No. 20 - Stranger and Lovers, Stranger and Lovers (2019)

(Over a series of twenty short posts – one per week for the remaining weeks of this decade – I have aiming to highlight in vaguely chronological order some of the most important and influential releases in the goth/post-punk/darkwave genre of the 2010’s. This is the final post in the regular series).

When planning out the twenty releases to feature in this countdown of the top twenty most important darkwave/goth/post-punk albums of the 2010’s, I reserved this final slot for an album from this final year, but such has been the quality of new music in 2019 that I ended up starting to write about four very different acts before finally settling on the wonderfully atmospheric gothic darkwave of Mexico band Stranger and Lovers.

My initial choice was the Dutch band Red Velvet Deception, a duo whom I somewhat unkindly christened “The Goth Proclaimers”, who followed up the immense promise of their 2016 track So Low with a wonderfully tight LP Like Rain in June of this year. Taking elements from the more commercial end of the 80’s underground (The Cure, New Order) and adding a driving rhythm section of drum machine and insistent bass lines intertwining telepathically with reverberating guitar riffs in the style of Second Still, Like Rain featured a really strong set of songs led by catchy single Serpent. Band members Arjen Zomers and Roy Orbon also innovatively streamed their rehearsals live on YouTube, allowing fans all over the world the pseudo- experience of enjoying their songs played live. Like Rain is certain to feature on many “best of the year” lists over the next month or so, which should help to raise the profile of this high quality release.

A second candidate for my final pick of the year was August’s Chinese Voodoo Dolls, the latest album by scene veterans Der Himmel uber Berlin, a Trieste band which boasts one of the scene’s most innovative guitarists, Davide Simeone. Usually lumped in the “deathrock” category due to Simeone’s unusually angular chord progressions and the claustrophobic atmosphere their songs generate, DHuB have developed over the decade into one of the scene’s most consistently exciting bands, with their last two albums (2017’s Amnesia as well as Chinese Voodoo Dolls) gaining wider prominence having been released on the influential Unknown Pleasures label.

Far from running out of ideas, Chinese Voodoo Dolls showcases Simeone at his thrilling best on a series of songs which take the listener on a breathless ride through the darkest shadows of the gothic genre whilst never too far away from the spirit of punk. The hard-gigging band supported the release with a series of compelling videos, such as this one for Dead Bodies Everywhere, which capture some of the anarchic spirit of their live shows.

September saw the release of a third album which briefly looked like securing the final slot on this rundown of the decade, with Antipole’s sophomore effort Radial Glare. Antipole is the project of Trondheim-based artist Karl Morten Dahl who has created a sumptuous feast of an album, with eleven varied songs built around his trademark heavily reverb-ed staccato guitar riffs redolent of vintage The Cure over a dreamlike coldwave backbeat with low key vocals provided by Paris Alexander, Marc Lewis and Eirene. Anyone wanting to unwind and let an album envelope them (in the same way as a vintage Cocteau Twins or Dead Can Dance LP did) could do a lot worse than succumb to the charms of Radial Glare. In thirty years’ time people will rediscover Antipole in the same way that the likes of The Sound and The Chameleons have belatedly gained the recognition which they deserved all along.

But ultimately I’m still an old goth at heart - well, all over to be honest -  and the eponymous debut album from Mexico’s Stranger and Lovers, released on cassette only earlier this month, got my shoulders shimmying and finally won the day. The band is the latest project from Dave Noise, previously guitarist in The Exils and The Sisters Ray, who played a strand of dark shoegaze spacerock, but the new band have a wonderfully full post-punk sound that neatly sums up the best of the past decade.

The band’s songs have been drip-fed via YouTube during the year, with debut video Masochistic Love starting with a haunting riff reminiscent of Lebanon Hanover’s Gallow Dance before the song structure modulates in a style familiar to fans of She Past Away, with a lugubrious vocal adding an air of dark menace. The next release, Black Beach had more of a film noir feel, with a distinct Ritual Howls dark twang feel, although the vocal on this track bares a distinct resemblance to Sonsombre’s Brandon Pybus, although the overall impact was just as powerful as on the debut track.

It was the third track which was released in September, Juliette, which confirmed that Stranger and Lovers would be my new favourite band. Again the introduction successfully works in the same area as She Past Away, but with a stronger, deeper and more evocative vocal, and there are some great chord modulations particularly going from the bridge into the chorus, and as with Masochistic Love there were also very welcome vibes of both The Sisters of Mercy and Red Lorry Yellow Lorry.

Further broadening their musical horizons, the next single Dark Line released in early October went right back to the vampiric slow-burning delight’s of Bela Lugosi’s Dead, a tribute to Mexico’s first silver-screen vampire, German Robles. With Nephilimistic arpeggios over a simple coldwave synth bass motif and another echoing meandering vocal, Dark Line was another resounding success and whetted the appetite for what was to follow later that month.

Death Song, with its heavy musical debt to The Sisters of Mercy’s Alice was an instant success, clocking up nearly two hundred thousand views  through the Darko: Post-punker FB page alone, more than some of the bands featured in this countdown have garnered in their entire careers. Although the debut album is so far only available for sale by cassette to personal callers only (!), the band have licensed the main five tracks to Spotify with other platforms to follow.

