After it blazed through England and New York in the 1970s, the first wave of punk rock left a whole lot of darkness in its wake. As the decade rolled to a close, young musicians struck by punk’s ferocity and lawlessness picked up its ashes, lit a few candles, and invited the world to a séance. Their songs were marked by echoes, distortion, minimal guitar lines, and an arch taste for the macabre; their electroshocked hair, smears of black eyeliner, and dark clothes only reinforced the vibe. Goth offered music what horror had given movies: a chance to lean into the void without quite falling in, to sneak close to death while still very much alive.
Recorded in 1979 in Northamptonshire, England, Bauhaus’ nine-minute vampire ode “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” is widely accepted as goth’s wellspring. Soon after their frontman Peter Murphy sang about the undead over an uneasy, descending bassline, fellow Brits Joy Division found transcendent melancholy in simple chord progressions and staccato baritone vocals, and Killing Joke reveled in menacing drum fills and overdriven guitars. Their sounds proved infectious: In the early 1980s, the Cure and Siouxsie & the Banshees melted down their early post-punk into lush and eerie fantasias, folding in synthesizers and slowing their tempos to a gloomy gait. Up in Scotland, Cocteau Twins started etching out songs that sounded like initiation rituals to arcane death cults. Something was in the water in the UK, but the sonic desolation wasn’t confined there: In New York, Suicide were immersing their synthesizers in waves of static while screeching about domestic murder.
At the end of the ’80s, the goth aesthetic seeped into industrial acts like Nine Inch Nails and Depeche Mode, who placed less emphasis on guitars and more on drum machines and caustic synths. Goth lay mostly below ground during the 1990s grunge movement, in which anger and sarcasm were the fashion instead of despondency; it burst back up into the mainstream with a fury by the mid-2000s, when My Chemical Romance and Panic! At the Disco threw a pop spin on the melodrama of their forebears. Singing about death in full Victorian regalia might not have sounded like a chart-winning strategy, but MCR’s Gerard Way knew his history: The kids love a good spook. Today, artists like Jenny Hval, Makthaverskan, and Zola Jesus keep the goth torch lit; black clothes and loose drapes dot designer runways; even Justin Bieber rocks a Marilyn Manson tee on occasion. Once a riotous underbelly of society, goth’s tendrils have risen from the grave into the mainstream.
Just in time for Halloween, we’ve traced the dark history of goth, from the earliest songs that hinted at its spirit to the ominous artists keeping the genre alive today. Before we take the plunge, though, here’s a transmission from the reluctant Godfather of Goth himself. We spoke to Peter Murphy via telephone from Istanbul, his home for the last two decades.
Peter Murphy: The Brits have a penchant for absorbing influence and turning it back out into something original. [The UK] creates its own culture. It’s an island race. Punk gave a kind of quantum tearing of the veil: Most of the punk bands were found through self-created, regional labels; one could start a label up and press a thousand records. You had John Peel, who was a great champion of music in general, and he would play anything once. The [Sex] Pistols broke open a window of opportunity really quickly. That adolescent need to scream about something, it morphed into a more artful direction.
When I came along with [Bauhaus guitarist] Daniel [Ash], it was just one of those things that was destined to be what it is. We wrote half of the first album in the first weekend we were together. It was the scintillating promise of being given the opportunity to be artful and creative, without any complications or hierarchy. There were no walls; there was an openness. It was quick with us: Within six months, we were at the top of the indie charts, and I was onstage for a few weeks after having never been on a stage. It was just right.
No, no. Never Mind the Bollocks was great, and there were hundreds of punk bands immediately after that. When we started in 1978/79, [punk] left the soil in which we could bud.
What did spur us on was playing all around Europe and in England. We would play a Leeds festival, and the place was empty for most of the day, and once they smelled that we were coming on, we’d call it “the charge of the wildebeest.” It was hordes of kids running at us. It was really what rock’n’roll should be. Fuck the punks, fuck anybody else. Nine minutes of a brooding, actually terrifying song live was more punk than punk. It wasn’t like, “Let’s create something in contrast with the three-minute [songs].” It was totally self-reliant.
When we went in to record four songs for a demo, we did “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” first. We did it in one take. It was the first vocal I’d ever sung into a microphone in a studio. And the moment that happened, it was like, “Oh. Oh, yeah.” A lot of the Bauhaus stuff, Dan and I would joke, is really rubbishly recorded. It’s like a cat scratching on a tin roof. But it had this intent that worked. When you hear it now, it’s so original.
Nobody could be likeminded like us. We were really awkward. We were a bunch of really difficult neurotics.
We got loads of demos given to us and they were really bad. Just rubbish goth demos, low voices and all this stuff. That became, I guess, the goth scene. It was terrible. I think we influenced a lot of people. When you look at the U2 album [The Joshua Tree], suddenly they had Anton Corbijn photographing them, making them look like Bauhaus, all black and white. We were very influential in ways that are not obvious, really.
We were playing in Derby, England. I scaled the stage curtain, got onto the wire rail, which was very thin, and hung like Tarzan onto the middle of it. I was hanging by my hands and swung like a gymnast over the audience. I flew over to the curtain again, grabbed it, threw it down, and landed on the edge of the stage. It terrified everybody.
