It’s almost too fitting that one of the 2010s’ most explicitly nostalgic musical trends technically took hold in the previous decade. In the middle of 2009, indie culture was awash in The Summer of Chill, as several homebound young artists from across the American South stared down an economic void by creating electronic pop songs that came to define what we now know as chillwave.

There was the synth-smeared “Feel It All Around” by rural Georgia bedroom act Washed Out, the melted-ice-cream-cone swoon of Texas psych-fabulist Neon Indian’s “Deadbeat Summer,” and South Carolina polymath Toro y Moi’s “Blessa,” a totem of high-temperature contentment that turned pop inside-out. All three songs shared fuzzy production values, partially obscured vocals, and increased emphasis on loops, the end product sounding like a decayed transmission broadcast through a busted television set. They wafted into indie’s general consciousness via Myspace, introducing a new sound that soon replaced the rustic chamber-pop that dominated the genre throughout the second half of the 2000s.

Music bloggers, who were arguably at the peak of their tastemaking powers, took notice. The perpetually joking-not-joking meta-blogger Carles effectively coined the term “chillwave” in a July 2009 post on his site, Hipster Runoff, partially poking fun at genre-coining music bloggers. But the name—and style—took serious hold. From its total prolificacy in the early ’10s to its various mutated forms reflected in today’s popular culture, the chillwave ethos has endured this decade in a way few other musical trends have, even as many of its first-generation practitioners have moved on to other, stranger sounds, or out of music entirely.

At chillwave’s peak, much criticism aimed at the subgenre addressed a perceived generational ambivalence emanating from its core. Los Angeles singer-songwriter Bethany Cosentino of Best Coast, one of the few guitar-based acts grouped under chillwave’s beach umbrella, somewhat unfairly represented the alpha and omega for such scorn after rhyming “crazy” with “lazy” on her 2010 debut Crazy for You. There was also Toro y Moi’s oft-cited “I found a job, I do it fine/Not what I want, but I still try,” from “Blessa,” which The Stranger once derided as “a sonic shoulder shrug.” In retrospect, these jabs are akin to blaming millennials for destroying the housing industry—a judgmental knee-jerk reaction against the state of mind that so many of chillwave’s creators grew up breathing.

If you were graduating from college in America at the start of the ’10s, you were likely mired in debt and entering a job market gutted by the Great Recession—a calamitous end to a calamitous decade that included two wars and the largest terrorist attack in the country’s history. The explosion of YouTube meant that witnessing the nitty-gritty of atrocities ranging from town-flattening tsunamis to illegal torture was as easy as pressing play, further normalizing our national obsession with violence. After having lived through all of this only to enter a workforce that doesn’t want you, why wouldn’t you dream of Fruit Roll-Ups and trips to the beach?

Just as chillwave itself seemed to fill the air like vapor from a festival misting tent, the subgenre’s points of musical origin can be similarly amorphous. The neon pop of the 1980s—a decade in which most chillwave practitioners spent some time in a literal embryonic state—looms large, as it did with the late-’00s internet-native dance subgenre known as bloghouse. But if bloghouse’s dirty bass lines, razor-sharp synths, and indie-disco hedonism reflected that era’s decadent excesses, then chillwave was more like a woozy hangover after a night out at the local new wave club.