The 50 Best Goth Songs of All Time
In 2006, Peter Murphy of Bauhaus sat down next to My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way for an MTV interview to promote a new CD collection titled Life Less Lived: The Gothic Box. “I’m trying to work out what sums it up,” Murphy said when asked how he would define goth. “It can’t be just about a bit of makeup and a dark lyric. There’s got to be more to it than that.” Way sheepishly chimes in: “Well, it’s very hard to categorize who and what is goth.” Thanks for the insight, jeez.
The scene was a torch passing of sorts. Murphy’s Bauhaus had helped invent goth during the early Eighties; Way had brought it to stripmalls and arenas in the 21st century. And, still, neither could answer a question that has haunted people for decades: What is goth?
Let’s travel back to 1983. A time when London’s Batcave club was in its infancy. There, the aesthetics of goth were cultivated—a love for horror movies and Gothic novels, a sickly pallor and a koosh ball of hair, pointy winklepickers and a mish-mash of fetish materials, and most of all, a romance with melancholy. ‘83 was also the year that vampire-thriller The Hunger, co-starring David Bowie, hit the big screens. Vampires, Bowie, Bauhaus – it was the perfect trifecta, beautifully bound in an orgy of tragic eternity.
The first batallion of dark 1970s post-punk bands fed off the energy of Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust character, an androgynous creature who didn’t quite seem human. The allure of Ziggy, mixed with the magnetism of Dracula (namely Christopher Lee, Udo Keir, and of course, Bela Lugosi) helped to assemble the essential iconography of the subculture– at once dreadful and oozing with sex appeal.
And the sound? It’s atmospheric. Somewhere between a banshee scream or a bellowing, reverberated howl that could part the Red Sea, goth began as a transition point from the jaggedness of punk’s confrontational simplicity into an elegant darkness, one cloaked in sorrow and so much emotion. In order to achieve goth status, there must be as much drama as possible: the music, in true Hitchockian fashion, must be as frightening as a spiral staircase in a creaking haunted house.
Think of this list as a roadmap to that sound—from B-movie horror thrills, to reanimated rock and roll rituals, to complete sacrilege, bulging with blasphemy, bondage, blood and lots of bats. It’s a history that touches on subgenres like dream pop, hard rock, synthpop, and glam, that makes pit stops in Spain and Germany, pays homage at the doorsteps of black-clad country heroes and spooky blues legends, and dives into seedy art rock grottos and DIY punk venues. So pour yourself a goblet of red wine and hold your rosaries tight. It’s gonna be a long, dark night of the soul.
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Strawberry Switchblade
Image Credit: Kerstin Rodgers/Redferns/Getty Images The Scottish duo Strawberry Switchblade were a glorious blur of ribbons and lace, frills and polka dots. Despite the sweet, cupcake-goth look of Rose McDowall and Jill Bryson, the duo were able to write sad songs under all that confection. “Since Yesterday,” off their self-titled album from 1985, harks of memories gone by and the wistfulness of nostalgia — the cornerstone of many a goth song. Aside from their cover of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene,” their last single and a minor U.K. hit, the duo remained underground, and McDowall would go on to collaborate with artists such as Coil, Psychic TV, and Dave Ball of Soft Cell.
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AFI
Image Credit: J. Shearer/WireImage What were you doing in the 2000s if you didn’t have a side lip ring? The Californian hardcore-punk turned gloomy-rockers AFI broke through the emo buzz and ricocheted into the mainstream with their 2003 album, Sing the Sorrow. Their song “Silver and Cold” — with its dramatic piano intro and epic chorus of “Your sins into me, oh, my beautiful one” — had all the attributes of goth, and lead singer Davey Havok played the part perfectly with blacked-out eyes and long, luscious black hair (a look that bore a striking resemblance to Peter Steele of goth-metal icons Type O Negative). The year after “Silver and Cold” was released, the band scored extra bat-points when it performed “Just Like Heaven” in front of Robert Smith for the Cure’s MTV Icon.
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Diamanda Galas
Image Credit: Catherine McGann/Getty Images Terrifying is an accurate description of Diamanda Galas. Since the late 1970s, she has steadily released experimental work that can raise tortured souls from the caverns of Satan’s lair, her voice writhing with an evil found only in the possessed. The 1988 song “Double Barrel Prayer” feels like the result of a failed exorcism: Galas’ vocal delivery could spook the most seasoned of goths. You Must Be Certain of the Devil LP is the final installment of a trilogy of albums that responded to the AIDS crisis after her brother died from the illness in 1986.