Yes, I thought it was great. It’s quite striking imagery. I was a bit late in trying to sue and get royalties.
I thought that was amazing. It was directed by David Slade, who’s British. He asked me to come on and play what he felt was a wink to those who know, a bookend to my appearance in [the 1983 Tony Scott film] The Hunger. I played The Cold One, the first ever vampire of that Twilight species of vampires. I did stunt training at my insistence—I wanted to do the stunts. Honestly, it looked good.
There you go. That’s your angle.
Essay and interview by Sasha Geffen
Listen to selections from this list on our Spotify playlist and our Apple Music playlist.
Screamin’ Jay Hawkins: “I Put a Spell on You” (1956)
Screamin’ Jay Hawkins used to rise out of a coffin onstage. He would brandish a walking stick decorated with a skull, which occasionally borrowed his cigarettes. Hawkins later grew ambivalent about his image as the Vincent Price of R&B; like the actor, he had high-minded ambitions but ended up typecast in a caricature. Still, he pioneered the idea of musical horror as theater: Half the artists on this list cribbed from Hawkins’ stage persona.
“I Put a Spell on You” was supposed to be a wounded ballad—until its producer brought piles of liquor to the recording studio. On the track, Hawkins screams, grunts, moans, and ad-libs evil laughs like a villain revealing his nefarious, seductive scheme. His backing band restrains themselves to stately waltz time, making the effect all the more uncanny—a torch song to rouse angry villagers. Here, Hawkins delights in the tension between fear and camp, the macabre and the ludicrous—the contradictions that give goth music its undead soul. –Chris Randle
Listen: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “I Put a Spell on You”
The Doors: “The End” (1967)
Before it soundtracked the iconic first minutes of Apocalypse Now, the Doors’ 12-minute fever dream “The End” looped visions of giant snakes, thirst-frenzied children, and Oedipal incest into California’s more LSD-addled minds. This was the 1960s, when even Jim Morrison’s claim that he “couldn’t get much higher” got the Doors banned from “The Ed Sullivan Show,” but that didn’t stop him from singing about wanting to kill his dad and fuck his mom during the sprawling third act of “The End.”
With its echoing drums and queasy guitar lines, the song led journalist John Stickney to coin the term “gothic rock” in a newspaper feature on the band in 1967. “‘The End’ poured out of his mouth, malevolent, satanic, electric, and on fire,” Stickney wrote after seeing Morrison and the Doors perform it live in New York. The band might have been tanner than their vampiric descendants, but they tapped into an otherworldly, erotic menace that would prove fertile for legions of spooks to come. –Sasha Geffen
Listen: The Doors, “The End”
The Velvet Underground & Nico: “All Tomorrow’s Parties” (1967)
The Velvet Underground helped to seed a galaxy of downtrodden genres, but on The Velvet Underground & Nico, they are, at heart, proto-goths. In this immortal storm cloud of melody, drone, and noise, the dour core of Nico’s voice is at its most spectacularly monochrome. John Cale jabs at a prepared piano to channel the repetitive headiness of Terry Riley, creating the same potion of elegance and airy dread that you might feel while walking through a cemetery. Inspired by Warhol’s nightcrawling soirees at the legendary Factory, “All Tomorrow’s Parties” is the most antisocial pop song about partying ever—and it was, of course, Warhol’s all-time favorite Velvet Underground song. The track is total rock’n’roll sorcery, like misfits dancing over a pentagram scraped in the ground, an evil spell to end the 1960s. It is the sound of cultishness. –Jenn Pelly
Listen: The Velvet Underground & Nico, “All Tomorrow’s Parties”
Brian Eno: “Third Uncle” (1974)
Goth was a descendant of glam rock, too, and not just punk. Although it abandoned the psychedelic color palette and exchanged alien worship for a vampire cult, goth kept glam’s theatricality intact, as well as its openness to experimentation. While Bowie was a more visible and conspicuous influence, thanks largely to Bauhaus’ zealous evangelism, Brian Eno may have contributed more to goth’s sonic DNA, especially in his love for synthesizers and abstract instrumentation. His pre-ambient solo career is full of aggressive, gleefully perverse proto-goth songs like “Blank Frank,” from his 1974 solo debut Here Come the Warm Jets, and “Third Uncle,” from the same year’s Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy).
“Third Uncle,” in particular, is goth in everything but name: It has a menacing drum beat, sprays of tightly controlled staccato guitar, and hypnotic, near-monotone vocals that find Eno at his creepiest (which is actually very creepy). The song clearly influenced Bauhaus, who recorded a somehow less sinister cover for their 1982 EP The Sky’s Gone Out. And it provided the entire blueprint for a Manchester band called Warsaw—who, after cutting a deeply Eno-influenced album, would go on to much bigger things under the name Joy Division. –Miles Raymer
Listen: Brian Eno, “Third Uncle”
Suicide: “Frankie Teardrop” (1977)
It takes a certain inner darkness to read about a murder-suicide in the newspaper and turn it into 10 minutes of unhinged proto-punk—and Alan Vega and Martin Rev had no shortage of darkness in them. The New York duo were prone to confrontation, whether it be in the studio, with their charred synthesizers and noxious bass, or onstage, where Vega cut himself in front of his audiences some 20 years before Marilyn Manson got the same idea. “Frankie Teardrop,” Suicide’s magnum opus, adopts the perspective of a laid-off factory worker who, in poverty and desperation, kills his wife, his baby, and then himself. Suicide don’t whitewash the material— it’s visceral and immediate, with Vega’s quaver breaking into an unearthly shriek. “Remember that scream on that thing?” he said in a 2008 interview. “Well, I almost passed out when I did it.”