Mexico has long had a vibrant gothic scene, and anyone who has seen footage of gigs by bands like The Sisters of Mercy there will have been impressed by the sheer enthusiasm of the sizeable audience for the band’s performance. It is therefore only fitting that the capital city should now boast the band most likely to become one of the biggest in the genre as the healthy scene looks ahead to the start of its fifth decade.

No. 19 - Divergence, Ground Nero (2019)

(Over a series of twenty short posts – one per week for the remaining weeks of this decade – I am aiming to highlight in vaguely chronological order some of the most important and influential releases in the goth/post-punk/darkwave genre of the 2010’s).

It is often said that the early post-punk music grew out of Britain’s industrial decline, a way for frustrated young people to deal with the sudden decline in the mining and textile industries that had brought prosperity to the North of England for nearly two centuries. Whilst the still-busy forges of the West Midlands had literally given rise to heavy metal (via Black Sabbath and Judas Priest), the goth scene emerged from the counties whose landscapes had been transformed by the rise and fall of the England’s “dark satanic mills”. Andrew Eldritch himself was frequently quoted as referring to “the M62 sound” of the guitar bands from towns and cities along the East-West motorway that runs from Hull to Liverpool via the likes of Leeds, Bradford, and Manchester, all characterised by a slight melancholy that reflected their decaying surroundings. In the same interviews, Eldritch would often extol the virtues of Fleming-speaking Belgium, where his own band had early notable success (which continues to this day), and the industrial landscapes of Limburg, the province that borders the Ruhr saw a contemporaneous rise in post-punk bands in the early 1980’s. 

The Neon Judgement’s Factory Walk is an early industrial classic, and bands like Aroma di Amore, Front 242 and Portrait Bizarre were at the forefront of what became the darkwave, EBM and coldwave movements respectively. The latter band featured Gwijde Wampers on vocals, although his contribution to that band is almost unrecognisable in his current band Ground Nero, which formed in the second half of the current decade with the aim of “creating 80’s gothic darkwave, making use of modern sound tech, re-staging it with “wall-of-sound” arrangements.”

As a veteran of reading band press releases, I took this description with a pinch of salt until I heard the track Dark Descent from the debut EP Beyond released at the end of 2016, being instantly mesmerised by the afore-mentioned dark atmospheric “wall of sound”. Here was a group of musicians steeped in and respectful of the history of the genre yet able to create a fresh new take on the classic gothic sounds of bombastic swirling keyboards, descending basslines, snatched samples of political speeches (very F242!), guttural baritone vocals and a guitar sound so broad, deep and varied that only Killing Joke’s Geordie sprang to mind by way of comparison.

Other tracks on the debut release had a similarly full sound (so much so that the band gave the engineer equal billing in the list of band members), with lead track Run From Your Relatives being picked up by goth DJs around the world and helping to spread the band’s fame amongst the darkwave community, a phenomenon which was given a significant boost when Oskar Terrormortis came across the EP and arranged a physical release on Gothic Rock records.

A change of label to legendary German imprint Danse Macabre saw the band release a second EP, Scales in early 2018 which saw a development in the band’s sound. Bannockburn introduced a slower pace and a more angular guitar sound, but Plethora was the stand-out track, with a sequenced bass-line, reverb-drenched picked coldwave guitar riff, typically lugubrious vocal and a big chorus that was strangely reminiscent of Sons and Fascination/Sister Feelings Call-era Simple Minds.

Buoyed by a hugely positive critical response, the band returned to the studio to record their first LP, Divergence, which was released in the Spring of 2019 and has certainly been one of the stand-out albums of the year for me. The sheer versatility of Peter Smeets’ guitar playing, from industrial chugging through Pink Floyd solos to KJ-esque modulated arpeggios, provides real variety in the songs across the darkwave genre, with the insistent drum-machine beat and regimented bassline from Peter Philtjens underpinning the sound. So many bands operating in this area fall down on the vocal front, but although his delivery can occasionally be a little pitchy, Gwijde Wampers is a charismatic frontman whose back-of-the-throat baritone has often been compared to Ian Curtis, both a reference point and a highly revered figure in this genre, and his clear and confident delivery of lyrics which serve as a clarion call for the current state of capitalist human society at the crossroads help to elevate this album further above the competition.

Heaven Sent and Divergence are probably the stand-out tracks in terms of immediacy and alternative dancefloor potential, whereas the angular Savannah and the in-you-face bombast of Alacrity have a harder edge and showcase Smeets’ talent to the full. With Wampers’ spookier delivery lending They Knew a more aggressively dystopian air and Jabez and Kitezh also drawn from a broader musical palette, Divergence is a tremendous LP from a band at the top of its game which showcases how much the post-punk genre has to offer as it passes its fortieth birthday.

Ground Nero’s work can be heard and ordered via their Bandcamp site.

No. 18 - The Veils of Ending, Sonsombre (2019)

It’s hard to believe that it’s only just over a year since Brandon Pybus launched his Sonsombre project on Bandcamp, as a mere fourteen months later the band is already rightly at the very forefront of the renascent gothic movement. With his long black frock coat, shades and preacher/state trooper hat, the unapologetically goth Pybus is every inch the reincarnation of a first generation goth poster boy, and with two memorable albums already released with a third imminent, not to mention a further excellent set of songs recorded with Chronic Twilight’s Michael Louis under the moniker Shadow Assembly, he is by far the most prolific artist in a genre dogged by musicians and lyricists suffering from permanent creative block – by way of contrast, Pybus’ heroes Carl McCoy and Andrew Eldritch have recorded and released precisely one new song (Fields of The Nephilim’s Prophecy) between them this decade!

