Popular music subcultures have acknowledged, engaged with, or rejected digital platforms to varying degrees; their relationship to it is often made fraught, ambivalent and ironic by projections of the Internet as inauthentic or impersonal and their inheritance of Romantic-influenced countercultural aesthetics. The genre vaporwave offers a key example of this, especially given that it emerged and exists almost exclusively on digital platforms. Vaporwave addresses its own digital nature and historicity in sound and image, as recent scholarship on it has observed. Its life online represents not an abandonment of traditional formulations of the relationship between culture, technology and authenticity, but a new arena in which to negotiate them.