The cover art of Donor Lens' As Warm as Summer, featuring an obi strip to the side with an eye logo, the artist & album titles in English & Japanese, and the cassette tracklist split between A & B sides. The cover itself is a blurry image of a dog with round sunglasses, with some deep indigo blue lighting and an old paper texture overlaid.

#DeclanLikes Donor Lens – As Warm as Summer

Nah, I'm actually ashamed I did not listen to this one as soon as it came out. The duo came through with some of the best classic vaporwave I have heard in years, with gorgeous sample interplay and Burial-styled ambient cuts in between.

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#DeclanRants #DeclanTalksVapor

The cover art for Vistas by Ghost Enterprise, featuring a Windows Vista taskbar, and a futuristic aquatic background featuring bubbles, water textures, and a goldfish.

#DeclanLikes Ghost Enterprise – Vistas

So this was a shock: The guy who rapped on a 3D Blast song created a lo-bit 2000s tech throwback with apt titling, great pacing, and some of the most excellently curated samples I've heard in vaporwave in a long time, all in under 41 minutes!
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I adore shit like this. You can't convince me that these kinda projects aren't deeply alluring because of their brevity and anonymity.

#DeclanLikes 1381 – Collected Works
My favourite of the three records is Castle, but Feudal does come close with more consistently ominous songs.

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It still disappoints me to this day that HKE is the way he is.

Who would've thought some of vaporwave's most fascinating, alluring, and provocative experiments would come out of nothing more than spite and malice?

#DeclanTalksVapor #DeclanRants

"Fuck vaporwave." – telepath テレパシー能力者, one of the biggest and most monumental titans of vaporwave history, known primarily for creating many of the genre's most beloved albums to the degree of spawning an entire subgenre, before transitioning to new age ambient music.

#DeclanTalksVapor #DeclanRants

A screenshot of two comments in the RateYourMusic comment section of the album Reading Room by Diskette Park. The first comment by Nature Morte on January 2020 reads: "Really solid, distinctive vaporwave artist. A bit like the first track on Reflection by Father 2006, but sampling 80's prog instead of IDM." The second comment by Deckard the Gecko on March 2021 reads: "Father 2006… wasn't… sampling… IDM… but go off, I guess? LOL."

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Fun Fact: At 2:08, I keep thinking the sampled vocals on SAINT PEPSI's Strawberry Lemonade are chopped up and singing:
█ "but if you want my love
█ I'm delicious – windows"

I normally hate misheard lyrics because they ruin my time.

#DeclanLikes SAINT PEPSI – Strawberry Lemonade

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The cover art of Dante Mars Ajeto's Celebrating Digital Artifacts, which displays the artist name & album title in uppercase English with underscores for spaces, along with the artist & title in wingdings below each of them. The titles are aligned to the lower left of the cover art, with the background consisting of incredibly glitchy pixels.

#DeclanLikes Dante Mars Ajeto! – B5 infp.mp3

I really could go on about the perfections of this album until the day I die, meet god, and bite his dick off. The atmosphere of this particular song is transcendentally intoxicating. I cannot get enough of it. #DeclanTalksVapor

youtu.be/8y242As8EvU&...

If I had a nickel for every vaporwave song that would ruin Toshiki Kadomatsu's Way to the Shore's incredible potential as a sample by virtue of having (fine) vaportrap elements and deeply distracting, unnecessary vocals added in, I'd have two nickels. #DeclanRants #DeclanTalksVapor

The cover art of Paranoia Online by Heaven Silhouettes, depicting a teal image of a knight sitting atop an armoured horse, framed with a border of white claw illustrations surrounding it.

#DeclanLikes Heaven Silhouettes – Paranoia Online
@bizcasual.bsky.social

An incredible Barber Beats mini-experience with a flurry of forward-thinking ideas. I highly recommend any vapor fan get into this one. I've written a full-on review of why: rateyourmusic.com/music-review...

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To any music theorists out there, I’m about to ask a vaporwave question. >:)

Why does telepath’s あなたの世界 sound so much more passionate of a song than Deon Estus’s Spell, the song that it samples? It’s slowed down and yet it just sounds so much more full of life. I’m baffled. How!?

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More albums should sound like this song specifically

#DeclanLikes HELLCOM – PAPARAZZI
#DeclanTalksVapor youtu.be/6HDxs11fHoc

It's so disappointing how hard it is to find new #Vaporwave albums in this day & age.

Go to the best-selling fresh vaporwave albums page on Bandcamp, at least 95% of what you'll see are physical reissues of records that came out years ago! Help me out here, y'all. >:(
#DeclanRants #DeclanTalksVapor

YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES

#DeclanLikes Lindsheaven Virtual Plaza – NTSC Memories

This album has the most authentic sound design I've ever heard from the vaporwave scene, and that alone makes it excel above most others.
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The cover art for the self-titled album by 1-800-TONIGHT, depicting a gloved female hand stroking golden railing with candles behind her and diamonds on her wrist. The title is depicted below along with tiny disclaimer text on the bottom that reads: "$2.99 per min. Adults only."

