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