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She Wants Revenge
Image Credit: Mason Trullinger/FilmMagic They say the best form of flattery is imitation. If so, She Wants Revenge’s self-titled LP from 2006 puckers right up to some 1980s goth ass. The Los Angeles duo of Justin Warfield and Adam Bravin were shameless in their dedication to their influences the Cure and Bauhaus. (It worked, too: They scored support slots for Depeche Mode, Peter Murphy, and Psychedelic Furs). “Tear You Apart” has several essential goth hallmarks rolled into one: a voice that imitates Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, a fast-paced electronic beat, and a blood-thirsty/cheesy lyrical invitation: “I want to fucking tear you apart.”
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Siouxsie and the Banshees
Image Credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images This is obviously not the last time we’ll see Siouxsie and the Banshees on this list. As one the first bands to cross over from punk into post-punk (Siouxsie Sioux often followed the Sex Pistols around in the fan group, the Bromley Contingent), Siouxsie and the Banshees set the foundation with their chilly aura for the goth subculture as early as 1977. “Red Light,” from the 1980 album Kaleidoscope, found the band exploring the era’s primitive synthesizer technology. With a sultry cabaret tempo, the song uses a sample of a camera’s shutter click and rewind as Sioux beckons us to “come into this gloom.” She forced us under her spell for decades to come.
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My Chemical Romance
Image Credit: Naki/Redferns/Getty Images Thanks to anthems like “Helena,” a generation of suburban kids bought MCR hoodies at Hot Topic and rubbed red eyeshadow around their heavily kohl-stained water lines. The New Jersey boys’ dark glam-punk concoction was sad but brash, and it touched a nerve in Middle America. The music video for “Helena” involved a funeral and black-clad ballerinas, while singer Gerard Way’s side-swept hair stole the hearts of baby bats and emo kids alike. We all have to start somewhere, right?
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Type O Negative
Image Credit: Niels van Iperen/Getty Images “Love You to Death,” the single from the 1996 Type O Negative album October Rust, owes as much to metal as it does the Sisters of Mercy — a blend of harsh guitars with soft goth undertones. It’s tough, but only just so. The Brooklyn band’s frontman, Peter Steele, had no qualms about getting in touch with his emotions, or his libido, and the eroticism he brought to Type O Negative’s music ramped up the excitement for sexually charged darklings right up until his untimely death at the age of 48.
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Echo and the Bunnymen
Image Credit: Michel Linssen/Redferns/Getty Images If you ever feel like crawling into the darkest recesses of your mind, Echo and Bunnymen’s Ian McCulloch will already be there to meet you. The Liverpudlian band liked this song so much they put it out three times — first on their 1981 live EP, Shine So Hard (under the title “Zimbo”); then on their landmark 1982 album, Heaven Up Here, under the title “All My Colours”; and as the B side for their “The Cutter” 12-inch single in 1983. With its signature post-punk tribalistic drums, Will Sergeant’s brilliantly bleak guitar, and McCulloch’s baritone voice drenched in melancholy, the song is nothing but four minutes of shared depression in which to wallow.
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Parálisis Permanente
In the early-to-mid-1980s, Madrid was the place to be. The burgeoning underground scene of “La Movida Madrileña” (or “the Madrilenian Scene”) was an experimental and hedonistic youth-counterculture movement that emphasized art of all kinds: music, film, fashion, literature, and photography. The scene’s look tended toward macabre displays of teased hair (sometimes a wig, sometimes not), a heavy hand of makeup, and a bricolage of fetish and punk accessories. From Madrid came the likes of Parálisis Permanente, which included members Eduardo Benavente and Ana Curra, a duo who set the stage for bands of “La Movida Madrileña” and beyond. Their 1983 cover of David Bowie’s “Heroes” on El Acto was an homage to their musical influences, which also proudly represented their own Spanish-speaking heritage.
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Suicide
Image Credit: George Wilkes/Hulton Archive/Getty Images “Ghost Rider,” the opening song of Suicide’s self-titled debut album in 1979, is certainly proto-goth — and so much more. “People have called us everything under the sun, but they could never categorize us,” said Alan Vega in 2002. “We’ve been called techno, electronic, punk, post-punk, glitter, industrial, psychobilly.” New York’s Suicide were fearless in their raw musical experimentation. Vega and his partner, Martin Rev, wrote effortlessly nightmarish music that many goth bands would noticeably model themselves after — including Andrew Eldritch of Sisters of Mercy, who listed Suicide as one of his favorite bands.
