For me, I’m not sure.
I love synthwave like GUNSHIP and PYLOT and Essenger as much as the next cyberpunk, but besides a few particular GUNSHIP and Essenger songs, they don’t feel quite right.
Neither does straight up punk rock or metal, which is the other stuff I listen to.
The cyberpunk music I want needs to be a blend of the two I think — the atmospheric sounds and use of synths and technological effects from synthwave, and the overt rage and message and aggressive, imperfect rock sound of punk rock and metal.
Edit: I’m liking industrial so far!
A lot of my foundational impressions were based on movie soundtracks of the likes of “Johnny Mnemonic”, “Strange Days”, “The Matrix”, and “The Crow”. In my college days, I was really into the industrial genre and the likes of NiN (the Broken/Fixed era), Front 242, Sister Machine Gun, God Lives Underwater, and Machines of Loving Grace. Then I got into EDM for a while, as a lot of the software devs I lived and worked with were into that genre.
These days, I’ve been getting into darkwave and synthwave. I’m a big fan of our very own @[email protected], Dance With The Dead, Extra Terra, Neon Nox, Lazerpunk, and DreamReaper to name a few.