That is not to say in any way that Sonsombre (which is French for "darksound") lacks quality control, with both albums packed full of well-crafted and well-executed songs which reveal that Pybus not only takes musical inspiration from the first generation of goth rock acts in the late 1980’s but also from second wavers like The Wake and Nosferatu and indeed the wall-of-sound acoustics of fellow third wavers Ground Nero. Add to that an appreciation of song and chord structure and dynamics from his long-term dabblings in black/viking metal bands, two of which had also released a brace of albums (each!!) in 2018, and you have a work-rate and sense of musical appreciation that even the late great Prince would have found hard to beat.

As a long-term student and admirer of the genre, it should have come as little surprise that his first recorded goth rock efforts should be so well-formed, and from the first notes of the organ introduction to the explosive opening track (Nocturnal) on Sonsombre’s debut album A Funeral for The Sun, it was clear that this was a project of high musical and lyrical quality and intensity. Nocturnal revealed Pybus’ obsession with late 80’s goth rock pioneers Fields of the Nephilim, owing more than just an atmosphere to Dawnrazor opener Slow Kill (a track the Sonsombre has recorded but not yet released), with the bellowed chorus bearing all the melodramatic hallmarks of McCoy’s much-imitated vocal style, although few have managed to render it with the panache which Pybus effortlessly manages here.

Other tracks on the A Funeral for The Sun, which was effectively an accumulation of demos recorded over the previous two years, reveal a much broader musical palette, with the occasional nod to Pybus’ Virginian homeland, whether in the Cajun guitar on Should I Go On or the slide guitar in the deathrock-influenced A Dance By The Graves, alongside some more straight forward “rockers” which would have crossover appeal to closet metal (i.e. The Cult) fans.

Originally only a digital release, the album was immediately championed by the Finland-based boss of Post-Gothic Records, Oskar Terrormortis, who has done so much to promote bands in the genre over the decade, and was duly re-released on CD in January 2019 containing an extra track, In This Fog, which had a more complete production and which featured heavily on goth internet radio/podcast playlists at the start of the year.

Even before the album had sold out of its initial run of CDs, something of a rarity in the download/stream-for-free era, Pybus announced that he had already completed the follow-up, and the sophomore Sonsombre set The Veils of Ending was released in June to unsurprisingly unanimous acclaim. Still lyrically obsessed with familiar gothic themes (e.g. shadows, mirrors, death etc), songs such as The Future Is Black and Fear quickly made the transition to becoming staples at uber-cool goth club nights across the globe, whilst Between and Matte Black had chord structures and dynamics that would immediately appeal to new-content-starved fans of the genre’s godfathers, The Sisters of Mercy.

Latter tracks of the album such as Mirror, Mirror and Unfit for Ending showed a great feel for atmospherics, reminiscent of both genre-defining first generation acts like Bauhaus (Mask era) and cult second generation artists like Corpus Delicti (particularly their classic song The Lake), hinting at a further development of the Sonsombre sound, which will be possibly more apparent on the new album which, fittingly, will be released at the very start of the new decade on Cleopatra Records, the ultimate accolade for an artist who grew up obsessed with the Californian label’s releases over twenty years ago.

With Sonsombre now operating also as a live band garnering rave reviews for their early US shows and with top European gothic festivals aiming to sign the band up for 2020, Pybus’ prodigious workload will only increase, particularly given his notable success in engineering/mastering releases for the likes of Chronic Twilight and The Kentucky Vampires amongst others, but again it is the sheer quality of his work rather than the unusual quantity of it that impresses the most.

Pybus’ already legendary catchphrase, “Stay goth!” has certainly been a far easier status to maintain since he emerged onto the scene little more than a year ago, revitalising a love for power chords in a genre that had been increasingly dominated by artists using just a picked or arpeggio-ed guitar style (which Pybus also uses when appropriate). Sonsombre’s releases are available via Bandcamp and other outlets.

Those who love bands with a sound partially inspired by Fields of the Nephilim should also think of checking out current UK act Guillotine Dream, or earlier bands Dronning Maudland and Sweet Ermengarde.

No. 17 - Damage, Kill Shelter (2018)

If any project sums up the mutually supportive and appreciative darkwave community, it’s Kill Shelter, whose debut album Damage was released at the end of 2018 and soon sold out its initial CD run. The band is essentially the studio project of Scottish remixer Pete Burns, who over the past three years has also curated (along with Christian Schaefer) the highly influential Rule of Three blog on Facebook, which highlights in each edition (of which there are now more than fifty) three artists on the darkwave scene deserving of a wider audience.

Burns/Kill Shelter also became increasingly in demand as a remixer, and as a keen student of the genre he decided to put an album together that would not only showcase his own talents as writer, performer and producer, but also utilise his growing contacts book to produce a set of songs which is a veritable “Who’s who?” of some of the emerging artists of this third generation. Whilst each song featured Burns on sequenced synthesised bass and arpeggioed guitar, the lyrics and vocals on top of the multi-layered tracks were added by a multiplicity of artists all working in different strands of the "wave" genre.