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Clan of Xymox
Image Credit: Anthony Pidgeon/Redferns/Getty Images The Dutch band Clan of Xymox were highly influential in the 1980s. Singer Ronny Moorings’ mullet ponytail (mullet-tail?) stood out, and so did his effortless ability to inject pure despair into everything he touched. But their 1999 song “Jasmine and Rose,” from the LP Creatures, catapulted goth into the next millennium by stepping away from gauzy post-punk and moving into an industrial-leaning dance-floor sound that still held onto the romanticism of early songs like “A Day.”
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The Sisterhood
Image Credit: Martyn Goodacre/Getty Images Goths love a good feud just as much as any subculture, and the Sisters of Mercy’s breakup is one for the ages. In 1986, Wayne Hussey and Craig Adams left the band and decided to carry on as the Sisterhood. Unsurprisingly, that name struck Sisters leader Andrew Eldritch as a little too close for comfort, so he beat them to the punch and took the name for himself, recording and releasing “Giving Ground” under the Sisterhood moniker in one week. The gambit worked, and it just so happens that “Giving Ground” is a masterpiece. Revenge can be so sweet.
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Fad Gadget
Image Credit: Peter Noble/Redferns/Getty Images As the first act signed to Daniel Miller’s U.K. label Mute, Fad Gadget are one of the most crucial bands in synth-pop history (an upstart Depeche Mode opened for Fad Gadget and landed a Mute record deal soon after). Vocalist Frank Tovey, who would perform tarred and feathered, always seemed at odds with himself onstage — his unhinged demon-release paralleling Iggy Pop’s self-flagellation. As the B side to 1981’s “Make Room” single, “Lady Shave” offers up a horrific tale of paranoia and tension as Tovey demands “Shave it! Shave it, shave it, shave it!”
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Cocteau Twins
Image Credit: Lisa Haun/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images It seems that elegance has always come naturally to dream-pop icons Cocteau Twins. Singer Elizabeth Fraser flirts and taunts the listener with opulent vocals that nestle within the luxury of their swirling music. Their 1984 album, Treasure, is one of Robert Smith’s favorites — in fact, he listened to it as he was getting ready for his wedding. The ethereal romance of “Pandora” is a heavenly slice of warmth, swapping us up as we wonder what exactly Fraser is singing about. But with a song this transporting, we don’t really care anyway.
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Nine Inch Nails
Image Credit: Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images Every goth loves the 1994 movie The Crow — it’s mandatory. The gloomy Hollywood comic-book blockbuster starring Brandon Lee (who died from a freak accident during filming) hit where it hurt. The soundtrack included the Cure, My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, the Jesus and Mary Chain, and, most important, Nine Inch Nails, who offered up a metallic and gritty cover of Joy Division’s “Dead Souls.” The Crow thrust goth subculture into the mainstream, and nearly three decades later, it’s not a decent goth party till someone dressed like the Crow shows up.
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She Past Away
Image Credit: Achim Raschka (CC BY-SA 3.0) As previously stated, sometimes copycat bands can do a really good job at copycatting. The Turkish darkwave act She Past Away hit the nail on the coffin with their 2010 track “Kasvetli Kutlama,” which also appears on their 2012 album Belirdi Gece. The song pulls inspiration from the mid-1980s symbiosis of strict drum machines, lush guitars, and string synth pads, cues taken from bands such as Clan of Xymox and Sisters of Mercy. She Past Away fit the dramatic goth hyperbole to a black T, and are considered the figureheads of goth’s current ripple of new artists, which include the Belarusian TikTok superstars, Molchat Doma..
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Bauhaus
Image Credit: David Corio/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images Goths have always been big fans of Catholicism — from the dramatic sacramental rituals to the symbolism (have you seen those saint relics?) to the fact that rosary stacks make great necklaces. These two uniquely creepy scenes go together like holy wine and Holy Communion bread. “Stigmata Martyr,” from Bauhaus’ scathing post-punk debut, In The Flat Field, feeds off the necks of the holy as frontman Peter Murphy spews the Latin phrase “In nomine Patris et Filii, et Spiritus Sanсti” (“In the name of the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit”). The perfectly sacrilegious song can be found playing in the 1988 horror movie Night of the Demons, during a choreographed possession scene.