Suicide’s halo of sympathy around this grisly tale elevates “Frankie Teardrop” from a shock-rock one-off to an enduring goth touchstone. It’s one thing to write about murder because it makes people uncomfortable; it’s another to make yourself uncomfortable trying to get inside the head of a murderer. Suicide never shied away from the bleakest aspects of human nature, and “Frankie Teardrop” captures them at their most daring. –Sasha Geffen
Listen: Suicide, “Frankie Teardrop”
The Cramps: “Human Fly” (1978)
Horror and the occult cast tall shadows in early punk iconography—the Damned, the Stranglers, and Dead Boys all sound like characters ripped from slasher flicks. But only the Cramps were deliberately referential to creature features and pulp novels; their albums play like strobe-lit costume parties, with songs about teenage werewolves, zombies, cavemen, and voodoo idols. The Sacramento band’s debut single, “Human Fly,” finds frontman Lux Interior seething like a vampire Elvis while loosely referencing the 1958 sci-fi/horror film The Fly. Behind him, the group lays down a writhing, carnal groove, adopting the surf-guitar tones of Link Wray and some of the Stooges’ sultry swagger.
Strutting the line between campy and creepy, the Cramps were hardly as sullen as their proto-goth peers, but their playful themes belied a more menacing edge—a sound the members themselves coined “psychobilly.” Their image was just as ghoulish: The cover photo of the “Human Fly” single shows Interior, gaunt and staring wildly into the camera while guitarist Ivy Rorschach appears propped lifelessly, her expression a rictus of maniacal, dead-eyed glee. The shot was snapped on the set of the song’s music video, which opens with Interior unloading a syringe into his neck and ends with Rorschach being disfigured at the hands of her bandmates. Other acts more clearly defined goth culture’s dress code and emotive subject matter, but the Cramps’ fixation on the supernatural, and their commitment to deranged theatricality, made them key figures in its macabre evolution. –Ryan Schreiber
Listen: The Cramps, “Human Fly”
Teenage Jesus and the Jerks: “Orphans” (1978)
“The original intention was to bring the inner tantrum of my diseased psyche to the forefront of the stage,” Lydia Lunch once said of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. “The guitar is like a hysterical baby screaming; the words are very infantile.” As fixtures of downtown New York’s rock-obliterating no wave scene, Teenage Jesus made some of the most brutal music of the 20th century. “Orphans” is particularly harsh: If the jackhammer guitars and tormentingly repetitive drums weren’t negative enough, the only lyrics Lunch chants are, “No more ankles and no more clothes/Little orphans running through the bloody snow.”
“Orphans” is an allegory for liberating oneself from one’s past—and what is goth but mortals seeking rebirth by facing death? In her 2013 interview with underground publishing legend V. Vale, Lunch offered a macabre revelation. “[My parents] didn’t encourage anything. All of what I’ve done has been in spite of my parents,” she said, detailing how she first lived in her family’s basement and attic at age 12, before running away from home at 14. “That’s why one of the first songs I wrote with Teenage Jesus was called ‘Orphans’ … and eventually that became true and it was wonderful.” Her parents, like everyone, died. –Jenn Pelly
Listen: Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, “Orphans”
Bauhaus: “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” (1979)
The title of Bauhaus’ first single could easily be mistaken, in retrospect, for a knowing wink at a genre that often took itself way too seriously. But the UK group’s debut predated goth’s self-aware period by a number of years, and there’s nothing campy about it. At nearly 10 minutes long, “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” feels more like some kind of ritual than it does a mere song, in the conventional sense of the word; there’s more than a minute of pulse and swirl before the first actual note—a glowering bass pluck, a tentative stab at the song’s descending progression—is even heard. The structure has more in common with dub and krautrock than it does punk rock or new wave.
