Hauntology [a portmanteau of haunting and ontology] is a range of ideas referring to the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, as in the manner of a ghost.

In music, hauntology is predominantly associated with electronic music, but it can apply to any music concerned with the aesthetics of the past. The trend is often tied to notions of retrofuturism, whereby artists evoke the past by utilising the "spectral sounds of old music technology". The trend involves the sampling of older sound sources to evoke deep cultural memory.

Critic Simon Reynolds has described hauntology is a "genre of eerie electronics fixated on ideas of decaying memory and lost futures" and "a strand of 'ghostified' music doesn't quite constitute a genre, a scene, or even a network...more of a flavour or atmosphere than a style with boundaries."

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Released September 2, 2024