No. 9 - Into The Water, Ritual Howls (2016)

(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).

As the 2010’s have progressed, the darkwave revival seems to have been increasingly been dominated by American bands, and our first band from across the Atlantic to feature in this countdown is Detroit’s Ritual Howls, who like many of the bands covered on this blog started in the early years of the decade and have recently released their fourth full studio album.

For the typical (post-)punk fan, Detroit conjures up images of Iggy and the Stooges or the MC5, but this particular Michigan trio took their inspiration from a variety of sources, with singer/guitarist Paul Bancell favouring indie rock guitar bands, drum/synth player Chris Samuels coming from an industrial background and fuzz bassist Ben Saginaw previously playing in a psychedelic doom band. Their 2012 eponymous debut album, released on the delightfully-named Urinal Cake label. Unsurprisingly contained songs in a variety of styles, with Year of Fear getting proceedings underway with a jangly melancholy darkwave pop vibe and following track Cemetery Guards then straying into The God Machine’s gothic post-rock territory. It was the third track that would retrospectively give the biggest clue to the band’s future direction, with Keep Those Stones Up Boys creating a broad cinematic soundscape topped with the reverberating melody of Bancell’s “dark twang” guitar, reminiscent of everything from Hollywood Western soundtracks to Nick Cave swamp/murder ballads or the uber-cool of Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game. With other tracks veering from JAMC style dark psychedelia to low-fi experimentalism, the album was praised for its creativity but lacked any cohesion or sense of identity, a flaw only partially rectified on 2014’s follow-up.

With a more electronic percussive background to reinforce the post-punk credentials, Human Leather kept a dark vibe thanks to Saginaw’s edgy bass lines and Bancell’s emotive vocal on the likes of Taste of You, with the “dark twang” guitar effects again very much to the fore. Although the song-writing and production were clearly stronger than on the debut, Human Leather still sounded like a band in search of their own definitive sound, although the stand-out track, the claustrophobic My Friends, blended the upbeat psychedelic groove with the more filmic elements successfully.

The Ritual Howls sound finally reached maturity on their third and best album, Into The Water, with opening track Scatter The Scars containing all the elements which made the previous albums such a rewarding listen but adding a stronger melody and a greater range of vocal effects and samples to the string bending guitar, the scuzzy bass riff and the Joy Division backbeat. Nervous Hands, Bound By Light and Park Around The Corner have a similarly downbeat sleazy feel, creating the feeling of band who have finally found a way to meld their disparate musical roots into their own distinctive sound.

After the excellent 2017 EP Their Body continued the band’s dark descent into the sleazy world of film noir, such as on the atmospherically maudlin closing track Blood Red Moon, Ritual Howls returned this year to end the decade with their most confident and ambitious release to date, Rendered Armor. The more commercial tone is set by opening track Alone Together which set their trademark “dark twang” to a more conventional radio-friendly alternative pop song structure, more in the style of legendary 80’s Belgian band The Neon Judgement. It remains to be seen if this direction will prove to be more successful in terms of sales, but the critical acclaim continues to grow for the band, as does the number of bands clearly influenced by them.

The best of these (to my ears ) is German duo Suir, whose 2018 sophomore album Soma aimed for a similarly widescreen sound, particularly on the epic Warsaw, a track which featured on many “Best Of..” lists last year.

Ritual Howls’ music can be bought on their Bandcamp page, likewise Suir.

No. 8 - Kaelan Mikla, Kaelan Mikla (2016)

(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).

13^th May 2015. A video crew from Berlin-based not-for-profit music collective Orange ‘ear arrive at the Gaukurrin bar/venue in Reykjavik to film a young local trio, Kælan Mikla, whose energetic live performances shared on YouTube had begun to create a bit of a stir.