The album's opening single In Decay drew universal praise and catapulted the project to the forefront of the post-punk zeitgeist, on the back of a sound that was reminiscent of The Sisters of Mercy in their mid/late 80’s heyday, yet very much rooted in modern studio technology. With a classic descending gothic bassline, a wonderfully icy guitar line from Antipole’s Karl Morten Dahl, and a great dark vocal from Delphine Coma’s Ashe Ruppe, In Decay was an update on the classic goth sound for a new generation, and like the album, the song featured on most “Best Of …” lists at the end of the year.

Those attracted to the album by the lead single were rewarded with a broad sweeping summary of the current scene, from coldwave to gothic rock. Fans of the latter would have been best served by No Regrets, featuring a chorus of Nephilimistic bombast belted out by guest vocalist undertheskin, whilst those with a more club-based background would have enjoyed the Alan Vega-esque beat of Get Down, featuring Cramps-style riffing from the golden age and a slightly detached crooned vocal by Canada’s The Shyness of Strangers (Vadim Christopher), whilst for many the undisputed highlight of the album was Bodies, replete with in-your-face distorted keyboard riffs as phat as The Prodigy’s on Invaders Must Die and the most wonderfully chilling one note vocal by Australia’ Buzz Kull (Marc Dwyer).

The sweaty masculinity of the above tracks was successfully counterpointed by more gentle, fragile coldwave tracks, such as Kiss Me Goodbye featuring French chanteuse Helene from Hante on vocals, or Sever, sung by New Haunts’ Alice Sheridan. Burns keeps the quality of songwriting and production high over the album, endowing it with more of a holistic feel than might be imagined when looking at the sheer variety in style of the guest vocalists on display.

Burns, who has a highly successful career in digital marketing as his day job, has returned the favour for many of the bands who helped out on Damage by subsequently remixing some of their new tracks, and has hinted that for the follow-up to Damage he will try to cast the net wider, with the debut’s success potentially opening doors to more ambitious collaborations with some of his musical heroes.

The mutually supportive and self-helping darkwave community has given the genre real resilience as the mainstream continues to be robustly indifferent to its ever increasing charms, but high quality projects like Kill Shelter’s Damage will surely help to pave the way to a brighter future for many of his collaborators.

Damage is still digitally available via this link.

No. 16 - Blood Lust/Eponymous LP, The Kentucky Vampires (2017/2018)

(Over a series of twenty short posts – one per week for the remaining weeks of this decade – I am aiming to highlight in vaguely chronological order some of the most important and influential releases in the goth/post-punk/darkwave genre of the 2010’s).

Goth. The G-word that dares not speak its name. Famously, he main high priests of the movement Andrew Eldritch, Robert Smith, Jaz Coleman and a myriad of others have always strenuously denied having anything to do with the much-maligned musical movement.

But recently, in the latter years of the current decade, all that has changed, with a plethora of artists mainly from the USA embracing the term “goth” and its associated sounds and imagery. These groups grew up venerating Nosferatu, The Wake and Type O Negative as much as Joy Division or the Banshees, and draw inspiration from both the genre’s ultra-creative birth and its more mature self-confident refinement to move the movement on a stage further in this third generation. One such band is The Kentucky Vampires, whose very name leaves no doubt as to their musical style, even discounting the bats and coffins which accompany their band logo on their album sleeves and tour t-shirts.

Any fears that the band may be just another clunky, faintly embarrassing pastiche of goth’s darkest delights are swiftly allayed with even a cursory listen to their music, which is a unique take on the genre. Built firmly around the rough-edged deathrock guitar of Zac Campbell and its interplay with the somewhat detached melodic vocal of Abbas Marler, the Vampires’ carefully-constructed songs revolve around suitably dark lyrical material whilst avoiding overly-cliched references or obvious subject matter.

Steeped therefore in the gothic musical traditions of the first and second waves, Campbell (who both composes the backing and plays all instruments) constructs songs with the simple complexity of a spider’s web, each goassamer thread shimmering and interconnecting to form an overall structure that is as strong as it is hauntingly beautiful. Central to each song is a driving bass-led rhythm section topped by a spooky buzzing guitar riff that evokes a misty graveyard at midnight, over which floats Marler’s confident, melancholic vocal line which owes as much to Morrisey and Stipe as it does to Steele and Eldritch.

Their instantly recognisable gloomy cinematic sound was first heard on the 2016 single Bitten, but the release which really began to spread their fame by word-of-mouth online was 2017’s mini-album Blood Lust which featured half a dozen songs which also formed the basis of the following year’s self-titled debut LP.

Lead track Spider and The Fly has not only a catchy melody but also a fascinating lyric which recounts bloodthirsty tale of 16^th century Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Bathory, famed for allegedly being responsible for the torture and death of hundreds of young women.

Tracks like Hex and Welcome To The Lot also featured the band’s signature sound, with Campbell’s heavily reverberated fuzzy riffs the perfect foil for Marler’s plaintive, almost folky vocal inflections, an irresistible package dripping with the creepy atmosphere of Hammer Horror films that shone through the slightly loose studio production.