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Depeche Mode
Image Credit: Koh Hasebe/Shinko Music/Getty Images As the greatest synth band to ever synth, Depeche Mode has a special way of making unhealthy addictions and death look real sexy. Their 1986 Black Celebration LP marked a new era in Depeche Mode’s history: Here, they zipped up their black leather and picked up their sledge hammers (”We’ll bash anything to make a sound,” said Dave Gahan), trading their early poppy sound for something darker, heavier, and more extreme. The title track crescendos in anticipation until it becomes a seductive invitation to join Depeche Mode in “another black day” that lasts well into the most devious cavities of the night. I’ll drink to that.
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Johnny Cash
Image Credit: Harry Langdon/Getty Images In what would turn out to be his final days, Johnny Cash made a move that surprised the whole world when he chose to cover Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt.” Cash’s interpretation of the ballad about self-harm and isolation somehow felt emptier and even more depressing than Trent Reznor’s original version. “When I heard the record, I said I can’t do that song, it’s not my style,” said Cash in 2003, the same year of his death. But he did the song so well, it became his own eulogy.
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This Mortal Coil
Want to feel like you’re walking through a haunted house? Well, this nine-minute medley of two Modern English songs, “Sixteen Days / Gathering Dust,” is a vortex of pure ecstasy with its tormented guitars and ominous vocals. Oh, but there’s dread, and plenty of it. Nothing less than a gothic orgasm, the 1983 collaboration between the ghostly, intertwining voices of Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser and Cindytalk’s Gordon Sharp will possess and submerge you in the dark corridors of your soul that you didn’t even know were there.
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Light Asylum
Image Credit: Dimitri Hakke/Redferns/Getty Images “Dark Allies” is for peak dance-floor hours. Light Asylum’s 2010 song has proven to be a timeless classic since its release, largely because of Shannon Funchess’s dynamic voice. Her vocal range is comparable to few (Alison Moyet of Yaz might be one exception), and the duo, which included Bruno Coviello, wrote masterful dark pop that referenced the past but stormed toward the future. A Black woman in an incredibly white genre, Funchess’s roots in the scene go very deep; her first band, which she joined at age 15, had her paying homage to two luminaries. “[We] did a hybrid David Bowie cover of “Ziggy Stardust,” and I tried to sing it like Peter Murphy of Bauhaus. Legends, both of them,” she said.
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Alien Sex Fiend
Image Credit: Kerstin Rodgers/Redferns/Getty Images As an in-house band at the seminal London club the Batcave, Alien Sex Fiend took camp to gruesome extremes. Unlike most artists on this list, Alien Sex Fiend found humor in egregious gore. Part Stooges, part B-movie horror montages, Nik Fiend and his band wore whiteface paint and piled on the black eyeliner, and the stage show incorporated both an oversize banana prop and tangled spiderwebs suspended from the ceiling. The frenetic track “R.I.P.” first appeared on the 1983 Batcave compilation album Young Limbs and Numb Hymns, which featured songs by Specimen, Test Dept., and Sexbeat.
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The Mission
Image Credit: Graham Tucker/Redferns/Getty Images When Wayne Hussey and Craig Adams broke away from the Sisters of Mercy after the band’s 1985 debut, First and Last and Always, no one was ready for what came next. “Wasteland,” the lead song off of the Mission’s first LP, God’s Own Medicine, in 1986, proved that Hussey was a powerhouse all his own. Decked out in a grungy spaghetti-Western look with a wide-brim hat, oversize duster, and conches, the Mission pushed goth fashion in a new direction, and, alongside Fields of the Nephilim, took the music into more rock-based, psychedelic territory during the late 1980s. Put on “Wasteland” and you can almost smell the stench of cloves and patchouli.
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Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Image Credit: Paul Natkin/Getty Images “Red Right Hand” has appeared in everything from Dumb and Dumber (honestly, what?) to the Scream movies, and even became the title track for the TV series Peaky Blinders — making it one of the few goth songs to cross over into the pop-culture mainstream. Perhaps that’s because of its brawny sound, and the tension it builds with steel clangs, organ stabs, and Cave’s snake-charmer purr. Extra bonus points for the guitar presence of Blixa Bargeld, from German industrial crew Einstürzende Neubauten, whose bromance with Cave was very intimate — ”To me, Blixa Bargeld is immutable, godlike … He is my tower of strength,” Cave said in 1997.