The beautifully lit video for the song Kalt that resulted from the session begins with a visual focus on the unusual synthesiser of Margret Rosa, a recent gift from a boyfriend which had one broken key raised from the keyboard. The apparently slightly ramshackle nature of the band is reinforced twenty seconds later when Solveig Matthildur launches the main bass riff, slightly out of tune from the synths and occasionally slightly off the beat too, playing Hooky-style eight-to-the bar to drive the classic darkwave beat forward. As is often the case in the post-punk genre, the music builds slowly and dramatically for exactly a minute before vocalist Laufey Soffia prepares to sing her first note. The listener is pinned back as Laufey Soffia‘s vocals begin, an angry half-spoken shrieking that is in equal measures Poly Styrene punk rock shouting and other-worldly banshee howl. With their youthful energy, impeccable punk look (dark lipstick on pallid complexions, multiple piercings and studded collars) and angular sound, Kælan Mikla had truly arrived, and this video, uploaded to Vimeo and YouTube the following month, became one of the word-of-mouth viral post-punk successes of the decade, eventually reaching 300, 000 views by January 2018 and attracting the patronage of Robert Smith. The Cure’s lead singer invited them to play at the Meltdown Festival which he “cureated” in London, which brought them to more mainstream attention, with the result that the video passed the notable milestone of one million views earlier this summer.

For all their low-fi charm, Kælan Mikla had already existed as a gigging band for several years by the time of the Kalt video (many of these incredible gigs were uploaded to and are still available on YouTube), but the recent acquisition of the faulty keyboard had resulted in a crucial change of direction which has ultimately resulted in them becoming one of the key players in the global post-punk revival this decade. The band had originally formed as a slam punk riot grrl posse in 2013, winning an event held at Reykjavik city library, and working up a series of songs based solely around some punk/funk basslines and Margret Rosa‘s energetic drumming. These were recorded with Alison MacNeil but not released at the time, although the band’s subsequent success saw the songs belatedly available last year on the Manadans album. Lead track Lítil Dýr gives an indication of the band’s early sound, a whispered dream-like opening sequence suddenly developing into an upbeat fluid bass-dominated garage backbeat, with Laufey Soffia‘s piercing scream presaging a ferocious rant that is as thrilling as it is unsettling, and vaguely reminiscent of the aural schizophrenia of Siouxsie and The Banshees’ Eve White/Eve Black. Whilst many bands hide their earlier, more amateurish recordings away when they become more famous, Kælan Mikla played a very active role in ultimately bringing these visceral songs to market, and as well as revealing the band’s genesis they stand as excellent tracks in their own right.

Back to 2015 though, and the Kalt video. Turkey’s Fabrika Records, home to scene darlings Selofan, Lebanon Hanover and She Past Away see the video and immediately sign the band to the label and the trio begin to record what will ultimately become their debut album, with a re-recording of Kalt and some other early tracks along with new songs, now all re-worked to feature the new influence of the keyboards and, crucially, a drum machine backbeat now that Margret Rosa is now employed elsewhere in the band. Listeners drawn in by the immediacy of Kalt’s classic darkwave sound were treated to a broader canvas of sounds, with Myrkriᵭ Kallar featuring the lush coldwave synth layers which have become their trademark, with Laufey Soffia’s shrill vocal offering atonal counterpoint to the melody. The varied and accomplished album was a clear signal that although the band remained true to its riot grrl punk roots, there was a crossover potential that other sonic terrorists (such as Switzerland’s The Young Gods) have often struggled to achieve.

This was certainly the case on the 2018 follow-up album Nott Eftir Nott, which includes recent video single Hvernig kemst eg upp, with the group moving away from the more aggressive and sparse arrangements of the earlier albums to arrive at a fuller, more dance-orientated sound more reminiscent of latter-era Xmal Deutschland or the spoken-word synth soundscapes of (criminally under-rated in the UK) 80’s legend Anne Clark, whilst maintaining their commitment to singing in their native tongue and always retaining the ability to shock the listener.

Having spent their early years hauling their instruments on public transport to self-arranged gigs, the band has recently completed a US tour (a rare achievement for an alternative band these days given current visa arrangements) as their fame continues to spread. Although ploughing their own furrow musically initially, although Kælan Mikla have retained their individuality, their sound is now more in tune with other bands on the post-punk scene, and their ability to share a bill with anyone from Idles to She Past Away will help them to pick up more fans as they continue to grow, becoming one of the alternative scene’s biggest names in the process.

No. 7 - Endless Party, Whispering Sons (2015)

(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).

By the middle of the 2010’s a new wave of younger post-punk bands had begun to emerge, those who had seemingly raided their parents’ record collections and began to develop a new darkwave aesthetic inspired by, but crucially not slavishly imitating the first wave of bands of the early 1980’s.

