Word.ws English Dictionary

mallsoft

mallsoft noun: a vaporwave subgenre themed after retro shopping malls.

mallsoft: a vaporwave subgenre themed after retro shopping malls
Image: Jornt Elzinga (猫 シ Corp.), CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

mallsoft (uncountable)

  1. A vaporwave subgenre themed after retro shopping malls.
    • It seems the late 1980s and 1990s are making a comeback, with new music genres like Vaporwave and Mallsoft.2017 December 28, Tyler Fister, “Why acid rain is out”, in Lexington Herald-Leader, volume 35, number 360, page 9A
    • Genres such as mallsoft, vaporwave, or hypnogogic pop, to name but a few, arise in a heartbeat and die out before many people, certainly mainstream music listeners, are likely even aware of them.2020, Ken McLeod, Driving Identities: At the Intersection of Popular Music and Automotive Culture, Routledge, →ISBN

Examples of mallsoft in a sentence

  • We’re Open is categorised as mallsoft, the vaporwave subgenre which evokes the sounds and atmosphere of shopping malls, and which obliquely references their current, precarious state.2021, Roisin Kiberd, The Disconnect: A Personal Journey Through the Internet, Serpent’s Tail, →ISBN:
  • “When you listen to ‘Mallsoft,’ you’re not listening to a recording of the music that was played in a mall, you’re listening to how that mall sounded when music was added to it.”2022, Alexandra Lange, Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall, Bloomsbury Publishing, →ISBN:

Origin of mallsoft

From mall + soft.

Questions about mallsoft

What does mallsoft mean?
Mallsoft means a vaporwave subgenre themed after retro shopping malls.
How do you use mallsoft in a sentence?
We’re Open is categorised as mallsoft, the vaporwave subgenre which evokes the sounds and atmosphere of shopping malls, and which obliquely references their current, precarious state.
What part of speech is mallsoft?
Mallsoft is a noun.

Words near mallsoft in the dictionary

  1. Mallozzi
  2. Mallozzis
  3. mallrat
  4. mallrats
  5. malls
  6. mallsoft
  7. mallspeak
  8. mallternative
  9. mallternatives
  10. Malltraeth
  11. Malltraeth Marsh

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mallsoft (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “mallsoft.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/mallsoft. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.