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The Cure
Image Credit: David Corio/Redferns/Getty Images The Cure’s landmark 1982 album, Pornography, begins with the line “It doesn’t matter if we all die,” then hurtles straight for the fiery pits of the abyss and never looks back. The album’s centerpiece is “The Hanging Garden,” a foray into the deepest inkinesss of the night with its frenzied tribalistic drums and Robert Smith’s wailing guitars in pitched battle with his own harrowing thoughts. Even Smith, who believes he was only a “footnote” in goth history, admits that “The Hanging Garden” is pretty goth: “There’s a look and a kind of a vibe and an atmosphere, yeah.”
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X-Mal Deutschland
As with the rest of the non-English-speaking artists on this list, we don’t really need to know what they’re saying to love their songs — it’s all in the delivery, especially when they’re shouting their lyrics with menacing German enunciations. “I never considered myself a singer,” said Anja Huwe in 2018. “I was a performer. The words were important to me, but really I [never] gave a shit about people singing along or knowing what I was singing about. It was my thing, my secret.” The Hamburg-based X-Mal Deutschland was, clearly, about attitude: Their track “Qual,” from 1983’s Fetisch, shows the band at its most confident, working a dance-punk hostility that brings to mind a more frantic, agitated version of the Liliput or Rubella Ballet.
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The Damned
Image Credit: Steve Rapport/Getty Images Dave Vanian has lived his whole damned life as a vampire. Before he was a goth icon, the Damned’s vocalist was a gravedigger, and he also just happened to be a dead ringer for Udo Kier in Andy Warhol’s Dracula. The Damned were one of the very first London punk bands, but by the mid-Eighties, they’d shifted to gothic rock. Like the rest of their entire 1985 album, Phantasmagoria, “Shadow of Love” teams with frights, with all its ghouls and creatures that go bump in the night. Announcing their new direction, the band cast goth model Susie Bick in the video for “Shadow of Love” and on Phantasmagoria’s cover art. Bick would eventually marry Nick Cave and start a clothing line named Vampire’s Wife.
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Tones on Tail
Image Credit: Fin Costello/Redferns/Getty Images In 1982, Bauhaus’ guitarist, Daniel Ash, formed Tones on Tail to experiment with more dance-based music (he brought along Bauhaus’ drummer, Kevin Haskins, too). Unsurprisingly, their music became a creepy favorite at the goth club, especially the 1984 song “Christian Says.” The band definitely had an influence on now-disgraced shock rocker Marilyn Manson, who would later rip off the Tones on Tail song “War” for his megahit “The Beautiful People.”
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Killing Joke
Image Credit: Brian Rasic/Getty Images Much like the Damned, Killing Joke cut their fangs in punk before moving into darker territory. The 1985 album Night Time thrust the band into Eighties angst-rock stardom, thanks to beloved frontman Jaz Coleman’s steadfast dedication to reflecting the bleak sterility of the world around him. Coleman based “Love Like Blood” on the writings of Yukio Mishima. “What I liked is [his] concept of writing with blood,” he said. “It’s like absolute sincerity. You are your art, and you have to personify your art.”
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The Velvet Underground
Image Credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images With their all-black look and frontman Lou Reed’s fearless desire to write about dark subject matter no one else would dare touch, the Velvet Underground are goth pioneers. When 1967’s “Venus in Furs” was released, the idea of a song about BDSM and finding pleasure in pain was literally unheard of in pop music. But the Velvet Underground lassoed that taboo and brought it to light. The song’s hypnotic funereal beat and Reed’s dangerously aloof vocals cast a bewitching spell, a hazy grip that never lets go.
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Crystal Castles feat. Robert Smith
Image Credit: Tony Woolliscroft/WireImage In the 21st century, Robert Smith dropped two collaborative bombs on us. First was the 2003 song “All of This” on Blink-182’s self-titled fifth album, and the second was a 2010 cover of the New Wave oldie “Not in Love” with Toronto electro-pop duo Crystal Castles. Originally recorded by 1980s Canadian AOR band Platinum Blonde, “Not in Love” embodies the goth spirit — not only because Smith’s voice brings to mind the most dire corners of the Cure’s discography, but because the song seems to capture a universal, unexpected melancholy. Let’s just cry together, OK?
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Sisters of Mercy
Image Credit: David Redfern/Redferns/Getty Images The Sisters of Mercy hit the magical bullseye with 1985’s First and Last and Always. Their debut LP was a peak moment in post-punk’s transformation into goth, driven by the symmetry of Wayne Hussey’s guitar, their drum machine (which they dubbed Doktor Avalanche), and Andrew Eldritch’s imperious, gravelly vocals. “Run around in the radiation, run around in the acid rain,” Eldritch roars on “Black Planet,” surveying a dystopian landscape so bleak that the only way out is nuclear war. The music video for “Black Planet” set the tone for the Sisters in this era: They looked like a bunch of hot corpses, cruising down California’s Pacific Coast Highway in a red Pontiac GTO first made famous in the 1960s as the Monkeemobile.