#DeclanLikes 1-800-TONIGHT – 1-800-TONIGHT

So Luxury Elite dropped the sequel to this side-project this week and I thought I'd prep myself. This comes off like late-night lo-fi through a signalwave lens and by god, it is so good to hear her refined production go all fuzzier again.
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#DeclanLikes Macintosh Plus – 外ギン Aviation

Gloriously underrated song. #DeclanTalksVapor
youtu.be/RrY-kKRMI6A

The cover art of There's Still Tomorrow by TDSTR; a close-up shot of an anthropomorphic wolverine's arm held against a doorframe. The character is wearing a white shirt and the edge of a light switch and the bottom half of the character's face/snout are visible. The painting was made by Avian.

#DeclanLikes tdstr – There's Still Tomorrow

Ten days in, and we've already got a special one here, folks. An hour-long, potently moody piece of experimental vapor that deftly balances tdstr's typical brand of sample curation with dense atmospheres and a deep, nightly melancholy.

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your new home, by skymmr 1 track album

One day, I wanna make something like this.

#DeclanLikes skymmr – your new home

I cannot tell you why this seven-part, seven-minute suite album is so remarkably fascinating to me. It's a broken-down, ominous story made up of loose fragments.

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earlyprey.bandcamp.com/album/your-n...

The cover art to Hypnopedia by Doomsday Video. A blurry, purple VHS still depicting a group of women in kimonos walking through a forest of cherry blossom trees, with the bottom fourth of the image mirrored.

Man. Vaporwave is just so good.

#DeclanLikes Doomsday Video – Hypnopedia

Because at any given moment, even obscure hidden gems like this one, you can just discover to be simply one of the prettiest vaporwave albums to have come out in several years.

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#DeclanLikes Dante Mars Ajeto! – 7e8c8f_eyes.mp3

One of the most dense & euphoric beat drops in any vaporwave song. It hardly gets better than this for me and it gets stronger with every listen.
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youtu.be/d0Yp9ZqoMr4

#DeclanTalksVapor

Seriously, go check out these albums, they’re excellent. Y’all might especially love the newest Butterfly Effect; a concept album about travelling back in time to save a loved one.

The cover art of Clear Vision by Personal Digital Assistant, depicting a low-resolution edit of Arabian Drift Core, with the image showing a drifting red car in the desert, a woman's eyes overlayered on top, faint question marks all over and a logo at the bottom corner made of a star and multiple crosshairs.

#DeclanLikes personal ☹︎ digital ☺︎ assistant – clear vision™

May be the most unique vaporwave album of the year. Bitcrushed HexD elements, eclectic sample palette, extremely digital retro-futuristic soundscapes, and some of the most creative & off-kilter loops I have heard in ages.
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The cover art for インターネット (56k Modem Edition) by Windows 98のご紹介, which depicts a cloudy daytime sky, the artist's name in Wingdings font, the Kanji album title, and an open window in the centre of it all with an America Online loading screen behind it.

#DeclanLikes Windows 98のご紹介 – インターネット (56k Modem Edition)

So I listened to this for the first time to see how it contrasts with the original EP and, while it does axe a couple of songs, as an overall rework, it's an absolute improvement as the first piece of an incredible trilogy.
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The cover art for これは魂のために by Windows 98のご紹介, which is abstract and difficult to describe in nature.

#DeclanLikes Windows 98のご紹介 – これは魂のために

One of my favourite albums of all time. It is one of the most haunting, exhilarating, captivating, and ascendent albums I have ever heard. Less of a vaportrap album with a vapornoise piece at the end; more of a cinematic nightmare experience.
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Vaporwave. #DeclanTalksVapor

The cover art for Virtua by Trendy Trendy, depicting the logo in plain serif font below a handful of images colliding together into one mass, including the Earth, Mona Lisa, a T-Rex skull, a Moai statue, an eye, a bird, an uppercase & lowercase A and environmental images including a sky, a desert and leaves.

#DeclanLikes trndytrndy – Virtua

Fuck yes! This is what utopian virtual is all about! The simply powerful, awe-striking, sentimental sense of joy & wonder that you can only get from the very sort of plastic corporate products that are deliberately designed to evoke those emotions!
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The cover art for Telenights by ghosting, depicting a VHS still of an obscure city from a ground-level perspective near a bridge in the middle of the night with blurry vehicles and no visible bystanders.

#DeclanLikes g h o s t i n g – Telenights

But if I had to be clear on its one biggest issue, it's that it lacks a strong identity. It's crisp broken transmission with some great loops for sure, but along with generic song titles, many of them lack any coherency beside one another.
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The cover art for Eden by New Dreams Limited, which is mostly a white void, consisting only of the title in red at the bottom right corner and a thin rainbow gradient strip on the right side.

#DeclanLikes New Dreams Ltd. – Eden

Normalise making albums for yourselves. Vektroid did it for her birthday [citation needed], and the result is a broken transmission album that is short but oh-so-sweet. I just adore its loose, sparse, serene and oddly wholesome sound throughout.
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The cover art of Chuck Person's Eccojams Volume 1, made using jumbled crops of artwork from the Ecco the Dolphin video game. The only decipherable image is that of a swimming shark.

#DeclanLikes Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1

The first vaporwave album ever made. Constantly swimming with echo & decay, every sampled lyrical loop is vivid & otherworldly. The energy emanating from what was meant to be just a scrappy release is remarkable and honestly unmatched.
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