Unsurprisingly, many of these bands came from the traditional heartlands of the post-punk movement where bands like The Sisters of Mercy still play to sold-out venues, such as the Flemish-speaking parts of Belgium, which is home to one such band, Whispering Sons. Formed in 2013 and with an average age of around half that of all the bands featured on this blog thus far, Whispering Sons have not just developed their own unique sound, but have risen to the top of the post-punk hierarchy without having to adopt the stereotypical uniform, iconography or lyrical clichés which have dogged the goth movement for decades and ensured its continued ghettoization.

Having self-released a debut EP of synth-based dark soundscapes (limited to just 99 copies) in 2014, the band really broke through at the end of 2015 and beginning of 2016 with a twin assault of a brilliant new EP which was gradually released on different formats (cassette, digital and CD) and their participation in Belgium’s most prestigious “battle of the bands” competition, Humo’s Rock Rally, which most bands of the post-punk genre would have shunned.

However, based on their strong set of songs from the Endless Party EP and their intense live performances, the band won the competition and instantly raised their profile higher than that of many darkwave bands who had been plugging away for decades, enabling them to commence an upward trajectory which the hard-working band have been able to steadily continue ever since.

Endless Party opens with the track Shadow, the tone immediately set with the lush minor key synth chords of Sander Hermans, the singing, ringing guitar arpeggios courtesy of Kobe Lijnen, with Sander Pelsmaekers (electronic percussion) and Tuur Vandeborne (bass) providing a crisp yet stark back beat. The band’s undisputed star however is vocalist Fenne Kupens, whose strong, deep contralto is perfect for lyrics of alienation and despair.

Other songs revealed in greater depth the band’s broad palette, with the gothgaze masterpiece Insights demonstrating the power of Kuppens’ vocal in a slower, swirling multi-layered sonic experience. Kuppens has been likened to Siouxsie and Nico but her vocal style is very much her own, and although visually she is the least likely post-punk poster girl, with her girl-next-door-chic and Dad dancing, it is this uncompromising individuality which has marked the band out from others in an increasingly crowded musical sector.

I was lucky to discover Whispering Sons relatively early on (thanks to a tip from my Belgian FB friend Bruno B), being instantly won over by this energetic and genially youthful performance of Time, the most upbeat track on Endless Party with an infectiously nagging hook, recorded live for a Belgian radio session in the spring of 2015.

Wisely, Whispering Sons didn’t rush the next stage of their development, sporadically releasing singles (Performance in 2016 and White Noise in 2017) before finally releasing their long-awaited debut album Image towards the end of 2018 via PIAS (Europe) and Cleopatra (US). Image didn’t disappoint, containing a strong set of ten varied darkwave delights which is a strong contender for the best album of the decade in this genre, although perhaps lacking in the killer single track that would break them to a wider audience.

However, on the back of their continued success on the live circuit, the band now regularly receive invitations to grace the main stages of mid-sized festivals, drawing very large crowds in their native Belgium in particular, especially at this summer's Werchter Festival.

With youth on their side, Whispering Sons seem best-placed of all the bands on the current scene to become a major global success once the media trend moves on from the current obsession with Ed Sheeran style troubadours. And by purchasing any remaining copies of their early releases, fans can not only support the band and obtain some unique records but almost certainly obtain an investment which is likely to outperform any stock market over the next few years!

No. 6 - Nyctophilian, Then Comes Silence (2015)

(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).

“Then Comes Silence is the best genuine goth band of the 21^st century that has encapsulated the early 80’s goth sound.” – Mark Musolf, seminal Leeds post-punk DJ during the first gothic wave (and ever since)

“I’m a fan. Then Comes Silence is the most important dark rock band that has come out for two decades.” – Jyrki, singer of leading second-generation band The 69 Eyes

If any band sums up all that is good about the third wave of post-punk/goth/darkwave over the past decade, it’s surely Then Comes Silence. The Swedish band transcend traditional pigeonholing, drawing influences from a huge range of sources (in addition to the first and second generations of goth) that range from classical music to grunge, from old school heavy metal to original punk, and from psychedelia to shoegaze.

When he formed the band in 2012, bassist and singer Alex Svenson seemed to draw particularly on the latter two forms of music, his whispered and distorted vocal floating over a blissed-out soundtrack that ranged from krautrock to A Place To Bury Strangers, filtered through My Bloody Valentine and The Telescopes. Having led a nomadic childhood and with fifteen years of experience in the music industry in bands as far removed from the gothic aesthetic as can be imagined, Svenson had imbibed a broad musical education which resulted in a pair of eponymous albums (in 2012 and 2013) that drew critical praise and hinted at the band’s potential, with the innovative and varied guitar work of Svenson’s long-time collaborator Seth Kapadia very much to the fore.

