Synth-wave and the question of where the genre goes after it fully absorbs the nostalgia is something I find genuinely uncertain.

The synth-wave revival was built on a specific nostalgia — for the 80s film score aesthetic, for VHS textures, for retrofuturism. That nostalgia had a specific half-life, and for a certain generation of listeners the emotional charge of those associations is fading as they become historical rather than remembered.

The genre has two options as the nostalgia fades. The first is to find a new nostalgia — to shift the aesthetic reference forward in time and build new nostalgic associations around the 90s or the early 2000s. The second is to use the synthesizer vocabulary for music that doesn't depend on nostalgia at all — that treats the sounds as a language rather than a reference and makes them serve contemporary emotional content.

I'm more interested in the second option, and I think the artists who pursue it will define the genre's next phase.