Daughter of The Morning Star, the new feature song on the 2017 expanded version, also features a lyric about alleged female involvement in the occult in mediaeval Europe along another strong melody, this time about witchcraft in Italy, meaning that the songs go way beyond the usual “flickering flame in the mirror” goth tropes (not that there’s anything wrong with that, occasionally).

Unsurprisingly, on the back of the tremendous critical success of the debut LP, The Kentucky Vampires have recently signed with Secret Sin Records, home of Angels of Liberty amongst others, whose first act was to bring out a lime green vinyl edition of the album which is selling well.

A follow-up album is promised within the next couple of months, but in the meantime the band have just dropped a new EP Blood and Tears on Bandcamp, the first to feature new bassist Motuvius Rex, but with the equally important recruitment of Sonsombre’s Brandon Pybus on mixing duties, giving the new songs both extra sheen and extra power whilst retaining the band’s distinctive sound. Whilst lead track Holy Heretic continues the good work of the debut album both lyrically and musically, the most interesting track for me is Our Love Has No Goodbyes, a smouldering slow burner of a full-on unashamedly gothic rock classic, and the shift away from a relatively repetitive song structure and one-dimensional guitar tone of old-school deathrock sits very well with their revamped sound . Third track A Different Shade also has a softer focus despite a grungier feel, as the band show their ability to broaden their musical palette whilst retaining their original appeal, and whet the appetite for the forthcoming sophomore album.

The Kentucky Vampires’ highly-recommended output can be sampled and ordered via their Bandcamp site.

No. 15 - Modern Cults, Holygram (2018)

(Over a series of twenty short posts – one per week for the remaining weeks of this decade – I am aiming to highlight in vaguely chronological order some of the most important and influential releases in the goth/post-punk/darkwave genre of the 2010’s).

The current darkwave/post-punk/goth scene, though relatively buoyant, seems to be very self-contained, in that the many bands/bloggers/DJs around the world are all appealing to the same small group of cognoscenti, with very few outsiders finding a scene which has been largely ignored by the mainstream media.

Breaking out of this third wave bubble seems to be proving very difficult for even the most commercially and critically acclaimed artists on the scene, who still count themselves lucky to sell out a vinyl/CD pressing run of under a thousand, and who even when promoting a fourth album can find themselves playing in small clubs to audiences that can be measured in the dozens.

Some of the most creative and potentially more mainstream acts have therefore taken the same route as the first wave of bands and accepted support slots which will allow them to play to and win over audiences who have really come to see a band from a different genre. Kaelan Mikla, for example, have just signed up for an extensive 2020 tour with metal band Alcest, whilst last year German bright hopes Holygram toured with 80’s synth nostalgia act Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. The Wirral band were of course themselves once at the cutting edge of alternative music four decades ago, but it is to be hoped that some of those who came to relive their youth and hear some familiar top ten hits from the past in fact went home singing the praises of the young darkwave act who were touring their first full album, Modern Cults.

As has often been the case this decade, the debut album was in fact a kind of compilation featuring re-recordings of the best tracks from previous releases along with new songs – Belgian band A Slice of Life and Italians Der Himmel uber Berlin have adopted a similar strategy – which in the case of Holygram meant a fuller release for the tracks on their October 2016 self-titled EP that first brought them to the attention of modern post-punk fans, Still There and Distant Light. The former, starting with a classic two-note darkwave reverb guitar riff, revealed their more dark pop sensibilities, with a slightly distant melodic male vocal over an insistent beat.

It was the latter though which marked them out from the increasingly crowded coldwave/darkwave masses, however, revealing their shoegaze and krautrock roots, adding a more distorted FX-drenched guitar sound over an ultra-repetitive bass beat, like a more refined Alien Sex Fiend or a more blissed out Jesus and Mary Chain.

The Modern Cults LP, produced by Soft Moon knob-twiddler Maurizio Baggio at  also featured new singles A Faction and Signals, which both got heavy rotation on alternative radio stations around the world, whilst She’s Like The Sun had a very welcome psychedelic undercurrent whilst retaining the band’s keen ear for melody which is likely to ensure that, along with their comparative youth, they will stay at the forefront of the darkwave movement and be amongst the best placed bands to break through into mainstream consciousness.

Holygram's music can be accessed via their Bandcamp site

No. 14 - Forever Waiting, Suffering For Kisses (2018)

(Over a series of twenty short posts – one per week for the remaining weeks of this decade – I am aiming to highlight in vaguely chronological order some of the most important and influential releases in the goth/post-punk/darkwave genre of the 2010’s).

One main feature of the past ten years musically has been the fragmentation of the scene, with the likes of MySpace, Soundcloud and in particular Bandcamp allowing artists to bypass record companies and the media and put their music directly in front of fans by uploading it to the platforms in question and tagging key words/genres to attract fans of similar bands.

The simultaneous growth of digital home recording technology has enabled the rise of the “one-man band” whether the likes of Ed Sheeran in the mainstream or the thousands of artists in the darkwave/goth/post-punk spectrum ploughing their own furrow, and my latter selections in this best of the decade round-up will be dominated by such acts.