However, neither of the earlier releases could prepare the listener for the instant appeal of the band’s 2015 third album, Nyctophilian, whose title indicated a strong lurch towards a more darkwave sound. The first track (and video single) Strangers quickly garnered a following with its scuzzy bass beat, simple guitar melody and a repeated refrain. The following track She Loves The Night (presumably referencing the titular nyctophilian) was both lyrically and musically the most obviously gothic track on the album, built over a fast angular descending riff (think Dark Entries or Shadowplay), but most of the album still had more than a feint whiff of psychedelia, with outstanding tracks like All Strange, Death Rides and in particular the catchy Spinning Faster sounding like a goth-ed up Dandy Warhols on steroids, with Svenson’s deep and breathy, sleazy croon reminiscent of his compatriot Jonas Almqvist (Leather Nun) or Flesh for Lulu’s Nick Marsh. All of a sudden, The Comes Silence sounded like the coolest band on the planet.

An already strong album was further enhanced by a couple of more experimental tracks, Demon’s Nest and My Head, where the band create a more claustrophobic atmosphere over a more cinematic soundscape, climaxing in a memorable string-bending repetition of the same bar of music for over a minute towards the end of My Head, as the band returned to a style more in tune with the previous two albums but with the cleaner sound of the newer tracks.

Unsurprisingly, the album drew rave reviews across the board and caught the attraction of record companies, with the band opting to sign for German metal label Nuclear Blast, who were immediately rewarded with the band’s best (and fourth) album Blood released in 2017. For me, this is the finest post-punk/darkwave/goth album of the past decade, with the opening four track salvo leaving the listener in no doubt that this is a band in supreme command of their sound and understanding the importance of both dynamics and melody in creating a truly darkwave sound. Opener The Dead Cry For No-one is a dark dancefloor-oriented statement of intent, leading immediately on to the punky Flashing Pangs of Love, which unleashes a powerful post-punk wall of sound, with Kapadia’s riffing and effects pedals very much setting the tone, as they do throughout the album. Following track Strange Kicks opens the sound out further, embracing more of the earlier influences of previous albums in the verse before unleashing a huge, syncopated rock riff underpinning another memorable chorus. Fourth track My Bones adds a creepier deathrock feel with (again) a heavier-than-expected chorus that would appeal well beyond the narrow confines of the goth fraternity.

There are more anthemic post-punk choruses over a thrilling, guitar-driven base, carefully-crafted darkwave middle-eights and more subtle, almost lyrical passages in other the video singles Warm Like Blood and Good Friday, the latter arguably the album’s most accomplished song, a poignant tribute to Svenson’s father who had recently passed away. 

To cement Blood’s reputation as a classic album, it also has the obligatory epic closing song, Mercury, a real slow-burner in the style of My Head which finds Svenson at his most operatic in an uplifting final section that calls to mind other classic final tracks (I Am The Resurrection, Champagne Supernova et al), leaving the listener both emotionally drained yet fully sated.

With the band seemingly on the verge of the big time, endowed with a sound that could appeal to more mainstream fans of both Interpol and Editors, Muse and Foo Fighters, or Royal Blood and The Courteeners, there was bad news from the TCS camp in 2018 with guitarists Jens Karnstedt and founder member Kapadia leaving the band in quick succession, but Svenson and drummer Jonas Fransson (who had joined the band prior to Blood) moved swiftly to recruit Mattias Ruejas Jonsson from A Projectiontion and Hugo Zombie from well-respected Basque horror punks Los Carniceros de la Muerte.  However, over the past twelve months the latter have more than proved their worth in some spectacular live shows, helping to create a visual aesthetic and spectacle which enhances the band’s darkwave credentials and means that image-wise as well as musically they are now a credible force to reckoned with.

With a fifth album recorded and ready to go (according to what the band told me at a recent gig), and a full and mature style that has evolved slowly but impressively over the decade, Then Comes Silence deserve to be one of the first bands to burst out from the darkwave ghetto and open the gates for the fountain of talent that has emerged during the 2010’s.

You can try before you buy Then Comes Silence's music via their Bandcamp page.