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Specimen
Image Credit: Rudi Keuntje/Geisler-Fotopress/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Though they aren’t as widely known as some other bands here, goths owe a whole damn lot to Specimen. Vocalist Olli Wisdom founded the Batcave in 1982 as a venue for Specimen to perform, and it became the seminal goth club. “We weren’t trying to start a movement, or we weren’t trying to set what fashion was going to be. We just wanted to take complete control over the environment in which we presented our band,” said Wisdom in 2016. “It was just right for the zeitgeist — everyone else just wanted it at the same time.” Despite their lack of success outside of the U.K., the glammy “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” from their 1983 mini-LP, Batastrophe, remains a delicious taste of the Batcave’s aesthetic, the sound of death hawks and ripped fishnet.
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London After Midnight
The windswept chorus of “Sacrifice” immediately conjures the image of Nineties goths, draped in their black lace, as they flit across the dance floor. The California-based London After Midnight were the epitome of decadent gothic rock in the Nineties — with frontman Sean Brennan reigning as the scene’s poster boy in the pages of the seminal U.S. goth publication Propaganda Magazine. On “Sacrifice,” his echoey voice is distant — almost like he’s fading away in front of our eyes — as he sings about his martyrdom for his true love. “The reaper is at my door now, he’s come to take me home,” he warns as colossal string-synths swell around him. With his blond teased lion’s mane and androgynous cat-eye makeup, Brennan was scotch taped on every teen goth’s bedroom wall alongside his one-time bandmate, John Koviak.
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Peter Murphy
Image Credit: Ebet Roberts/Redferns/Getty Images Peter Murphy’s cheekbones were so sharp that one might wonder if “Cuts You Up” is a warning about getting too close to their angled edges. This late-Eighties alternative favorite from his 1989 LP, Deep, resplendent with its acoustic guitar and violin, evokes a vampiric romance like no other song ever could. That same year, Murphy remarked he would like to play a vampire in the film adaptation of Anne Rice’s novel The Vampire Lestat — but his only claim to cinema fame after his appearance in The Hunger was an unfortunate cameo in the first Twilight movie.
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Sex Gang Children
Image Credit: Erica Echenberg/Redferns/Getty Images In 1994, Ian Astbury of the Cult claimed that goth came from Sex Gang Children’s vocalist, Andi Sex Gang: “I used to call him the Gothic Goblin, because he was a little guy and he’s dark and he lived in a building in Brixton called Visigoth Towers,” Astbury said. “So he was the little Gothic Goblin and his followers were Goths.” Believable, really, since Andi’s voice brings to mind the screeches of demons, a unique talent that’s especially acute in Sex Gang Children’s erotic 1983 career high point, “Sebastiane.”
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Christian Death
Image Credit: Kerstin Rodgers/Redferns/Getty Images Remember all that Catholic stuff? Christian Death emphasized religion as a concept, both in their music and in their live shows. Singer Rozz Williams was once crucified onstage — ouch. As a movement that ran parallel to the U.K.’s post-punk scene in the late Seventies and early Eighties, Los Angeles death rock was inspired by the decrepit remains of Hollywood glamour. “Spiritual Cramp,” from the 1982 album Only Theatre of Pain, was an irreverent slice of Williams’ performance art that pushed boundaries into blasphemous territory with lyrics like “Walking on water in a sea of incest/I’ve got an image of Jesus embedded on my chest.”
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The Cult
Image Credit: Brian Rasic/Getty Images Many claim that 1986 was the year when the decline of the first wave of goth began. It was the moment when the subculture crept out of the tomb and into the sterile spotlight of the alt-rock mainstream. The Cult’s journey is a good metaphor for this transition; with each step away from goth, the band shortened its name — from Southern Death Cult to Death Cult to the Cult — eventually ricocheting into stardom with the “stadium goth” of “She Sells Sanctuary.” Purists scoffed, but their give-no-fucks attitude was undeniable, and several bands followed in the Cult’s footsteps. The bat was finally out of the bag.