The first artist whom I personally followed on a track-by-track basis in the early years of the 2010’s was Stockholm-based Eric Sparkwood who operates under the name Foghorn Lonesome, and whose music was described as being influenced by "Depeche Mode and The Sisters of Mercy" on his Soundcloud page. With falling basslines, a lugubrious pace, lush synth backgrounds and a half-whispered baritone vocal telling tales of lost love and regret, FL began to create a worldwide cult following, with the distribution of pin badges featuring the band’s very gothic crown of thorns logo (think The Danse Society) and the creation of a fangroup Children of the Horn, where followers were encouraged to upload their own photos, artwork etc, which ultimately resulted in the fantastic video collage (sadly now unavailable) which accompanied the most memorable song Always the Undertow. With songs added on almost a monthly basis, by the end of 2014 Sparkwood had enough material for an eponymous debut digital album. Half of the album, was made up of more upbeat, dance-oriented synth pop, and Sparkwood has continued the move in this direction over the past five years of very sporadic releases.

Another one-man band operating in a similar sonic area is Suffering For Kisses, the cold/darkwave project of Oregon-based Tony D’Oporto, whose stark and monochromatic debut set Forever Waiting  on Bandcamp gained him a large following upon release in 2018. D’Oporto’s deadpan vocal over a spartan backing of bass and drumbeat with occasional swathes of synth brought comparisons to Joy Division, with dark lyrics about isolation and rejection. Several of the tracks had previously been released as stand-alone tracks, such as the self-descriptive Beautifully Dark, featuring a wonderfully light guitar cameo courtesy of Mark Hjorthoy.

Photos of crying angel graveyard statues, titles like Pretty In Black and In The Night and D’Oporto’s chilling vocals all added to the strong gothic vein running through what is essentially a dark synthpop project, but it was his ear for a multi-layered less-is-more arrangement and his strong melodic composition which made Forever Waiting one of my most-played albums of the decade, with simple ideas such as She’s Gone Away being executed with a subtlety that only added to the pervading sense of melancholic gloom.

The prolific D’Oporto has already produced a follow-up EP and two further singles which retain the same song-writing style, although the power of the light-touch guitar and bleak atmosphere which made the debut such a dark delight has in general been reduced by the lusher arrangements where synths are more to the fore, although he remains an artist worth following.

D'Oporto is one of many artists who have benefitted from the ability to use digital technology in teh recording process and digital platforms to reach fans directly, although the sheer number of groups and individuals using this route will always make it hard for them to reach a mass audience. 

Suffering For Kisses music can be bought via their Bandcamp page, with a similar situation for Foghorn Lonesome via their page.

No. 13 - Revolt (EP), Future Faces (2017)

(Over a series of twenty short posts – one per week for the remaining weeks of this decade – I am aiming to highlight in vaguely chronological order some of the most important and influential releases in the goth/post-punk/darkwave genre of the 2010’s).

Every now and then, a band arrives on the scene seemingly from nowhere yet perfectly formed – no low-fi demo EP, no awkward first album finding a direction. Future Faces are one such band, arriving in 2017 with a first EP (entitled Revolt) of such quality that despite being released on one-man operation Throatruiner Records, it immediately caused a stir amongst the darkwave community.

Just four songs made up the debut release, which in time-honoured fashion (think Unknown Pleasures, Killing Joke or Damage Done) came in a monochromatic sleeve with artwork that made the perfect t-shirt yet gave no clue as to the origin or identity of the band in question.

The band’s Bandcamp page was more helpful, revealing that not only were the band Swiss, but that two thirds of them had previously been in a band called Equus, who a decade earlier had released a couple of albums of very experimental sounds, lengthy instrumental albums combining krautrock and free-form psychedelia likely to shoot off at a tangent without any notice.

Some of those creative features contributed to the multi-layered songs on the Revolt EP, which at seven or eight minutes were way beyond the usual track length of guitar-based post-punk compositions. The somewhat distant echoing male vocal had a lugubrious quality that brought to mind Brendan Perry (Dead Can Dance) or Iain McCulloch which was entirely appropriate for the musical backing but very different from the usual gravel-throated Eldritch mimicry of so many scene vocalists. The music itself featured a stark yet shifting reverberating electronic drum backbeat interwoven with syncopated bass rhythms, over which a classically post-punk reverberated guitar constantly soars, shimmering as it takes it own path away from the main melody to introduce a new segment of each song, echoing the six-string alchemy of The Edge on U2’s incredible Boy debut in 1980.

Clearly surprised by the uniquely positive reaction to the release, the Swiss trio have yet to release any further songs in the intervening two and a half years and have only played a handful of live dates, mainly in their native Geneva area, although their Facebook page reveals that they have been in the studio and that new recordings are imminent. Indeed, it took the band almost a year to produce a video for the EP’s lead (and by far shortest) track Embraces, which showed the bearded trio backlit in blue and surrounded by dry ice in time-honoured tradition.

Whilst there are many other bands who have produced excellent work this decade in a similar melodic and melancholic vein that brings to mind the disparate likes of The Chameleons, The Cure and even early Coldplay, such as Italian groups like Starcontrol and Tanks and Tears, Americans Night Nail or Belgians Slice of Life, no-one has produced a debut with depth, the atmosphere and the sheer musicality of Future Faces’ Revolt EP, which can be bought via Bandcamp.

No. 12 - Walk The Wire, Miazma (2017)

(Over a series of twenty short posts – one per week for the remaining weeks of this decade – I am aiming to highlight in vaguely chronological order some of the most important and influential releases in the goth/post-punk/darkwave genre of the 2010’s).

