Hypnagogic pop

Hypnagogic pop (or simply h-pop) is a loosely defined style of pop and psychedelic music that evokes cultural memory and nostalgia for the popular entertainment of the past (principally the 1980s and early 1990s). It emerged in the 2000s through a wave of American Millennial home recording artists in the lo-fi and post-noise scene, who adopted retro aesthetics from their childhood, such as radio and soft rock, new wave, video game music, synth-pop, R&B and early Internet aesthetics. Recordings were typically marked by the use of outmoded analog equipment and DIY experimentation, while distributed on cassettes and CD-R's with circulation primarily based on the Internet through blog sites.

The genre's name was coined by journalist David Keenan in an August 2009 issue of The Wire to label the developing trend, the term was inspired by a comment made by musician James Ferraro about the notion that 1980s sounds had seeped into the unconscious of contemporary musicians while they were toddlers falling asleep. Keenan characterized the concept as "pop music refracted through the memory of a memory." It was used interchangeably with "chillwave" or "glo-fi" and gained critical attention through artists such as Ariel Pink and James Ferraro. The music has been variously described as a 21st-century update of psychedelia, a reappropriation of media-saturated capitalist culture, and an "American cousin" to British hauntology.

In response to Keenan's article, The Wire received a "slew of semi-hate mail" that derided hypnagogic pop as the "worst genre created by a journalist". Some of the tagged artists rejected the label or denied that such a unified style exists. During the 2010s, the style's "revisionist nostalgia" sublimated into various youth-oriented cultural zeitgeists. The scene influenced the rise of bedroom pop, while elements evolved into vaporwave, with which it is sometimes conflated.