[X]-wave appellations has been a thing for a good while now, whether it's dreamwave, vaporwave, retrowave, fashwave, chillwave, or more besides. It's good though so more exposure is fine by me. I personally tend to use 'synthwave' as an umbrella term for most of it, on account of the common utilization of analogue synthesizers in many such described works (obv).
Para exemple:
The on it's own excellent soundtrack composed by Disasterpeace may seem an interesting inclusion here, but as in all things there is reason.
Borges once wrote, in an essay on Franz Kafka, that when a great man of art creates a seminal work, he also creates his precursors for that work; upon unleashing the golem to the wider world, his contemporaries then begin searching through the past, to find what elements contained in the work there that are also contained elsewhere. Men who in the past time, and their own times, who would otherwise have not seemed to have had much relation with each other, now suddenly find themselves joined together in the new world that was brought into being by the great artist, drawing the analogies into obvious unmistakeability. Old colleagues in the future, avant la letre.
So it is here. When released a few years ago, it's status as the ost to the videogame Fez (unfortunately overseen by the execrable Phil Fish) would place it in most peoples minds as a great example of what the chiptune genera is capable of, especially as the game itself recalls many themes of classic platforming gaming. Retrochronically however, we can see now in it many of the same themes we also see most explicitly invoked and crystalized in synthwave strands, especially the almost meditative, purposefully nostalgic ambiance.
I think as an overarching phenomena it's something that taps into an aesthetic energy that heretofore had not yet found more proper expression; particularly amongst post-gen-x and pre-millenial demographics. In my view it's one of the genres that's displaying the most creative potential amongst contemporaries right now.