Regular readers of this countdown may have noted a preponderance of post-punk artists around the middle of the decade, but more recently there has been a welcome resurgence in good old-fashioned gothic rock. After years or even decades where, taking the lead from the so-called Godfather of Goth, Andrew Eldritch,  no-one would admit to being part of the scene, a series of bands have been prepared to unashamedly admit to their love of the classic late 80’s sound and update it for a modern audience.

The shock recent unveiling of two new songs (Show Me and Better Reptile) by The Sisters of Mercy themselves at their recent live shows, the band’s first new material in thirteen years, has rekindled hopes that the quintessential goth act will finally release a follow-up to 1990’s Vision Thing, as promised by lead singer Andrew Eldritch during Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016.

In reality, many fans had long since accepted that there was no hope of the band ever releasing a new album, and several bands over the years have enterprisingly filled the gap, producing an ersatz Sisters sound that mimics the Wagnerian choruses of the Overbombing years. To a greater or lesser extent, Rosetta Stone, The Merry Thoughts, The Merciful Nuns and others have been accused of paying rather too close a homage to Leeds’ finest, although most have gone on to develop their own sound, merely using TSOM as one of my original starting points.

During the 2010’s, with the TSOM recording drought entering its third decade, there has been a revival in the Sisters clone market, with The Cascades reforming and their baritone crooner M.W. Wild releasing a highly enjoyable solo album in 2016 entitled The Third Decade, which featured several songs which bore more than a passing resemblance to The Sisters, even lyrically on lead track So Dark All Over Europe.

The undisputed king of the Sisters-influenced market however is Swede Kristian Olofsson, who records under the project name Miazma. The one-man-band multi-tracking in the studio has been a feature of the third wave of artists, and over a series of releases spanning over a decade, Olofsson gradually refined his vision, increasing the overt gothic references on albums like Dressed In Black (which included original compositions entitled Walk Away and More) before releasing his meisterwerk, Walk The Wire, in January 2017.

The album’s sound is firmly anchored on the Overbombing years of TSOM’s big club hits like Lucretia My Reflection and More, particularly on the title track and on the single More Than Miles, with the metronomic buzzing basslines and chugging guitars giving way to melodic choruses with repetitive baritone refrains, very reminiscent of the Vision Thing years, but also of bands such as 69 Eyes and Type O Negative on tracks like Monster and Far Away.

Released on Gothic Rock records, always a promising sign, the CD received rave reviews but like many releases in the genre inexplicably only sold in the hundreds, with ultra-conservative old-school goths refusing to countenance anything recorded after 1992, even when it follows the exact sonic template of their favourite artists.

Hopefully Miazma will continue the move away from parody and pastiche as they continue to develop their sound, with songs like A Kiss Away and Kallt showing that their forte resides in mid-paced melodic melancholia. In the meantime, however, Walk The Wire stands as one of the most accomplished goth albums of the decade, and well worthy of a place on this countdown.

Miazma’s back-catalogue (or at least the recent parts of it) are available from the band’s Bandcamp page.

No. 11 - Second Still, Second Still (2017)

(Over a series of twenty short posts – one per week for the remaining weeks of this decade – I am aiming to highlight in vaguely chronological order some of the most important and influential releases in the goth/post-punk/darkwave genre of the 2010’s).

One feature of the latter part of this decade has been the vast number of new bands from all corners of the globe citing post-punk guitar bands as their main inspiration, in particular the likes of The Chameleons and The Cure, but often also slightly more obscure names such as The Sound, Sad Lovers and Giants or Modern Eon. The latter’s album Fiction Tales is often cited as a forgotten classic album of the early 80’s, and the name of its opening track Second Still was appropriated by Californians Alex Hartman and Ryan Walker for their third-generation post-punk band.

Bassist Hartman and guitarist Walker had met in 2007 and through a love of the French coldwave and English post-punk bands began to record together, laying down hundreds of hours of ideas based around fast-paced tightly interwoven duelling of reverb-drenched staccato guitar lines and bubbling bass riffs, effectively replicating the ingredients of the niche Robert Smith/Steve Severin project The Glove but with results more akin to their “day job” bands, and therefore reminiscent of Hyaena era Banshees with a cranked-up metronomic Doktor Avalanche replacing Budgie’s languid looping beats.

Years of low-fi rehearsals honed their craft, meaning that by the time (after several false starts) they finally met the right vocalist for the project, the classically-trained Suki (formerly singer with psychedelic shoegaze act Sua) in New York in late 2014, they were already tight enough to make an immediate breakthrough. The debut EP Early Forms was released in early 2016, and immediately and understandably drew enthusiastic comparisons with Garlands era Cocteau Twins as well as with the Banshees, with standout track Two Reasons an excellent example of their sound at this stage. Spidery McGeoch/Guthrie arpeggios and a syncopated bass motif provide a lush soundscape for Suki’s dreamy vocal on a song that has 1983 written all over it.