But then, of course, there are Peter Murphy’s absolutely absurd baritone meditations to contend with—on virginal brides, black capes, tombs, bats, bell towers, blood running in “red velvet lines,” and a B-movie Count Dracula that died in 1956, long before most actual goths were even born. It’s a virtual Mad Libs of doom-besotted iconography. It’d be enough to make you weep with laughter, if Murphy and his bandmates didn’t sell it all with such total conviction. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Bauhaus, “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”
The Cure: “A Forest” (1980)
Goth is synonymous with excess—too much echo, too much feeling, too much eyeliner. But “A Forest,” off 1980’s spellbinding Seventeen Seconds, is a masterpiece of minimalism. It is a world away from so many of the band’s other signature efforts: the spiky, sprightly post-punk of Boys Don’t Cry, the druggy dolor of Pornography, the rococo swirl of Disintegration. Composed around a four-note synth part, with bass and guitar counterpoints twirling like vines, it follows a steady motorik groove that’s evocative of train travel; the reverb on the snare feels like it’s going backward and forward at the same time, which only adds to the sense that it could go on forever (a goal they would inch closer to, a year later, with the nearly 30-minute “Carnage Visors”). Deliciously repetitive, “A Forest” stretches from horizon to horizon, bleak as winter branches against a dull grey sky. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: The Cure, “A Forest”
Joy Division: “Love Will Tear Us Apart” (1980)
Britain’s establishment received the first post-punk and industrial bands as a dismal omen: “wreckers of civilization,” as one Conservative MP helpfully described Throbbing Gristle. Aside from their flirtations with Nazi imagery, Joy Division never gloried in destruction that way. Ian Curtis’ lyrics were often painfully literary, austere, and existential, yet the band’s sense of rhythm gives purpose to their awkwardness. The producer Martin Hannett created expressionist landscapes for Curtis’ voice to sleepwalk through, a world of shadowy hollows. Here, the apocalypse had already happened
Joy Division were fans of the sci-fi author J. G. Ballard, and “Love Will Tear Us Apart” suggests a constant theme in his writing: how environments shape human behavior. The bleakness here is contained between two people, as Curtis sings, “Why is the bedroom so cold? You turn away on your side.” There’s no anger to the words, no cries of sorrow. The chorus arrives with resigned detachment. Few other songs describe the black of depression so directly, let alone are ones you can dance to. –Chris Randle
Listen: Joy Division, “Love Will Tear Us Apart”
The Birthday Party: “Release the Bats” (1981)
London’s Batcave club plays the same quasi-mythical role in the origins of goth that CBGB does for punk and the Loft does for dance music—a place where likeminded artists came together to form an aesthetic revolution. Nick Cave and the Birthday Party were Batcave regulars, but even by the club’s standards, they stood out from the crowd: a bunch of Australians who carried themselves with half-rock-star swagger, half-zombie shuffle and seemed legitimately as nihilistic as the music they made. Like a number of future goth anthems, “Release the Bats” was intended at least partially as self-parody, but, as so often happens, the band’s caricature of themselves only highlighted their greatest strengths: the lacerating guitar assault, Cave’s unhinged but weirdly charismatic shrieking, and a chaotic energy that makes the listener feel in actual danger of having a swarm of bats set loose on them. –Miles Raymer
Listen: The Birthday Party, “Release the Bats”
Siouxsie and the Banshees: “Spellbound” (1981)
Without Siouxsie Sioux, goth might never have taken root. Her fright-wigged silhouette remains its most visible embodiment, her album covers a Rosetta Stone to the genre’s symbolic lexicon of ankhs and Cleopatra eyes and art nouveau typography. Siouxsie and the Banshees delineated goth’s musical and thematic frontiers, beginning with their debut album’s scraped-metal dissonance and extending through torch songs, 1960s-soaked acid flashbacks, and, yes, an occasionally tone-deaf approach to racial politics. (With the shockingly enduring “Cities in Dust,” they even anticipated the History Channel’s entire M.O.)
“Spellbound,” from 1981’s Juju, finds the band at the peak of their powers—thanks in no small part to guitarist John McGeoch, who would be gone from the group within a year. First, his phased and flanged electric lead sets the otherworldly tone; then his almost-frantic acoustic strumming fleshes out the song’s nether regions. Everything seems to shimmer, the chords’ outlines as hazy as a mirage, as Sioux bellows her way through a tale as ominous (“Take them by the legs/And throw them down the stairs”) as it is entrancing. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Siouxsie and the Banshees, “Spellbound”
Soft Cell: “Tainted Love” (1981)
You really couldn’t call Soft Cell textbook goth; sonically, the duo of Marc Almond and Dave Ball had more in common with early-’80s synth-pop contemporaries like Depeche Mode and the Human League. However, the label they called home, Some Bizzare, had a distinctly shadowy bent: Among their labelmates were the industrially tinged acts Psychic TV, Einstürzende Neubauten, and Cabaret Voltaire. (And surely it must count for something that the first time Almond tried MDMA, the drug that would reportedly fuel the recording of the duo’s debut album, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, the Cure’s Faith was on the stereo.)
