Future Funk

Future funk is essentially disco and Japanese city-pop reassembled. Producers take short loops from late-1970s to mid-1980s funk, disco, or Japanese pop records — frequently female-led, frequently with a prominent slap bass — and place them over a contemporary four-on-the-floor kick at roughly 115-125 BPM, often with a side-chain pump that ducks the sample on every kick. Drum machines are usually programmed in the style of French touch or filter house. Tracks are short, two to three minutes, and rely almost entirely on the warmth of the sampled material; original synth work is minimal.

Future funk took shape on SoundCloud and Bandcamp around 2013-2014 as a more upbeat offshoot of vaporwave. Where vaporwave dwelled on slowed-down melancholy, future funk pulled the same retail-era source material — Japanese city-pop especially — up to dance tempo. Saint Pepsi (later Skylar Spence), Macross 82-99, Yung Bae, and Night Tempo were the early defining producers. The genre's profile rose again from 2017-2018 when Mariya Takeuchi's 1984 single 'Plastic Love' went globally viral on YouTube, helping reframe future funk as the leading edge of the city-pop revival.

Listen to how the sample loop is treated: usually two to four bars of a vintage track repeated for the whole song, with the producer's added drums sitting on top rather than replacing the original groove. The side-chain compression — where the sample 'breathes' in time with the kick — is a clear French-touch inheritance. Vocals are almost always sampled rather than newly recorded, and you can often hear short Japanese phrases inside the loop.

For the genre's reference point, Saint Pepsi, 'Skylar Spence' (2013). After that, Macross 82-99, 'Sailorwave' (2013) and Night Tempo's 'Showa Idol's Groove' series.

Future funk and the global city-pop revival fed each other. By the time 'Plastic Love' was being algorithmically pushed by YouTube in 2017-2018, future funk producers had been sampling Mariya Takeuchi and Tatsuro Yamashita for years, so the audience for the originals partly already existed.