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Iggy Pop
Image Credit: Richard E. Aaron/Redferns/Getty Images Iggy Pop and his producer David Bowie predicted the future with “Funtime,” from his excellent 1977 album, The Idiot. When Iggy sang the line “Last night I was down in the lab, talkin’ to Dracula and his crew,’ over the song’s cavernous production and lachrymose rock & roll swagger, it was almost as if he was giving marching orders to the goth subculture that would come into fruition just a year or so later. The song was also featured in goth-grail movie The Hunger. Deepening the bleak allure of Pop’s finest solo LP, Ian Curtis of Joy Division had The Idiot on his stereo when he hung himself in 1980.
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The Birthday Party
Image Credit: David Corio/Redferns/Getty Images The goth word jumble of the Birthday Party’s 1981 single “Release the Bats” is unlike anything else in all of music: “Sex horror, sex bat, sex horror, sex vampire,” Nick Cave yelps, on the edge of hysteria. Nick Launey, the song’s producer, said this of his time working with the band: “They walked in looking like they hadn’t slept in days, all smartly dressed in black like they had just come from church but maybe the church was a ruin with rats, and they hadn’t washed in weeks. I will say that recording a song called ‘Release the Bats’ with people who looked like vampires was pretty fucking exciting!”
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Virgin Prunes
Image Credit: Erica Echenberg/Redferns/Getty Images The Irish curiosity Virgin Prunes were more performance artists than anything, and their concerts became grand spectacles with props and storylines that included pigs’ heads, candelabras, and corroded doll parts. Their early albums were mainly full of one-take chaotic improvisations, but their 1982 LP, …If I Die, I Die, honed in on the strong musicianship behind the theatrics (with the help of producer Colin Newman, of art-punk icons Wire). “In retrospect …If I Die, I Die is a wonderful album; it has a peculiar foreverness about it,” recalled singer and primary member Gavin Friday. The anthemic cackle of “Baby Turns Blue” feels just as odd today as it did 40 years ago. Give me money, give me sex, give me food and cigarettes!
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Sex Beat
Image Credit: Martyn Goodacre/Getty Images Perhaps unwittingly, “Sexbeat” became goth’s theme song. “Some wear leather, some wear lace. Some wear makeup on their face!” Hamish MacDonald insists as he lists off all the diverse attributes of the subculture. “Some are poor, some are rich. Some so lonely, and some they bitch!” The bare bones song, with its punchy bassline and splashy snare, first appeared on 1983’s Batcave compilation, Young Limbs and Numb Hymns, and has since become a standard on the goth club circuit. MacDonald was also a resident DJ at the Batcave, so rest assured he knew exactly what he was singing about.
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Danse Society
Image Credit: Kerstin Rodgers/Redferns/Getty Images In 1984, the Danse Society released their album Heaven Is Waiting. It had all the hallmarks of goth, with its atmospheric synthesizers and melancholic guitars that were sleek and awash in silky, chilling darkness. The title track could stoke the emotions of even the most hard-hearted listener, and it didn’t hurt that baby-faced Steve Rawlings (who was once offered the lead role in a Jim Morrison biopic because of his good looks) could steal those same hearts with his charmingly disinterested vibe and bad-boy black-leather style. Playing hard to get always works.
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Joy Division
Image Credit: Rob Verhorst/Redferns/Getty Images There are no pleasantries here. Released months after the tragic suicide of Joy Division’s vocalist Ian Curtis in August 1980, “Atmosphere” was (and remains) incredibly heavy. “A lot of people say it’s their favorite Joy Division song, but it’s not mine,” writes bassist Peter Hook in Unknown Pleasures. “It reminds me too much of Ian, like it’s his death march or something, and it figures that it’s one of the most popular songs to play at funerals.” Hook’s trademark bass guitar forges onward as stoic synthesizer chords sweep around Curtis’ bass-baritone voice. Accompanied by Anton Corbjin’s stoic music video, with its cloaked and faceless figures, the song suggests nothing so much as a funerary procession, as Curtis sings, “Don’t walk away, in silence.”
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Screamin’ Jay Hawkins
Image Credit: Charlie Gillett/Redferns/Getty Images Even though goth didn’t come around for another 25 years or so, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins kindled the flame with his diabolical 1956 hit “I Put a Spell on You.” The Cleveland blues artist recorded the song during a drunken stupor in which his ravenous screeches and growls went beyond intense emotion to evoke the supernatural. Hawkins’ live performances of the song (which didn’t make it to the charts until it appeared on the very not-goth Fifty Shades of Grey from 2015) were mesmerizing to witness. Borrowing from horror’s most beloved camp characters, he rose out of a coffin, wearing a flowing cape and holding aloft a juju stick topped with a cigarette-smoking skull.
