New Releases: May 2025

With the festival season approaching and the summer season already in full swing for the northern hemisphere, the various corners of the vaporwave community are planning events, curating livestreams and releasing tons of new music! For our May 2025 release rundown, we’re covering ten new albums from across the galaxy of subgenres. We got some Future Funk, Slushwave, Vaporbreaks, Barber Beats, Dark Ambient and a healthy dose of the current “trending aesthetic”: Frutiger Aero. There are side projects, remix albums, collaborations and new albums from heavy hitters as well as up-and-comers!

Before I move on to our list of albums for the end of May, I suggest you go check out one of the latest Bandcamp Daily features about the Venezuelan group Weed420. Obviously vaporwave is mentioned in the title, Weed420’s Vaporwave Rebellion Is The Sound of Venezuela’s Lost Generation, and it’s honestly a pretty good jumping-off point for contextualizing their sonics, even though their music leans toward rap, glitch and hexd (as its tagged on Bandcamp). These young producers use nostalgia and samples to undergird their flows and sonic collages which reflects their lives as a lost generation in turbulent Venezuela. For us vaporwave folks, I hear elements of signalwave, drone, and eccojams in their music- but utilizing/repurposing signifiers and samples from their own regional area. The article does a great job framing their music and I definitely recommend you read it while listening! Now onto our list...

猫 シ Corp. - Blueberries on Mars - The Remixes [Slush, Ambient, Vaporbreaks]

Hot on the heels of his latest release, legendary mallsoft and ambient producer 猫 シ Corp. has collected 7 remixes that “reimagines 猫 シ Corp.’s cosmic ambient journey through the ears of alien civilizations across the galaxy”. With access to all the stems of each track, the respective producers put their own spin on the new album Blueberries On Mars. Thankfully this is not an overly long compilation, with strong opening tracks by Pizza Hotline and 暗闇DESTINY. I personally tend to skip over remix compilations because they are so long but this carefully curated set of collaborators manages to strike a great balance between aural explorations and rhythmic re-grooves. You can also purchase the album on vinyl, cassette and CD through the Hiraeth Bandcamp or Webstore.

enterprises - photos (:E) [Frutiger Aero]

I recently posted on BlueSky about Vaporwave and Frutiger Aero- a match made in digital heaven. There was a lot of great responses (after some reposting/prompting on my part lol) and I think we’re gonna see a lot more discussions about how the two intersect and influence each other as more people hype up Frutiger Aero in online spaces. This album is a great example of this crossover: a side project from prolific vaporwave producer, and owner of the WORLDS END COLLAPSE RECORDS, HYDROPLANED INTO A FALSE REALITY! It takes a similar fuzzy and bitcrushed re-remembering of the mid 2000’s (like another enterprising producer did earlier this month, which I’ll mention later in the list). The artwork is textbook, or should I say YouTub-Video-Essay-approved, Frutiger Aero aesthetic and the gentle digital hiss is sure to inspire nostalgia for the dawn of Web 2.0.

creative zen - touch [Frutiger Aero, Late Night Lo-Fi]

Here, again, we have another album tapping into that mid 2000s nostalgia and it’s tagged “mp3 player” and “2000s” on Bandcamp. It’s another side project that the artist just couldn’t keep a secret (which was also the case for the previous album if you read the description on HIAFR’s Bandcamp page). I won’t spoil it here, so instead I’ll direct you to a post on the brief commercial break blog and hopefully you’ll figure it out. 

Macroblank and slowerpace 音楽 - The Era of Information [Barber Beats]

Two titans of contemporary Barber Beats meet up in what sounds like a Dot-Com-era office space, decorated with minimalist furniture and sleek computer terminals, to churn out slow burning, chilled out, beats. They surf the web, dancing between the utopian and dystopian digital abyss where “data flows like rivers, secrets are hidden in code, and the line between reality and simulation blurs”, according to the Bandcamp description. Yet again, more artists tapping into the Frutiger Aero vibe but giving it a fresh trim to fit neatly in the vaporsphere and alongside their most well known albums.

