A Brief History of Dark Wave and Post-Punk

subgenre of New Wave

What was the scene like that birthed Dark Wave and post-punk?

“If you are familiar with my style of writing, you might have noticed that I always start placing music genres and styles into their historical context. ”

I've done it with all of our Hip Hop Electronic specials. If you want to jump back, you'll find one about Kosmiche Musik (Krautrock), one about Ambient Music, and one about Belgium's New Beat.

Everything surrounding us is interlinked, especially when humans are looking for new ways to express their feelings. After three decades of relative peace, I'm talking, of course, mainly about Europe and the US. In the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, people had the time to focus more on themselves and their feelings and emotions rather than only surviving conflicts and dealing with countries that weren't safe. I wish this could have been a permanent condition for us all. Still, we know the world has seen more and more conflicts and wars even during the so-called "decades of peace," so I guess this article, written by a European and most likely read by Americans, will be heavily influenced by our Western perception of things.

Anyway.

What is Dark Wave?

“Dark Wave as a music genre developed in Britain in the late 1970s as New Wave and Post-Punk movements evolved.”

It had its decade of glory in the 1980s, ironically the same decade of dance music, parties, iconic dance halls, colorful fashion, and glamour. Some people didn't fit in that contagious explosion of joy and felt more comfortable with another type of music and lifestyle. Dark music listeners were more connected to how we feel with each other and to our place in the grand scheme of things. This new genre was perceived as dark, romantic, and bleak, with an undertone of sorrow, and for these reasons was given its name. Minor key tonality and introspective lyrics make up its characteristics. The Dark Wave had Depeche Mode, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Cocteau Twins, and Soft Cell as British exponents of its first generation.

To describe the Dark Wave, though, we must consider what happened with the post-punk movement of the late 1970s. The music industry had been more or less the same since The Beatles era. Post-punk continued the revolution of punk. Punk's energy inspired it, the first real game changer in the music world, and do-it-yourself ethic started to appear in the picture with artists experimenting with styles and production techniques of dub and disco, taking inspiration from art and modernist art, movies, books, politics, even critical theory.

This period was when artists and musicians questioned the mainstream empire for the first time, and these post-punk communities were the first to produce independent record labels, multimedia performances, visual art, and fanzines. This change of vision will shape the music industry for a long time, at least until the 2000s with the arrival of the internet, and especially with streaming services, the last big revolution in the music business.

Dark Wave and Post-Punk Artists and pioneers

Early post-punk vanguards included Wire, Public Image Ltd, the Pop Group, Joy Division, Talking Heads, Magazine, the Raincoats, Gang of Four, the Fall, and the Cure. Nicholas Lezard used a brilliant way to describe the post-punk movement in The Guardian's review of Simon Reynolds's book Rip it Up and Start Again: Post-Punk 1978–1984:

"was avant-garde, open to any musical possibilities that suggested themselves, united only in the sense that it was very often cerebral, concocted by brainy young men and women interested as much in disturbing the audience, or making them think, as in making a pop song."

Siouxsie and the Banshees were the perfect link between the two genres.

The dark Wave, a subgenre of post-punk, spread internationally in the 1980s and generated other subgenres, such as ethereal Wave and neoclassical dark Wave, thanks to the music of bands like Dead Can Dance and In the Nursery.

Its German evolution was called Neue Deutsche Welle (German new Wave), and bands like Malaria! and the Swiss band the Vyllies added elements of cabaret music, later known as cabaret noir (or "dark cabaret"). In the 1990s, other bands from Italy, France, and Germany formed a second generation of dark wave-inspired projects like Ataraxia, The Frozen Autumn, Corpus Delicti, Diary of Dreams, and Deine Lakaien.

The American label Projekt Records started promoting artists from German label Hyperium Records in the US like Chandeen and Love Is Colder Than Death. Projekt Records also had bands like Lycia, Black Tape for a Blue Girl, Downwards, and Love Spirals, some characterized by atmospheric guitar and synth sounds and female vocals.

“As we have seen with other (if not all) music scenes, every time a new musical style emerges and gains attention, it spontaneously creates new trends involving aspects such as fashion and attitude.”

The evolution, Fashion, and scene of Dark wave and Post Punk

Venues start playing these new types of music to offer people (especially youngsters) a place to gather. In the following decades, the term Dark wasn't related only to a music genre but also to a specific group of people and developed in the following years in New Romantics, Goths, and, more recently, Emos. I'm not a big fan of categorizing people, but the Dark style in fashion has always been clearly recognizable, like Metal, Punks, and Grunge. Especially the Gothic rock subgenre, with bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, the Cure, and Joy Division contributed a lot to the visual elements we are discussing. Fans started imitating their new favorite musicians, often wearing black clothing, similar makeup, and crimped hair.

These gatherings led to many dark music festivals in the following years. The most famous is Substance, an annual dark wave and Industrial music festival occurring in Los Angeles that began in the 2010s, Verboden in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Wave-Gotik-Treffen in Leipzig, Germany, considered one of the largest world festivals for "dark" music and culture.