I really, really like The Year of Hibernation, but it occurred to me recently that it shares a lot with other songs and records that get that genre tag - hazy, drum machine beats, keys of various types smeared all over, selective use of electric guitar, and so on. Obviously there are some elements that fall outside of typical chillwave boundaries - rather emo lyrical and vocal approaches, to name one - but the same is true for, say, anything Toro y Moi has done this year. A quick googling shows that it wouldn’t be true to say that no one calls YL chillwave, but the project definitely isn’t being grouped with, say, Washed Out.

So again, I ask: why aren’t people calling the Youth Lagoon record chillwave?