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Wave is a genre of bass music and a visual art style that emerged in the early 2010s in online communities. It is characterized by ambient music Melody and harmonies, melodic and heavy bass such as reese bass, modern Trap music drums, chopped vocal samples processed with reverb and delay, and . Visually, it incorporates computer-generated imagery and animation, and imagery from and .
Wave music originated on online music platforms from a small group of DIY artists. Since then, wave music uploaded to streaming platforms such as YouTube has gathered millions of plays, which is partially attributable to the genre's broad influences. Since 2016, the wave scene has experienced an increase in physical events. From 2017 onward, the genre further incorporated elements of trance music and hardstyle, leading to the emergence of the hardwave subgenre.
Wave's musical scene direct origins can be dated to at least 2013 when UK-based producer Steven "Klimeks" Adams began hashtag his tracks on SoundCloud as wave, and subsequently founded the prominent label Wavemob, which published its first release in 2016, the compilation album wave 001 with tracks by producers such as Klimeks, Skit, Spoze, and Nvrmore. Also in 2013, Plastician became an early promoter of the wave scene by featuring wave music during his radio shows on Rinse FM, and by releases on his label Terrorhythm Recordings, for instance Klimeks's remix of "Born in the Cold" on the compilation album Turquoise. In December 2015, Plastician released The Wave Pool MMXV mix featuring a selection of wave music that popularized the term wave within the music press and further promoted its general usage.
In early 2016, UKF Music and Futuremag Music wrote that wave producer Jude "Kareful" Leigh-Kaufman released the first full-length wave album, Deluge. Following in 2017, Kareful et al. founded the Liquid Ritual label and collective to promote wave music.
Since 2016, the wave scene—originally an online phenomenon—has experienced an increase in physical events such as in London, primarily Dalston. For example, entities that promoted events in London include Plastician who ran the Survey London wave nightclub in 2016 at Phonox, in Brixton; Mixmag featuring wave artists at Ace Hotel; and Kareful. Regarding the United States wave scene, in December 2022, Vibe.digital, Human Error//, and Soul Food Music Collective collaborated on a three-day wave festival in Seattle, named Pantheon, the largest in that country as of 2024. The ongoing Los Angeles based wave showcase event Tears In The Club also emerged in 2022 and currently represents the largest recurrent and exclusively wave focused event in the western hemisphere. Further local scenes include Poland, Russia, and Canada.
In 2017, Perth-based producers Skeler and Ytho began incorporating elements from trance music and hardstyle into wave for appealing to the broader festival and nightclub audiences, coining the name hardwave and popularizing the genre. This lead the wave scene to evolve into the emergent subgenre known as hardwave.
The Asian wave scene includes Japanese musician Dean Fujioka. In 2018, he released the single "Echo" which became the theme song for the Japanese TV series The Count of Monte-Cristo: Great Revenge. The music video for the song also won the Best Alternative Video at the MTV Video Music Awards Japan. In 2021, he released the song "Plan B" as the Hardwave.
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