‘The body was the drums, the brain was the synthesiser’: darkwave, the gothic genre lighting up pop | Music

Wellor whatever the reason, there’s a huge appetite right now for music that features a dark, minimalist, synth-heavy, often lo-fi sound that smells like an amphetamine-fueled squat party in 1980s West Berlin.

Take I Like the Way You Kiss Me by British-Cypriot musician Artemas Diamandis, who performs as Artemas. The two-minute burst of throbbing, icy synth-pop – depicting an objectified and emotionally disengaged love affair – sticks out a mile on the charts next to Sabrina Carpenter, Kendrick Lamar and ranks of earnestly strummed acoustic guitars. “We made the song in about three hours, I posted it the next day, then things went crazy,” he says. Upon its release in March, it jumped to No.1 in many countries and has had over half a billion streams on Spotify alone – and is just one of many mega-streamed songs of its kind.

An official Spotify playlist featuring artists including Artemas, Mareux, Boy Harsher, Ekkstacy, ThxSoMch, Twin Tribes, KVB, Molchat Doma and Pastel Ghost – along with older bands such as the Cure and Depeche Mode – are brought together under the darkwave label. But even though it’s arguably one of the most popular genres in the world right now, no one can agree on exactly what it is or whether they fit into it.

“It’s hard to say what darkwave is,” says Carter De Phillipis, aka ThxSoMch, whose 2022 song Spit In My Face! also passed the half billion streaming mark. “Artists, especially nowadays, we don’t think about genre when we make music. We just pull from things we like, and the music of the past becomes the music of the future.”

Diamandis agrees. “The romantic in me wants to have a specific sound,” says the 24-year-old. “All my favorite acts from the past do it, but it’s really hard for artists of my generation to have that because we have such scattered tastes. We don’t really have stages, we just have playlists and an endless supply of music.” While Khyree Zienty, AKA Ekkstacy, says, “I’ve never been good at putting a name to my music. It’s hard to do that without sounding like an ass.”

To help, a new 60-song compilation album No Songs Tomorrow: Darkwave, Ethereal Rock and Coldwave 1981-1990, arrived to provide some historical context. Featuring the likes of the Cure, Dead Can Dance, Cocteau Twins, In the Nursery and Twice a Man, it shows that even in its original form, darkwave has always been an obscure genre. Simply put, it’s an exercise in opposites: taking a new wave, keeping the tempo, but turning to something more minor, introspective, estranged and, well, dark.

If there’s a single band that most accurately embodies darkwave in its original cross-pollinated form, it’s Clan of Xymox, whose 1985 self-titled album on 4AD remains a template album for music that’s as dark and melancholic as it is quiet. euphoric and dance floor ready. “John Peel declared us the pioneers of darkwave,” says the band’s Ronny Moorings, who has seen their influence on the current wave of bands through Twin Tribes remixes and She Past Away covers. “Darkwave is totally hip right now,” he says. “Newer bands always say we were an inspiration to them, but I’m also inspired by their music – it’s a perfect cycle.”

All-female German band Malaria!, another ’80s band featured on No Songs Tomorrow, takes the sharper end of post-punk, but with added synths and hooks. “I’ve always been interested in the brain and the body,” says the group’s Gudrun Gut. “The body was the drums and the brain was the synthesizer.” Guth says interest in her old band has increased in recent years. “Many, many young producers and musicians, especially women, mention malaria! a lot,” she says. “We were role models.”

Both Gut and the Moorings, as well as the music they create, stem from a rejection of conventional life and mainstream music. Moorings lived in squats in the Netherlands – one of which burned down while he was in it – playing gigs in abandoned factories. “It was a free country and we could do whatever we wanted,” he recalls of the time. Guth says her music is a reflection of the “wild, extreme but gray” background of West Berlin, which is made up of a community of like-minded “art lovers and party people”. Gut was even in the earliest incarnation of Einstürzende Neubauten, a band that rejected the glitz of the era perhaps more fiercely than any, stealing from construction sites to make instruments, recording music under highways and punching through walls during at concerts.