In any case, at least in the U.S., the all-ages dance clubs where goth found its mid-’80s foothold are unthinkable without “Tainted Love,” the duo’s cover of an old Gloria Jones track. In its theatrical dimensions, goth provided many teens a safe space to experiment with all manner of role-playing and gender-bending, and there was no drama coach quite like Almond. There’s a dark desperation in his delivery that isn’t too far off from goth’s overripe, decadent urges—it’s a song, after all, about a stain. Unlike other synth-poppers, Soft Cell were interested in neither flash nor perfection: Almond’s faltering voice drips like tear-stained mascara, while the song’s signature bloop might have been the complaint of an agonized robot. The duo’s take on the torch song was a kind of camp, but it was negative camp—tragedy instead of farce. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Soft Cell, “Tainted Love”
Cocteau Twins: “Blood Bitch” (1982)
On the first track of Cocteau Twins’ debut album, Garlands, Elizabeth Fraser wields her vibrato like a buzzsaw. Against Robin Guthrie’s squalls of guitar and Will Heggie’s minimal, throaty bassline, Fraser sets the mood for what would become her long career of vocalizations made more sinister by their indecipherability. It’s strange to listen to “Blood Bitch” and imagine that she’d one day feature on a song that would become the theme to “House,” of all shows, but it makes sense in a way: Fraser always sang just out of frame, like the narrator of a horror story. What lyrics do come through on “Blood Bitch” only deepen the song’s sense of the occult: There’s an altar, a blood woman, a well of female range. In 2016, Norwegian artist Jenny Hval would name her own exploration of menstruation and vampires after this song; in their introduction to the world, Cocteau Twins opened a wound that’s still not ready to close. –Sasha Geffen
Listen: Cocteau Twins, “Blood Bitch”
The Sisters of Mercy: “Temple of Love” (1983)
In the 1980s, any alternative rock fan could dabble in the Cure and Joy Division, but the Sisters of Mercy appealed to serious goths and serious goths only. Andrew Eldritch’s long-running project could have enticed more mainstream fans if they hadn’t relied on unambiguously synthetic drums, or if Eldritch had ever decided to dial back that theatrical, sometimes flat-out hammy and bombastic croon. But those qualities, along with Eldritch’s stubborn refusal to tone them down, are what made them goth icons.
“Temple of Love” is one of many Sisters tracks with a hook big enough to thrive on mainstream radio, but it’s too cavernously dark, too dissonant, and—thanks to Eldritch’s ghoulish baritone—just too goth for the wider world. That glorious, defiant weirdness ensured that the song would remain a prize reserved for those in the know. –Miles Raymer
Listen: The Sisters of Mercy, “Temple of Love”
This Mortal Coil: “Song to the Siren” (1983)
By any metric, This Mortal Coil were an unusual proposition: a supergroup composed of members of the 4AD roster, spearheaded by label founder and producer Ivo Watts-Russell, tackling covers of songs by the power-pop legends Big Star and the folksinger Roy Harper (among others). Despite the decidedly non-gothic provenance of the songs they performed, there was no mistaking the atmospheres they conjured using gloomy strings, dolorous baritone voices, and never-ending reverb. One song above all stood out in their dirgelike catalog: a cover of Tim Buckley and Larry Beckett’s “Song to the Siren,” which Buckley recorded for his 1970 album Starsailor.
Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser sings This Mortal Coil’s version, and it is devastating. Clean-toned electric guitar, gentle processing, and subtle vocal multi-tracking provide the woozy backdrop for Fraser’s voice, agile as a barnswallow; she circles the root note as though drawn to it by gravity. Metaphors of surf and sailors pass by almost unnoticed, tossed aside by the magnetism of her voice, until she zeroes in on the crux of it all: “Here I am, here I am, waiting to hold you.” Just as the climax is reached, it all goes silent, as though pulled under by the waves. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: This Mortal Coil, “Song to the Siren”
Misfits: “Die, Die My Darling” (1984)
It’s up for debate whether the Misfits could ever be considered truly goth. Their sound—fast, loud, often melodic, and frequently brutal—is a textbook example of punk and hardcore. On songs like “Some Kinda Hate,” Glenn Danzig could sound as much like a 1950s crooner as anything, and the band never displayed the atmospheric qualities that distinguished so much goth. But goth and punk often went hand in hand, particularly in the case of Southern California’s “deathrock”—a sound enshrined in the classic 1981 compilation Hell Comes to Your House, where straight-up punks like Social Distortion and Redd Kross rubbed elbows with proto-goths like 45 Grave and Christian Death.
So it’s worth considering the ways that the Misfits were at least tangentially related to goth. Their winking embrace of schlock stood at some remove from goth’s generally somber self-seriousness—but then, there were plenty of card-carrying goths (Batcave faves Alien Sex Fiend, say) who were just as enamored of camp. The Misfits could go toe-for-toe with the most occult-obsessed merchants of gloom. “Die, Die My Darling,” off their 1984 EP of the same name, is probably their gothiest effort, from the morbid lyrics (“Your future’s in an oblong box, yeah”) to the grandiose sound—the ringing guitars, the ostinato squeal that unfurls like a red velvet cloak. Put aside those genre distinctions, and the song also turns out to be something much simpler: a classic murder ballad, as deeply American as Elvis—the missing link between Johnny Cash and Sisters of Mercy. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Misfits, “Die, Die My Darling”
Clan of Xymox: “A Day” (1985)
4AD’s goth cred is forever set in stone: Bauhaus’ “Dark Entries” was among the label’s first releases, after all, and through the mid 1980s, the label was a failsafe purveyor of the artier, less schlocky end of the gloom canon. The Dutch group Clan of Xymox came to 4AD via Dead Can Dance, who had invited them out as tour openers, and they cemented their legacy on the imprint with “Muscoviet Mosquito,” their cut on 1987’s landmark Lonely Is an Eyesore compilation. With their self-titled debut, they carved out a unique sound, sleeker and more danceable than the majority of their contemporaries’ output.
