After Vaporwave: The Strange New Aesthetics Taking Over the Weird Internet
Photo by Photo by Maxim Berg on Unsplash on Unsplash
Let's be honest about something: vaporwave is everywhere now, and that's exactly the problem. The moment you spot a purple-tinted Roman bust on a Forever 21 tote bag, the subculture that produced it has officially completed its journey from fringe obsession to mall decoration. Vaporwave didn't die dramatically — it just got absorbed, smoothed out, and sold back to us at a 40% markup. Classic.
But weird culture doesn't mourn for long. The communities that built vaporwave out of corrupted mall music and stolen corporate imagery are already three steps ahead, cooking up new visual languages that are stranger, more confrontational, and significantly harder to slap on a phone case. So what's actually capturing the imagination of the experimental internet right now? Let's get into it.
Traumacore and the Aestheticization of the Uncomfortable
If vaporwave was nostalgia filtered through a fever dream, traumacore is what happens when you stop romanticizing the past and start staring directly at the damage it left behind. Emerging primarily on Tumblr and bleeding into TikTok, this aesthetic layers childhood imagery — crayon drawings, cartoon stills, plastic toy textures — against distressing text, glitchy overlays, and an overwhelming sense of emotional dread.
It sounds bleak, and it kind of is. But there's something genuinely cathartic happening in these spaces. For a generation that grew up in the aftermath of 9/11, through two recessions, a pandemic, and the slow-motion catastrophe of social media adolescence, traumacore gives a visual form to experiences that don't have clean narratives. It's not pretty. It's not supposed to be. And that refusal to be aesthetically comfortable is exactly what makes it resonate.
Musically, you'll find this energy in hyperpop's more chaotic corners — artists who weaponize AutoTune and distortion until the song feels like it's actively breaking apart.
Goblincore Goes Architectural
Goblincore — that earthy, mushroom-obsessed celebration of moss, rocks, and general forest-creature energy — has been percolating for years, but something interesting is happening to it in 2024. It's moving indoors. Specifically, it's moving into interior design, graphic design, and a broader visual aesthetic that might be called "organic maximalism."
Think handmade textures, irregular type treatments that look almost biological, color palettes pulled from decomposing leaves and cave walls. Online communities on Reddit and Discord are building visual identities around this sensibility, and independent designers are applying it to everything from album art to zine layouts. The appeal makes a certain kind of sense: in a world of ultra-optimized, algorithm-smoothed design, something that looks like it grew rather than was rendered feels almost rebellious.
This is the anti-Figma. This is the aesthetic that happens when you let the imperfections stay.
Weirdcore and the Architecture of Unease
Weirdcore might be the most purely interesting aesthetic movement happening right now, and it's also the most difficult to describe without just showing someone a picture. Imagine spaces that feel architecturally impossible — hallways that go nowhere, rooms lit by light sources that don't exist, familiar objects placed in contexts that make them feel alien and threatening. The emotional register is somewhere between a childhood nightmare and a philosophical crisis.
What's fascinating about weirdcore is how it maps onto a very specific 2024 anxiety: the feeling that reality itself is slightly misconfigured. The liminal space trend was a precursor to this — those viral photos of empty swimming pools and fluorescent-lit office corridors at 3 AM — but weirdcore pushes further, into territory that feels genuinely surreal rather than just eerie.
On the music side, this aesthetic is finding its soundtrack in ambient and drone music that deliberately resists resolution. Artists building long, unresolved sonic landscapes that feel like being stuck in a room you can't quite find the door to.
Clowncore and the Reclamation of Absurdity
Not everything in the post-vaporwave landscape is processing trauma or manufacturing dread. Clowncore — and its adjacent aesthetic cousins, jestercore and circuspunk — is doing something almost radical: it's being genuinely, aggressively silly in a cultural moment that takes itself extremely seriously.
Clowncore pulls from vintage circus imagery, theatrical makeup traditions, and a deliberately excessive approach to color and pattern that makes maximalism look restrained. It's loud. It's chaotic. It refuses to be cool in any conventional sense. And in a content ecosystem where every aesthetic is immediately analyzed for its market potential, something that's this actively uncommercial feels almost like a political statement.
The music that pairs with this sensibility tends toward the theatrical and the absurd — think cabaret filtered through noise pop, or folk music that's decided the whole thing is a bit.
What All of This Actually Tells Us
Pull back from the individual aesthetics and a pattern emerges. Where vaporwave was fundamentally about nostalgia — about processing the cultural artifacts of the 80s and 90s through a melancholic, distorted lens — the aesthetics gaining traction right now are about the present moment in all its instability. They're about anxiety, yes, but also about finding strange beauty in discomfort, about refusing the clean lines of optimized digital culture, about building visual languages that resist easy consumption.
The weird internet has always been a space where people work out their relationship to the world using whatever cultural materials are at hand. Right now, those materials are strange, and the work being done with them is stranger still. Vaporwave gave us a beautiful way to feel nostalgic. Its successors are giving us stranger, more honest ways to feel now.
And honestly, that's exactly where weird culture needs to be.
