American Silence by US Golf 95 | Review

US Golf 95 is the long-running alias of a Glasgow producer whose name and artwork dress the project up as an imaginary 90s golf game. The Bandcamp catalog now runs past sixty releases, stretching back to 2015. It’s a highly impressive project, and the artist's most recent full release, American Silence, arrived in July 2026. The title matters, too. A producer in Scotland naming an album American Silence joins a long vaporwave habit of looking at the United States from the outside, through a screen, where the mall and the cul-de-sac blur into one exported dream.

That dream has been vaporwave's subject from the start. Most vaporwave lives inside the idea of a dead mall, looping the fantasy of a golden age of 80s and 90s Americana until the loop wears thin. American Silence does something rarer. The tracklist tells a story, and the story runs from the earliest dreams of personal computing to the moment the store pulls its gates shut.

"Openworld" loads without a title screen. A wavy, unhurried groove settles in beneath the classic vaporwave plunk, and the track drifts outward into a wide, serene space, the kind of level where nobody tells you where to go. Somewhere in the mix, a voice has been masked past the point of words and folded in as one more instrument, a trick US Golf 95 returns to across the record with real effect. American Silence spends ten tracks testing this promise, and by the final song, it has closed.

"Slippin 2" sets the story in motion. A classic stomp beat gives way to slushy, grunge-soaked riffs, while the synth work overhead recalls Eyeliner. "MEMEX Memory Expansion" then reaches back to the source. In 1945, the engineer Vannevar Bush imagined the memex, a desk that would hold a person's books and correspondence and link them by association, a machine built to extend human memory. The idea later earned credit as a forerunner of hypertext and the web. US Golf 95 answers that dream with airy guitar plucks and sweeps while an ethereal, choral synth swells over them like a congregation gathering in a server room.

"Net-PAL" brings the next promise, the online friend, a pen pal rewired for the modem age. Then the machine starts talking back. "Digital Wellbeing" takes its name from the screen-time tools Google rolled out in 2018, the moment the platforms began gently advising users to spend less time on the platforms. The music here is the friendliest on the record. US Golf 95 leans into odd syncopations and a springy groove whose composition calls Animal Crossing to mind, while the sound itself belongs to the dead-mall corner of mallsoft, all tiled echo and shuttered storefronts. Picture a cozy village theme drifting over the PA of a shopping center nobody visits anymore.

"User Agency" carries the grunge thread forward with heavy, melancholy bass lines, and the title asks the question every nudge and notification eventually raises. Who is actually choosing here? "nuworld mall" is where the story turns. The serene vocal masking returns inside an echoing chamber, and the dead-mall influence settles in for good.

"Lakeview" steps out of the concourse and into the subdivision. Mellow guitar sweeps glide over classic lofi drum beats, and the record shifts from urban, mall-bound spaces to suburbia. A warm summer night or an early autumn morning hangs over a maze of little boxes, the kind of development named for a lake nobody can see from the road. If the mall is one half of the exported American dream, the suburb is the other, and US Golf 95 renders it with real tenderness.

Then "LIGHTS OUT" pulls the plug. An intercom announcement crackles through, and the track breaks down into heavy hardcore with shoegaze-driven guitar crashing over the top. There is a certain level of Turnstile influence here for me. After nine songs this serene, the rupture hits like fluorescent tubes shutting off row by row. 

The title finally makes sense in that last minute. American Silence explores what remains after the music stops: the hum of an empty building and the ringing in your ears once the guitars cut out. Vaporwave has spent years circling the mall and its dead promises, usually from a safe and woozy distance. US Golf 95 walks the listener through the whole arc instead. It’s an impressive and shockingly substantive album. I love it. Go check it out. 

US Golf 95 was also generous enough to offer download codes for American Silence, which we are handing out over on our Instagram! Follow us there for more opportunities like that.