“A Day,” the opening song on that album, flutters nervously in the space between goth, new wave, and what would soon become techno. (Anticipating the latter, engineer John Fryer even delivered a percussive, nine-minute remix of the song, which was produced by 4AD honcho Ivo Watts-Russell.) As pick-slides shriek like angry seagulls, the track’s atmospheric dimensions are fleshed out by shuddering synth arpeggios and soaring guitar leads. Singer Ronny Mooring’s woozy baritone wail really tips the song over the edge, turning its high-velocity darkwave oily and lugubrious. The song offers thrilling proof that dancing and moping need not be mutually exclusive. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Clan of Xymox, “A Day”
Killing Joke: “Love Like Blood” (1985)
By the time they released their fifth album, Night Time, Killing Joke had birthed a new strain of vocal pop within brooding, riff-heavy arrangements. The single “Love Like Blood” was an honest-to-God radio hit, one that felt further than ever from the UK band’s abrasive roots. Though their original DNA still shines through in chugging power chords and nervous, hi-hat-heavy drums—not to mention a lyrical concern with mortality and violence—“Love Like Blood” edges closer than ever to the dark appeal of Echo & the Bunnymen and Siouxsie and the Banshees. It's a far cry from the “ambient technohorror” that critic Robert Christgau complained about while reviewing the band’s 1981 album, What’s This For...!, which is not to say “Love Like Blood” lacks in terror. Quite the opposite, in fact: The band had refined a new kind of horror, one that grabs listeners by the ear and sticks around for awhile. –Sasha Geffen
Listen: Killing Joke, “Love Like Blood”
Coil: “The Anal Staircase” (1986)
Horse Rotorvator was the second album from the British industrial legends Coil, the project of Throbbing Gristle founding member Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson and his then-lover, the artist John Balance. It begins with “The Anal Staircase,” an instantly disorienting collage of rattling metal and a child’s laughter; it swirls open like a bat flitting out of a cave and into a club full of dry ice. “The Anal Staircase” samples Stravinsky’s controversial Rite of Spring and (as others have noted) is a dizzying pop song about anal sex.
In the mid-1980s, Sleazy and Balance were watching AIDS ravage their community: “Our friends were beginning to die,” Sleazy told Alternative Press. “The Anal Staircase” is a reminder that, in goth’s most powerful works, its fixation on the moribund is far from theater. It is a means of dealing with the edge of life and death. –Jenn Pelly
Listen: Coil, “The Anal Staircase”
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: “The Mercy Seat” (1988)
For a singer-poet like Nick Cave, the appeal of narrating a death row inmate’s inner monologue comes from what the character can illuminate in the narrator. In “The Mercy Seat,” Cave uses his “nearly wholly innocent” murderer as a vehicle in which to exclaim “I’m not afraid to die!” over and over as his band churns behind him, like walls closing in. The repeated lyrics, the slashes of violin, and the militaristic drums all bring the electric chair closer with each measure.
“The Mercy Seat” isn’t Cave’s favorite song from his vast and dark discography—in a recent interview with GQ, he confessed he “was surprised that people went for it the way they did”—but it remains a staple of the Bad Seeds’ live show, in which he sings it like a fire-and-brimstone preacher in the Baptist South. To sound like both the sinner and the hell that awaits him, as Cave does here, is his signature gift as a vocalist. –Sasha Geffen
Listen: Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, “The Mercy Seat”
Diamanda Galás: “Let My People Go” (1988)
For decades, Diamanda Galás has used her primal scream as a rallying cry. Trained in classical and jazz, with an extreme multi-octave range, the avant-garde icon began performing solo in the late 1970s, dressed in black and with her back turned to the audience. “My voice was given to me as an instrument of inspiration for my friends and a tool in the torture and destruction of my enemies,” Galás said in the 1991 book Angry Women.
“Let My People Go,” from Galás’ fifth album, You Must Be Certain of the Devil, is especially harrowing. In an unusual turn towards conventional pop structure—a jarring contrast to her more abrasive extended vocal techniques—Galás pounds on a piano and, within her quavering defiance, comes off like a bluesy jazz singer. But Galás’ version of “Let My People Go”—a cover of a black spiritual that has been recorded since the Civil War—is inextricable from 1980s New York. By this point, Galás had turned most of her music into activism for AIDS awareness, and was a member of ACT UP. When she sings, “I go to sleep each evening now/Dreaming of the grave/I see the friends I used to know/Calling out my name,” it is rooted in the cold realism of the AIDS epidemic and all the lives around Galás that it claimed. –Jenn Pelly
Listen: Diamanda Galás, “Let My People Go”
Dead Can Dance: “The Host of Seraphim” (1988)
In its first few years of existence, “goth” as a musical term referred to a certain kind of post-punk that leaned extra-heavily on dramatic atmosphere. By the time Dead Can Dance released their breakthrough track, “The Host of Seraphim,” the genre had begun to show off its flexibility, spreading to cover everything from eccentric synthpop to hard rock. The Australian-born duo weren’t the first group to try adding ambient music to the mix, or to explore the burgeoning world music movement; goth musicians had been dabbling in Middle Eastern progressions and Jamaican dub since the start. But “The Host of Seraphim” brought together these disparate influences in a way that felt not only natural but almost inevitable.
