Teal hair, dolphins, Windows 95 marble textures. Ran for about eighteen months before the New York Times described it and Rihanna performed it on Saturday Night Live in the same season, each fatal on its own.
For the record, the ironic use of Seapunk and the sincere use overlapped for longer than people admit. There were years when you could not tell, and those were the good years.
A clean death, as these go. No lawsuit, no rebrand, no comeback tour — Seapunk simply stopped, around 2013, and the silence afterwards was the obituary. This is just the paperwork.
Filed as evidence: a local newspaper's letters page, 22 February. Seapunk in the body text, twice, once misspelt. The second use is the more interesting one.
The one thing missing from the headnote: Seapunk landed differently on people who had been online since the 2010s than on anyone who arrived later, and the later arrivals were the ones who spread it.
What does it mean? Write it the way you would say it out loud.
