If you are a person who spends any significant amount of time on the internet, you should know that at this point, you don't find memes—they find you. There’s something ingrained in the menagerie of algorithms that just plops random crap (bad and good) in your feeds at all hours, only to be replaced by new stuff the following week.

In the mass graveyard of memes, the micro-genre of music known as vaporwave was all but assigned its own headstone. It revolved around seapunk Tumblr aesthetics, ‘90s pop-culture nostalgia, and chopped and screwed elevator muzak, and it started around 2010 with James Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual. Entries from the vaporwave canon, like Vektroid’s Floral Shoppe, continue to rank among the best-selling experimental albums on Bandcamp. Vaporwave’s critical height came in 2012, when writer Adam Harper painted the genre as the height of anti-capitalist gestures in music, a new “punk” so to speak. Since then, entire academic books have been dedicated to picking apart the nuances of vaporwave.

Like punk on a hyper-micro level, the question of whether vaporwave is dead seems to loom around the musicians most associated with the genre. Folks like James Ferraro, Skylar Spence (fka SAINT PEPSI), Vektroid, and Blank Banshee have, for the most part, moved on to other things. Some became entrenched with new trends like health goth (Vektroid), moved towards more mainstream pop sounds (Spence), or just grew weirder (James Ferraro). Which is why the recent emergence of a new sub-genre of vaporwave called Simpsonwave is all the more curious. Memes can have second winds, just look at Crying Jordan. But why vaporwave? You can thank a bored teenager for that one.

So what exactly is Simpsonwave? Basically, Simpsonwave constitutes a genre of YouTube videos that collage classic "Simpsons” moments with vaporwave tracks. The clips from “The Simpsons” are often heavily edited, given a codeine purple filter, a static-y VHS feel, and generally arranged with psychedelia in mind. Overlaid on these clips are the classic vaporwave sounds of John Carpenter synths, cheesy muzak saxophones, and skittering drum machines, making the otherwise strange edits feel complete. The mashup of the both is startlingly relaxing. Those early seasons of “The Simpsons” are reeking with ‘90s nostalgia and flashes of surrealism, while vaporwave accesses something deeper in that energy, tapping into a sort of dreamy ennui.

People started to take notice of Simpsonwave around April, when the YouTuber FrankJavCee posted a video titled “HOW TO ＳＩＭＰＳＯＮＷＡＶＥ.” In four minutes, he traces the roots of Simpsonwave and demonstrates, satirically, how to create such a video. At the end of May, the YouTube channel This Exists posted a video called “Is Simpsonwave A Joke,” a deep dive into whether the growing number of videos was some long-running ironic joke or earnest art-making. At the beginning of this month, Rough Trade declared via Twitter, “In case you needed a weird new music subgenre, I present to you Simpsonwave.” Afterwards, coverage of the subgenre spread quickly, leading The Verge to dub the nascent subgenre the “chill summer soundtrack you didn't know you needed”... meaning, what exactly? Vaporwave is back, but only when there are stray clips of Mr. Burns scattered throughout?

If there is a ur-moment for Simpsonwave, it comes from a very short Vine from the user Spicster, where a clip from the episode “Bart on the Road” (season 7, episode 20) is set to the tune of “Resonance” by the artist HOME. The vine has been looped more than 22 million times. While Spicster might have birthed the origin moment, the internet denizen who gave the genre its name—and became the most visible Simpsonwave artist working right now—is a 19-year-old physics student from Nottingham, England, named Lucien Hughes. Back in February, he started compiling what could be called, as absurd as this may sound, the most seminal Simpsonwave YouTube playlist in existence. Since then, there has been a rash of videos following suit. Who knows how long it’ll last, but for now, we caught up with Hughes to figure out why, exactly, Simpsonwave is a thing.

Pitchfork: How did you even start making these videos in the first place?