Gamma Flow - Twin Palms [vaporwave2, Synth Pop]

Pivoting away from the 2000s and back to vaporwave’s roots in the carefree neon-lit 80s, London producer Gamma Flow released his new album Twin Palms on May 23rd. Blending sunny synthwave, nostalgic internet music and vaporfunk grooves, this one is for folks who are fans of synth pop and vaporwave2 (vaporwave with original vocals). There are also collabs with a number of great artists and familiar names like Bart Graft, Stux.io, and Dan Mason. Gamma Flow has launched a vinyl pre-order for the album with options for US fulfillment or UK fulfillment for international fans! 

known artiste & Hozokauh - ARGOS [Barber Beats]

Over the past couple years, known artiste and Hozokauh have been steadily releasing a slew of Barber Beats albums but only recently have they been getting their due with vinyl releases and this new collaborative album. It’s what we’ve come to expect from a Barber Beats “collab” with each artist contributing half the tracks, united under a common theme/artistic direction. However, this one has a nicely curated tracklist (instead of two EPs from each artist) with songs being sequenced to guide you on a sonic journey of breakbeats, yearning saxophone, burbling synths, and slow but steady grooves. 

s h i m a - 3 3 - i ' v e - n e v e r - f e l t - t h i s - w a y - b e f o r e [Classic Vapor, Eccojams]

Another longtime veteran of the scene returns to Business Casual with a new album that is also a throwback to the early days of vaporwave: Shima33, or in this case s h i m a - 3 3 . While they’re mostly known for Dreampunk and their association with Dream Catalogue, Shima is a prolific producer with tons of albums and side projects- some more infamous than others. This album sticks to the original eccojams template with heavy delay, enveloping reverb and pitched-down samples. It almost feels a bit satirical and, I dare say, formulaic with its simplistic treatment of the source material, occasional stutter glitches and lack of satisfying loops. That said, the sample choices and “irresistibly smooth” music, as one Bandcamp fan mentioned, will satisfy anyone looking for that old school vibe. It’s a combo of the Heaven Can Wait mixtapes and Chuck Person’s eccojams. 

SENTINEL - Galatea [Dark Ambient, Hushwave]

To commemorate the one year anniversary of Geometric Lullaby’s sub-label/sister label Hustones, head curator Brickmason assembled a team of artists to work collaboratively on the SENTINEL project. The five artists- 恋人の夢, Brickmason, M31-ZERO, ｔｅｐｈ　ｃｏ. 愛, and victory over death- quote, “worked together to create an album of shared themes, sound profiles, and apprehensions about the future”. It reminded me of some other legendary mega-collabs like the recently reissued Overgrowth and the underrated Aquatic Airlines release from back in 2016. This album touches on elements of dark ambient, slushwave, and the label’s namesake hushwave. It’s quite an epic journey with 23 tracks stretching out over nearly 2 hours, so set aside some time for this one! 

Alpha Centauri アルファ - Heat Lover (Reignited) [Future Funk]

Usually I don’t shout out reissues or remasters on the podcast but since this one involved a recent contributor to the website, I thought it was appropriate to mention. The unearthed and reissued lost album from Alpha Centauri アルファcalled Heat Lover (Reignited) was released on Bandcamp on May 15th with two bonus remixes. It was Alpha Centauri アルフ’s foray into mixing samples with original instrumentation that still captured the cosmic grooves of future funk and filter house! 

Ghost Enterprises - Vistas [Frutiger Aero, Utopian Virtual]

Saving the best for last, I mentioned another enterprising producer earlier and yet again we have another side project that dips into the bubbling waters and soap bottles of Frutiger Aero. Ghost Enterprises is Dan Mason’s outlet for music outside of his ambitions as a songwriter and lyricist, as well as a place for his sampled work that doesn’t quite fit under the current day Dan Mason persona. Vistas is an homage to post-millennium technology and entertainment with distinctly digital lofi timbres. It is not the sonic equivalent of the shiny and smoothed out visual aesthetic we see so often in Frutiger Aero, but instead a grainy memory of 56K dial-up era sounds, low bitrate mp3s, and a hollow utopia of technological progress. Surprisingly it is not sampled, but the intentionally low sound quality and watery high end might be off-putting for some. There’s a few tracks I had to just skip cuz it was almost frustrating to listen to.. I mean we did have high quality digital music on CDs and non-mp3 formats in the 2000s, but I get that audio quality is innate to the concept of the album. Maybe Dan will release some non-96kbps-ish versions or remixes? You can read some more praise for the album over on the brief commercial break blog as well!