The transition from 1980s music to the new crop of Gen Z artists isn’t easy, though. Both Diamandis and De Phillipis point to Nirvana, grunge and Soundcloud rap, as well as the avant-electro of bands like Crystal Castles and the Weeknd’s glittery neon pop as more key to their foundations. Diamandis’ main association with ’80s artists comes more from his mother telling him that’s what his music sounded like, and so he went back to explore.

The likes of Boy Harsher and KVB, who have been around for over a decade now, have seen streaming numbers and live audiences grow rapidly on the back of this new surge. “The main difference with the new bands coming in now is the club influence,” says one half of Boy Harsher, August Müller. “Club culture is much more prevalent, especially in the States. The first raves we played were just DIY spaces and there were a lot more live sets than DJs – just like 707 [drum machine] in a Boss twist [pedal] and some guy bangs his head. Now there are plenty of proper clubs with nice sound systems and Berlin is a household name. People will adapt to where they imagine their music to sound and that has a big impact on the sound. These days we write more about the club and less about the old chemical plant in North Philly.”

Kat Day of KVB says that “music production is becoming more democratic with digital audio workstations and cheaper synthesizers” has helped. “At its core, the darkwave scene is absolutely DIY. They’re bedroom-written and produced songs that, with the internet, have the power to cross borders.”

Spotify patronage aside, it also feels organic and fan-driven. “Artists have gained a following without a big-budget PR campaign or expensive studio recording sessions,” says Day. She also wonders if the appeal to younger listeners is “a kind of rebellion against music that’s not mainstream or that’s over-commercialized,” she says. “The songs themselves aren’t overly polished, have a lo-fi aesthetic and are perhaps an antidote to the overly perfectionist worlds of social media that this generation grew up in.”

This seems to ring true for the younger generation making music. “I was just doing this in my bedroom, and then I get a million streams a day,” says De Phillipis. “It’s like, how does this happen? I think people gravitate to it because it’s so easy to make everything digital and clean. I like it when things are a little dirty.

Add in the era of the TikTok wildcard, and even more songs seem to explode out of thin air. Back in 2015, Mareux covered the Cure’s song The Perfect Girl, but it would take six years before it blew up on social media after people started layering the song over tracks from the movie American Psycho. Similarly, Belarusian band Molchat Doma, signed to the relatively cult-like underground label Sacred Bones, became huge when their music began accompanying a TikTok fashion challenge, as well as numerous Soviet-era videos of brutalist architecture and the like. Soon the gloomy sound of their song Sudno (Boris Ryzhy) was heard by hundreds of millions of people.

While TikTok trends come and go, music seems to last. “People say our music resonates with them because of its honesty and sincerity,” says Raman Kamakhortsau of Molchat Doma. “In our songs we convey the dark side of man – the depressed, sad and anxious moments.”

This is evident in Artemas’ I Like the Way You Kiss Me, whose love title is pretty much undermined by its brutally honest chorus: “Don’t try to be romantic, I’ll kick it in the rear just so you don’t get attached.” Diamandis says this unabashed, unpolished lyricism resonates. “Some of the things I sing in my songs I would never say in conversation in real life,” he says. “But there’s something about singing it in falsetto over a hard beat that’s quite liberating. Once people know I don’t take myself too seriously and maybe know more embarrassing things about me, it’s just a lot easier for me to relax and breathe.” De Phillipis says his songs are “a way for me to making darker, more melancholic music that I can still move to while still being true to myself.”

Whatever the appeal of darkwave, millions of fans have gathered under its broad umbrella. Diamandis spoke to me midway through his first tour, and the next one booked for later in the year is in venues four times the size. “I had only played to 20 people in a room before,” he says. “I guess that’s just the way virality works these days — once people decide they want something, that’s it.”

No Songs Tomorrow: Darkwave, Ethereal Rock and Coldwave 1981-1990 is out now on Cherry Red Records