Seapunk

Seapunk's sound sits at 130-160 BPM, with synths processed to feel watery — heavy chorus, pitch-modulated delay, reverb tails that simulate underwater attenuation — over UK garage- or jungle-leaning drums. The melodic palette borrows from late-1990s and early-2000s rave and pop, which is part of the Y2K nostalgia the visual side is built on. The music was almost inseparable from its imagery: turquoise GIFs, dolphins, Windows 95 chrome, beach palm trees, all rendered in browser-art lo-fi.

Seapunk started in 2011 on Tumblr as a visual aesthetic before it had much of a sound. Producers Ultrademon (Albert Redwine) and Slava made the music side concrete with releases like Ultrademon's 'Sea Punk' (2011) and 'Moon Jellyfish Census' (2013). The whole moment was effectively over by 2013, after Rihanna's 'Diamonds' SNL performance in November 2012 used seapunk-style graphics and the scene felt absorbed by the mainstream within months.

Listen for the chorus and pitch-shift on the synths — that's doing the 'underwater' work. Drums often borrow UK garage shuffle. The music alone makes more sense if you watch a representative Tumblr GIF set or YouTube visualiser alongside it: the visual register really was half the genre.

Ultrademon, 'Sea Punk' (2011) or the 'Seapunk Vol. 1' compilation (Coral Records Internazionale, 2012).

Seapunk is often cited as one of the first microgenres to live and die almost entirely on Tumblr — its lifespan, from Lil Internet's joke tweet about a 'seapunk leather jacket' in 2011 to mainstream visibility in late 2012, is shorter than the gap between most major-label album cycles.