The following year saw the release of their self-titled LP, a stunning collection of songs (including two from the original EP) that brought a breath of fresh air to the genre, mixing a strong female vocal with the up-tempo dark melodic accompaniment that harked back to the guitar-driven coldwave sound of Baroque Bordello, Tanit, Jad Wio and Mary Goes Round in France in the late 1980’s. Final track Judgment (sic) with its thrilling changes of direction and underlying sense of menace is an excellent example of the energy and melody that underpins the album as a whole. Unsurprisingly Second Still won many “LP of the year” plaudits (including on my own list), and brought an invitation to produce a Part-Time Punks session (released as an EP in early 2018 and featuring a version of For Against’s Echelons).

A further EP Equals broadened the sound’s sonic palette a little further, re-introducing a more overt Banshees guitar and a harder-edged sound overall, with a harsher drum sound higher in the mix, notably on the track Automata, which encouragingly strayed more into Whispering Sons territory, whilst other tracks went more towards the dark coldwave pop of Dubstar or the string-bending claustrophobia of Curve.

This sadly turned out to be a pre-cursor of their future direction, with sophomore album Violet Phase continuing the move away from a guitar-based sound on some tracks and featuring a stricter coldwave beat with a sumptuously produced sequenced keyboard backing, with the best tracks (such as Idyll) combining both elements, but they have now more in common with quirky dark coldwave pop acts like VOWWS or Drab Majesty (a very saturated end of what is a limited market) than with the Cocteau Twins. Whilst their sound has undeniably progressed with every release, it could be claimed that in the process they have lost many of the elements that made them so unique in the first place, although the song-writing remains as well-developed as ever.

Second Still’s music can be bought on an impressive variety of formats via their Bandcamp page.

No. 10 - The House of Bastet, Penance Stare (2017)

Over a series of twenty short posts – one per week for the remaining weeks of this decade – I am aiming to highlight in vaguely chronological order some of the most important and influential releases in the goth/post-punk/darkwave genre of the 2010’s).

The breadth of the post-punk genre during the 2010’s is probably best illustrated by the huge musical gulf between the last band to feature on this countdown (Ritual Howls) and this week’s object of focus, UK one-woman-band Penance Stare.

One feature of many of the current wave of goth/post-punk groups is their ability to verbalise their own soundscape, and this is certainly the case of Esmé Louise Newton, sole member of Penance Stare, who (during an 2018 interview with excellent local online music magazine @narc ) brilliantly described the full metal racket which she manages to coax out of her studio set-up thus: “When I started Penance Stare, it was clear how goth/post-punk has become a very narrow, codified sound that has been largely unchanged for around forty years. Noticing the similarities between the more downtempo, depressive approach of Lycia, and the slow sections of some of my favourite black metal songs made me realise that the boundaries between dark musics tend to be pretty arbitrary and meaningless. With that in mind, drawing from anything from death industrial to witch house seemed fairly uncontrived and natural for this project. I wanted to put all of my influences on top of one another instead, noise overlaid with atmosphere until they are inseparable.”

I for one was utterly transfixed from the opening string-bending bars of Persona Non Grata the opening track on debut cassette EP The House of Bastet, which after a stark echoing drum machine intro, unleashes a mighty FX-pedal drenched guitar assault, effortlessly marrying the dark arpeggios and nonchalant sheets of dense guitar fog of Killing Joke’s Geordie with the angled modular shards of genius of John McGeoch, although the latter is more apparent on the Night Shift-influenced final track of the all-too-short-debut, the wonderful Bleaken. The pummelling riffage and dark melancholic beauty of the music is perfectly topped off by Newton’s distant, echoing, ethereal vocal, sounding like a plaintive Liz Fraser trapped in the studio next door, shown to best on the most moody track of the four, Moon In Scorpio. Like several other artists featuring in this countdown, Newton’s background in black and doom metal and her ability to analyse and deconstruct the genre’s tropes and core elements has allowed her to build a multi-layered aural assault that is as emotional as it is powerful, and her helpful listing (on the Bandcamp page for this incredible EP) of all elements of her set-up only hints at the pure musical alchemy that goes into Penance Stare’s profoundly affecting music.

Any thoughts that Newton may subsequently mellow the band’s sound were immediately banished (no pun intended) by the opening track (Banishing) on 2018’s full-length follow-up, Scrying, which featured the same dark, doomy gothgaze as the earlier EP. Each track is carefully crafted around a repeated heavily reverberated de-strung guitar riff, a punishingly metronomic drum machine backbeat and the swirling barely-discernible female wailing vocal, with each song featuring a more pleasingly circular structure than the extended jams of the debut EP. “Please listen after dark for best results”, the advice on the Bandcamp site for the album needlessly read, as the more immediate tracks like You Have Wronged Me and Cemeteries Near Me immediately conjured up the atmosphere of tarot card and Ouija board sessions by candlelight. Unsurprisingly, further unadulterated critical acclaim followed, and Newman began the difficult task of bringing the huge Penance Stare sound to the stage, incongruously playing low on the bill in front of tiny audiences in small pub gigs in her adopted homeland near Newcastle.

The most recent Penance Stare release, Solanaceae, came out at the beginning of this year, and sees Newton producing (frustratingly) shorter snatches of sound, more experimental fragments of beautifully dark and heavy trance-like noise still leavened by her hauntingly dulled vocal stylings. As usual, the limited-edition cassette version sold out almost immediately, although the entire digital Penance Stare back catalogue can be purchased on Bandcamp for the ludicrously generous price of £4!