The slowly shifting synth pads, blooms of rolling-thunder drums, and vocalist Lisa Gerrard’s chant-like vocals have an otherworldly magnificence; the effect is like a scene in a movie where someone wandering in a barren desert stumbles upon a massive statue of alien provenance. Dead Can Dance’s talent for conjuring an exotic energy has given the duo a second life as a regular presence on film scores, and “The Host of Seraphim”–style slow-motion grandeur has become the go-to sound for directors looking to set an unearthly mood. –Miles Raymer
Listen: Dead Can Dance, “The Host of Seraphim”
Depeche Mode: “Personal Jesus” (1989)
In a 1990 SPIN profile of Depeche Mode, guitarist/songwriter Martin Gore explained that “Personal Jesus” was inspired by Priscilla Presley’s adoration of Elvis. “We play these godlike parts for people but no one is perfect,” he said, “and that’s not a very balanced view of someone, is it?” No wonder Johnny Cash and Marilyn Manson have both covered the song. With those deceptively simple blues chords, the song can sound perverse at first, amid the fluorescent darkness of Violator—until Dave Gahan sings like an animatronic Elvis, all sneer and no moue, with an echo like an afterimage. The coda is nearly wordless, just pistoning drums and the synth notes looming behind them, as if the narrator is mocking the listener’s expectations before they’re even aware of them. Using religious yearning to describe base desires, Depeche Mode twist the bonds of faith into a leather choker. –Chris Randle
Listen: Depeche Mode, “Personal Jesus”
Nine Inch Nails: “Head Like a Hole” (1989)
Goths and industrial music fans can be hard for the non-initiated to tell apart, especially considering their shared love of extreme hairstyles and harsh yet surprisingly club-friendly beats. But amid the all-black wardrobes of the 1980s and 1990s, the industrial contingent often looked down on goths as effete and insufficiently edgy, while many goths considered the industrial scene a breeding ground for quasi-fascist bullies.
Trent Reznor was one artist who could unite both sides. Nine Inch Nails’ hit second single, “Head Like a Hole,” is a pummeling sonic assault, with instrumentation that begs for comparison to construction tools. But behind all that, Trent Reznor has more in common lyrically with frilly gothic swooners than his industrial contemporaries; while they were screaming about vivisection and genocide, he was compulsively dissecting failed romances like the Robert Smith superfan that he is. Reznor claims he doesn’t remember what the song’s lyrics are about (and that he wrote the whole thing in 15 minutes), but the verses that vaguely allude to capitalistic oppression are much less believable than the choruses about submission, which feel less like political polemic than some kind of heavy emotional kink play. –Miles Raymer
Listen: Nine Inch Nails, “Head Like a Hole”
Swans: “Failure” (1991)
After releasing their largely unloved major-label effort The Burning World, Swans continued moving away from the blunt force of their early music in pursuit of something more elusive. The noise turned to melody, bellowing to singing, never adopting conventional pop structure. “Failure,” from 1991’s White Light From the Mouth of Infinity, is a dark apex of this period.
With its buried strumming and pale synthesizer tones, “Failure” shapes Michael Gira’s drawl into hypnotic spirals: “And I, I’ve been lonely/And I, I’ve been blind/And I, I’ve learned nothing/So my hands are firmly tied.” Jarboe’s backing vocals float through the music as a ghostly presence, adding to the ambience. Though White Light From the Mouth of Infinity looks towards transcendence, that’s entirely absent here; the song’s beauty is a sublime mirage. Swans play this desperation almost as comedy, Gira a dour cartoon character muttering to no one in particular, “I can’t even elegantly bleed.” The words land like a bitter, ugly laugh. –Chris Randle
Listen: Swans, “Failure”
Jarboe: “Lavender Girl” (1995)
As a core member of Swans from 1985 to 1998, Jarboe knows what it means to create sonic horror. (After hearing the band’s Filth while living in Atlanta in her late twenties, she moved to New York and compelled them to let her join.) But sometimes, the heaviest and most ghastly music is lighter in form than expected: On the opening track of her second studio album, Sacrificial Cake, she sings in exquisite whispers that curl like smoke, both embodying and conquering the unknown with a plainspoken vulnerability. She could be touring the shelves of her local occult boutique: “There’s patchouli, Spanish blossom, Frankincense, and rose/I’m lavender, lavender.” Or perhaps she is readying herself to cast a spell, to conduct a séance. “Lavender Girl” is a nonlinear ode to what has become the most omnipresent fragrance in aromatherapy—one that embodies the feminine and also a bracing ease, a calm within the storm of existence. Music is rarely more mystical than this. –Jenn Pelly
Listen: Jarboe, “Lavender Girl”
Type O Negative: “Love You to Death” (1996)
The strategic piano, the writhing self-abjection, the hundred candles burning: Type O Negative wrote a power ballad for goths, smudging black over the red lipstick. Peter Steele’s cries of “I am your servant/May I light your cigarette?” can be thought of as a counterpart to “I wanna fuck you like an animal,” fetishistic metal in its purplest form.