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Sisters of Mercy
Image Credit: Brian Rasic/Getty Images Picking a best Sisters of Mercy song isn’t easy (the nearly 10-minute version of “Lucretia My Reflection” is vital during club nights when the DJ needs a bathroom break). But “Dominion,” from their 1987 album, Floodlands, is the band’s absolute peak, a towering achievement of goth-pop dance-fop bombast, full of booming Eighties drum production and a chorus big enough to fill an empty cathedral; the seven-minute album version tacked on the Bob Dylan-quoting “Mother Russia,” where Andrew Eldritch cheered for the Soviets to win the Cold War (a pretty bold move in 1987). Bassist Patricia Morrison (who would become goth royalty when she married the Damned’s Dave Vanian) had joined the Sisters in the mid-1980s, and with her commanding vocals, black pointy fingernails, bushel of backcombed hair, and blood-stained red lips, she added a severe yet oh-so-feminine element to the band’s aesthetic — especially in the music video for “Dominion,” which includes an epic horse stampede through the alleys of ancient Jordan.
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David Bowie
Image Credit: Michael Putland/Getty Images Goth would not exist without David Bowie — and if goth somehow did exist sans Bowie, it’d be quite dull. It was Bowie who instantaneously changed the lives of goth’s progenitors with this July 6th, 1972, Top of the Pops broadcast of “Starman” from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. The whole goth gang — including Siouxsie Sioux, Robert Smith, Daniel Ash, and David J of Bauhaus — witnessed Bowie, the androgynous alien in his gold-accented jumpsuit and burgundy hair, performing those three minutes of transformative bliss. David J wrote about that moment in his book, Who Killed Mister Moonlight: “Bowie’s visitation was a startling explosion of colour and excitement — a galvanizing shock of beauty.” Ten years later, Bauhaus found chart success with their cover of “Ziggy Stardust.”
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The Cure
Image Credit: Paul Natkin/WireImage When you’re feeling down, Disintegration is there to hold your hand and keep you company: It’s music for the darkest nights full of the most dismal thoughts. In fact, Melody Maker noted that the Cure’s 1989 masterpiece was “about as much fun as losing a limb.” Even though Disintegration was inspired by the horror of Robert Smith’s impending 30th birthday — ”It’s that sense of everything falling apart” — the album proved to be the literal disintegration of the Cure, as Smith took control of their music and original member Lol Tolhurst was evicted from the band. The resulting tumult is found in every recess of the album (the only glimmer of hope is “Lovesong,” and even that ain’t too cheery), and it’s especially powerful on the towering title track, an eight-minute ode to heartbreak that begins with the sound of shattered glass and only gets more intense from there. Smith’s sense of madness keeps increasing as the song reaches its apex, making for, arguably, his greatest performance as a singer. Here’s to sweet, sweet sorrow.
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Siouxsie and the Banshees
Image Credit: David Corio/Redferns/Getty Images If there ever was a soundtrack for Halloween, Juju would be it — heck, there’s even a song titled “Halloween” on the 1981 album by Siouxsie and the Banshees. But the lead single, “Spellbound,” takes the red-velvet cake, with the swirling, maniacal guitar work of newly joined member John McGeoch, Budgie’s thunderous drumming, and Siouxsie Sioux singing about laughter cracking through the walls and spinning entranced in a rag-doll dance. “I’ve always thought that one of our greatest strengths was our ability to craft tension in music and subject matter,” said Siouxsie Sioux. “Many goth bands have imitated Juju, but they simply ended up diluting it.” Spooky, but never over the top, “Spellbound” is the witchiest of them all.
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Bauhaus
Image Credit: Fin Costello/Redferns/Getty Images 1979’s “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” was the first song Bauhaus ever recorded: “It was as if we had been playing this strange song for years,” wrote bassist David J Haskins in his autobiography. “All the parts fitted perfectly into place, and all of a sudden we had a fully formed nine-minute epic on our hands. Magic out of the blue!” The slow burn of reverberated rimshots and Daniel Ash’s dub-inspired guitar work boils with tension, and when Peter Murphy sings the haunting lines “The bats have left the bell tower, the victims have been bled,” it immediately brings to mind a vision of shadowy monsters lingering just around the corner. The song also soundtracks the six most important minutes in goth history: the opening sequence of The Hunger, in which David Bowie plays a sex-starved vampire stalking his prey as “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” echoes through a subterranean club. The night life of the eternally undead never looked so enticing.