opus: “Should Have Taken Acid With You” (the poetic lyrics include: “Should have taken acid with you / Touch the stars and the planets too / Should have taken acid with you / Melt our tongues and become unglued”).  This demo (somehow) resulted in Alan catching a record deal with Lefse Records and, eventually, the Fader Label which was responsible for putting out his debut: Psychic Chasms in October 2009.  I feel that the album is better as a snapshot in time than as a musical statement.  If you heard it in high school, I’m sure you loved it like I did, but if you check it out again now… well I’ll let you decide for yourself.  In this author’s opinion, only the zeitgeist-bearing “Deadbeat Summer” and (painfully titled) “Terminally Chill” have held up well since ’09.  Entries like “Laughing Gas” and “Local Joke” make me feel like I’ve eaten too much candy corn.

 Ernest Greene, a native of Georgia, released the second installment of The Holy Chilfecta under the name Washed Out.  Life of Leisure EP dropped almost simultaneously with Psychic Chasms, and it contains the biggest hit that will be mentioned in this entire essay: “Feel It All Around.”  Every single scratched-up “Summer Mix ‘09” CD in the world had this track on it (alongside “My Girls” and “Two Weeks”) and it soon became his “Creep.”  Mr. Greene couldn’t escape it, and I believe that every composition that he’s made since has been a reaction against it.  Anyways, the EP is good enough.  It’s great “ey-braj-toke-some-mad-dank-and-check-out-this-siq-track” music (but, in the end, I suppose all the music I’m talking about here could fit that description).  “FIAA” is indeed a great track, and is certainly the best on the EP, but other than that the short project, at only 17 minutes, somehow still manages to drag on for too long.

 Only three months later, the final god of Chillwave, Toro y Moi, made his debut album, Causers of This.  TyM is the pseudonym of Chazwick Bundick (yes, that’s his real name), a native of South Carolina.  He released his debut at the ripe old age of 24, and his five years of maturation over Palomo resulted in an album that exponentially superior to Psychic Chasms.  It sounds far cleaner and it thankfully doesn’t rely on drug puns and paraphernalia.  The record displays TyM’s serious harmonic and melodic skill, along with in-depth production ability.  Seriously, just listen to “Imprint After,” which is certainly one of the greatest compositions to emerge from the age of Chillwave.  TyM is a musician’s musician, and I think he’s leagues ahead of any of his peers.

 In February 2011, just a year after his debut, Toro released another great project, Underneath the Pine.  The record is the culmination of everything good about the movement, and nobody has since come close to matching it.  It’s got Portishead-style samples, lush vocal harmonies, and a dynamic range that can satisfy both audiophiles and chill bros.  It flows perfectly as a whole piece of art, but each individual track is good enough to stand alone.  “Divina” is probably the prettiest track that he ever wrote, and “Before I’m Done” features some of his best chord progressions and post-production skill.  

 It’s strange, then, that the release date of this album directly coincides with the formal end of the genre.  Nobody thinks that Chillwave artists simply quit because UtP was too good, but other than that I really couldn’t tell you exactly what happened.  Either way, this release somehow caused a subconscious and seismic shift in the musical cosmos, as if a pause button had been pressed on all of the actors in the Chillwave matrix.

 All three members of the central council of the chill went on to create follow up albums (Neon Indian’s Era Extrana, Toro y Moi’s Anything in Return, and Washed Out’s Within and Without), but everything felt like an attempt to distance the writers from their chill titles.  Toro’s follow-up usurped reverb and funk and replaced it with everything from sensual jazz (“Rose Quartz”) to outright party bangers (“Cake”).  Neon Indian ended up making a superior album as well via swapping his analog Moogs and keytars for strictly cold, modern keyboards and drum machines.  The sound is much, much tighter, and it features two superb tracks, the hit single “Polish Girl” and the endlessly replayable “Heart: Release.”  Washed Out went on to release Within and Without, a forgettable compilation of disjointed tracks that served as the dying breath of Chillwave-as-Chillwave.  A few years later he submitted his marginally superior Paracosm, but its distance from the previous material marks it as a dramatic departure and further proof that the genre, as we knew it, had come to an end.

 If it sounds like I’m being overly simplistic by reducing an entire genre to three artists, and if you have doubts over how convincing my words are, just take a look at the sad husk of redid.com/r/chillwave and sort by “top posts of all time.”  13 of the top 25 posts are submissions concerning TyM, WO, or NI.  The other 12 posts are all memes (“One does not simply listen to only one Neon Indian track”), discussion questions (“Which Toro y Moi album is your favorite”), or listening guides (the charts are simple enough to describe here in words: listen to Psychic Chasms, Life of Leisure EP, Causers of This, and Underneath the Pine).  The only truly interesting post resides at #1, which is a link to The Beach Boy’s track “All I Wanna Do,” which the submitter rightly titles as “First Chillwave Song Ever.”  I do believe that the state of this subreddit does accurately mirror the state of Chillwave.  If the genre’s primary audience (young internet dwellers) are having this hard a time in finding any truly chill music released after February 22, 2011, then the genre must really have come to a standstill.

 Anyways, to get at the meaning of the title of this article, one must realize that even the four central releases that are firmly within the chillwave genre are already moving past the constraints of the form.

 To get at the meaning of this article’s title, one must realize that Chillwave didn’t just die a quick death: it was dying from the moment it was born.  What I mean is that ALL Chillwave albums (even the four main releases that I described before as being firmly within the genre) are attempts to get away from the constraints on their form.  In this way, I think that there aren’t even four Chillwave albums, but only three actual Chillwave songs: “Deadbeat Summer,” “Blessa/Minors,” and “Feel It All Around.”  All of the other tracks on the albums that are home to these tracks were already attempts to break away from The Chill Wave and become something new.  In this way, Chillwave was Post-Chillwave as soon as “Deadbeat Summer” came to a close.

 That being said, there is a silver lining to the atrophy of this genre: the live show.  I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Neon Indian a number of times, and anything that they lack in recording quality and songwriting ability is much more than made up for by the rows of synthesizers that the 6-person band brings along for the live show.  Likewise, Toro y Moi’s show was the superlative BEST dance party that I have ever been to, with a crowd that became absolutely intoxicated with Chazwick’s funky-ass bass lines (and notably funky afro).  The live show for these artists really is the perfect antidote to the intrinsic sleepiness of their genre.

 In the end, what’s the point?  Why am I being such a complete dick about what songs are within a genre and what songs lay outside its bounds?  The answer is that I am completely fascinated with the temporal nature of this era.  Just try to think of any other genre that is as ephemeral and difficult to describe as this one.  I think that the fact that Neon Indian has disappeared off the face of the earth since late 2012 speaks for itself: Chillwave-as-Chillwave has no future, and Palomo has accepted his fate.  Remember, I’m not insulting any of these bands (they really do put out some great tracks); I’m just trying to figure out their slippery place in music history.  And seriously, don’t write an angry CLAP article.  We accept letters-to-the-editor in mailbox 1159.