Life of Leisure by Washed Out

Life of Leisure, the EP Ernest Greene released as Washed Out on Mexican Summer on September 8, 2009, was his second of the year, hot on the heels of High Times, and it's the record that handed a hazy new micro-genre its calling card. "Feel It All Around" is the one: the song generally held up as the definitive chillwave track, the template everybody else traced, and the reason Pitchfork later crowned Greene the Godfather of Chillwave.

It sounds like a summer afternoon taped onto a cassette that got left on the dashboard: warped synths, soft-focus beats, a voice smeared into the mix until it's more mood than message, bedroom pop melting into dream pop. It's a slight thing, an EP rather than a manifesto, but it set the table for what came next, Within and Without.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.