One can hardly be a goth if you’re afraid of looking ridiculous, though, and “Love You to Death” is up there with “Sheena’s in a Goth Gang” by the Cramps in its embrace of the caricature. It doesn’t hurt that Steele occasionally enunciates like Celine Dion. And what’s more gothic than melodrama, the medium of grand ruins, of lamps snuffed out, of emotions long buried? –Chris Randle
Listen: Type O Negative, “Love You to Death”
My Chemical Romance: “Helena” (2004)
In the music video for “Helena,” which is pretty much “November Rain” to those of us reared on The Sandman, black-clad mourners dance across the floor of a church, flinging themselves against the coffin with stylized woe. The song itself moves from funereal poise to unbound abandon; Gerard Way whispers the opening as an incantation, cymbals building to kickdrums behind him, until his dramatic vocal sheds all ceremony. As each chorus slows down again, the strange dynamics reveal themselves: “Helena” is a ballad sung at manic speed.
People still make fun of mall-goth bands, sometimes affectionately, but they scrambled together punk, emo, and industrial into sensational carnivals and introduced them to new audiences. My Chemical Romance led the charge with sneaky subversion. At the end of “Helena”’s breakdown, Way emerges from a pyre of feedback and distortion; his voice shifts into radiance. It’s a true transfiguration. –Chris Randle
Listen: My Chemical Romance, “Helena”
Fever Ray: “If I Had a Heart” (2009)
The opening track from Karin Dreijer’s debut solo album is so menacing, it was used as the theme song to a History Channel series called Vikings. Here, the former member of the Knife unpacks a minimalist churn that is foreboding in every sense. Recalling the slow throb of Suicide, “If I Had a Heart” wrenchingly evokes the feeling that something bad is on the horizon, to the point that it feels like pure relief when it ends. It is gloomy, barren, and incredibly naturalistic—the sound of impending apocalypse. Therein lies its current of dread: History, after all, repeats itself, and “If I Had a Heart” predicts future darkness. –Jenn Pelly
Listen: Fever Ray, “If I Had a Heart”
SALEM: “King Night” (2010)
The stereotype of goth culture as a refuge for delicate Anne Rice devotees isn’t entirely undeserved, but goth was also the inheritor of punk’s most provocative tendencies—as evidenced by the popularity of bands with names like Sex Gang Children and Christian Death. For the witch house progenitors SALEM, provocation seemed to be, if not their primary goal, then at least one very close to the top of the list. They offered critics a veritable feast of reasons to hate them, from their music’s impenetrable sonic murk to their unrepentant dickishness when accused of cultural appropriation. For a stretch in the late Aughts, they were probably the most reviled band this side of Nickelback.
But SALEM’s antagonistic nihilism and lo-fi occult aesthetic were a breath of dank cemetery air for goths who’d spent the past decade watching their culture devolve into nü-metal fandom and Emily the Strange merch. And tracks like the soaring “King Night,” the title track of their sole LP, connect the dots between a startlingly broad range of influences, from Cocteau Twins and post-electroclash synthpop to chopped-and-screwed Houston hip-hop and European classical. The combination could seem intentionally perverse, but “King Night”’s collision of a rave-ready bassline, slow-roll beats, and bombastic choir reaches a level of stygian majesty worthy of its title. –Miles Raymer
Listen: SALEM, “King Night”
Zola Jesus: “Night” (2010)
For all its morbid fascinations, goth has always boasted a strong libido, too. On her breakthrough single, “Night,” Zola Jesus trots out all the sensuality of smeared eyeliner at the end of a long, sweaty evening, like Depeche Mode and the Cure before her. Behind her bugle of a voice, a bass drum strobes and synth strings float like a miasma.
In her lyrics, Jesus blurs the line between lying down to fuck and lying down to die: She’s beckoning from her “bed of stones,” inviting her lover to “rest [their] bones.” The way her voice echoes, it’s almost like she’s singing from beyond the veil already, luring her next victim to the grave. But who says the grave isn’t a perfectly good place to get it on? Whether it's describing a tryst in this life or the next one, “Night” strikes a perfect balance between the macabre and the erotic, finding the ample common ground between the two. –Sasha Geffen
Listen: Zola Jesus, “Night”
Jenny Hval: “Female Vampire” (2016)
Formlessness is horrifying—an embodiment of the unknown. “Female Vampire,” a highlight from pop avant-gardist Jenny Hval’s album Blood Bitch, has no clear beginning or end, no defined shape. It throbs and floats like a ghost in the room, like a creeping specter, with the slink and swing of a fantastic black cape. (In this sense, “Female Vampire” has a precedent in Jarboe’s “Lavender Girl.”) On an album that rooted its gothic disposition not only in blood but in the sad political and technological realities of our time, “Female Vampire” stood out; its terror was felt. It is crucial evidence of a contemporary—and, especially, feminine—iteration of goth. –Jenn Pelly
Listen: Jenny Hval, “Female Vampire”
Contributors: Sasha Geffen, Jenn Pelly, Chris Randle, Miles Raymer, Ryan Schreiber, Philip Sherburne
