RESEARCH & DESTROY
POST-PUNK
Also known as: New Musick
With its roots in the mid to late 1970s, post-punk emerged alongside the initial Punk Rock explosion in the United Kingdom. While retaining punk rock's focus on trimming away excess, post-punk tends to place more importance on creating atmosphere and usually has more complex songwriting than punk rock. Musicians tend to be much more experimental, often incorporating influences from Dub, Funk, Krautrock, Art Rock, Experimental music, and Electronic music. Unlike New Wave, its more pop-based counterpart which emerged around the same time, post-punk often deals with more serious subject matter.
Stylistically, the genre has a general backbone consisting of a prominent, pulsating sound and rhythm section of bass and drums. On top of this arrangement are atmospheric, spiky, interweaving lead guitar lines commonly described as "angular", creating a cold and melancholic tone with extensive use of minor key melodies. Vocals tend to be menacing, monotone and in some cases, even robotic.
Public Image Ltd, formed after the implosion of Sex Pistols, are often heralded as the first post-punk band, although artists in the New York punk scene like Television had been much earlier playing an experimental style of punk rock that would later be classified by some as post-punk. Other (mostly British) bands followed, including Joy Division, Talking Heads, Gang of Four, and Wire and the genre came into its own in the late 70s, reaching its underground peak in the early to mid 80s.
Post-punk's underground popularity helped create many offshoots. Its sorrowful atmosphere was merged with increasing theatrics and influences from Glam Rock to create Gothic Rock, which bands like The Cure and The Sisters of Mercy leveraged to great chart success in the late 80s and helped form the pervasive Goth subculture. The bouncy syncopation and overall funkiness of post-punk bass is exploited to its maximum in Dance-Punk which saw mainstream popularity in the mid 2000s. Coldwave, popular in continental Europe and especially France, was a colder, more methodical affair which took influence from the avant-garde and science fiction. No Wave was a New York-based movement which took influence from post-punk and punk rock but focused on experimentation above all else. Post-punk's first wave saw a decline in underground popularity after the mid 80s as it was subsumed by new wave, gothic rock, Alternative Rock, and Alternative Dance, all genres which took heavy influence from the original post-punk movement.
After a period of declining interest in the 1990s, a mainstream Post-Punk Revival emerged in the early 2000s centred around the New York City scene, with bands like The Strokes and Interpol spearheading a movement which took influence earlier post-punk bands but had an increased focus on indie rock and pop song structures. This approach allowed the revival to quickly spread worldwide, with bands outside New York joining the fray, including Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party. The movement was incredibly successful with multiple bands obtaining chart hits and was heralded by publications such as NME as a "new rock revival", although it ultimately proved to be short-lived as other strains of indie rock took over by the mid 2000s. An underground resurgence of interest in the genre developed in the early 2010s with bands like Preoccupations and Protomartyr eschewing the earlier revival's focus on accessibility and returning to the punk and experimental ethos of first wave post-punk.
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POST-PUNK
Also known as: New Musick
With its roots in the mid to late 1970s, post-punk emerged alongside the initial Punk Rock explosion in the United Kingdom. While retaining punk rock's focus on trimming away excess, post-punk tends to place more importance on creating atmosphere and usually has more complex songwriting than punk rock. Musicians tend to be much more experimental, often incorporating influences from Dub, Funk, Krautrock, Art Rock, Experimental music, and Electronic music. Unlike New Wave, its more pop-based counterpart which emerged around the same time, post-punk often deals with more serious subject matter.
Stylistically, the genre has a general backbone consisting of a prominent, pulsating sound and rhythm section of bass and drums. On top of this arrangement are atmospheric, spiky, interweaving lead guitar lines commonly described as "angular", creating a cold and melancholic tone with extensive use of minor key melodies. Vocals tend to be menacing, monotone and in some cases, even robotic.
Public Image Ltd, formed after the implosion of Sex Pistols, are often heralded as the first post-punk band, although artists in the New York punk scene like Television had been much earlier playing an experimental style of punk rock that would later be classified by some as post-punk. Other (mostly British) bands followed, including Joy Division, Talking Heads, Gang of Four, and Wire and the genre came into its own in the late 70s, reaching its underground peak in the early to mid 80s.
Post-punk's underground popularity helped create many offshoots. Its sorrowful atmosphere was merged with increasing theatrics and influences from Glam Rock to create Gothic Rock, which bands like The Cure and The Sisters of Mercy leveraged to great chart success in the late 80s and helped form the pervasive Goth subculture. The bouncy syncopation and overall funkiness of post-punk bass is exploited to its maximum in Dance-Punk which saw mainstream popularity in the mid 2000s. Coldwave, popular in continental Europe and especially France, was a colder, more methodical affair which took influence from the avant-garde and science fiction. No Wave was a New York-based movement which took influence from post-punk and punk rock but focused on experimentation above all else. Post-punk's first wave saw a decline in underground popularity after the mid 80s as it was subsumed by new wave, gothic rock, Alternative Rock, and Alternative Dance, all genres which took heavy influence from the original post-punk movement.
After a period of declining interest in the 1990s, a mainstream Post-Punk Revival emerged in the early 2000s centred around the New York City scene, with bands like The Strokes and Interpol spearheading a movement which took influence earlier post-punk bands but had an increased focus on indie rock and pop song structures. This approach allowed the revival to quickly spread worldwide, with bands outside New York joining the fray, including Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party. The movement was incredibly successful with multiple bands obtaining chart hits and was heralded by publications such as NME as a "new rock revival", although it ultimately proved to be short-lived as other strains of indie rock took over by the mid 2000s. An underground resurgence of interest in the genre developed in the early 2010s with bands like Preoccupations and Protomartyr eschewing the earlier revival's focus on accessibility and returning to the punk and experimental ethos of first wave post-punk.
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