Gothic rock
Sung. Melodic singing throughout.
In short
Post-punk with reverb, chorused guitar and a baritone voice. Its aesthetic passes straight into gothic metal and doom.
How it sounds
- Guitar with chorus and flanger, thin and cold, drenched in reverb.
- Melodic bass up front; some bands use a drum machine instead of a drummer.
- Baritone vocals, often declaimed, with literary and funereal lyrics.
Hear what that means
- The chorus pedal
The signal split and one half detuned, through a very long reverb. It is the identifying sound of the genre, and the tuning underneath it is entirely ordinary.
Open on YouTube - Bass carries the tune from 26:06
The Sisters of Mercy - Floodland
A drum machine, a forward bass playing the melody, and a baritone delivering it with complete seriousness. The machine under the human voice is the effect.
Open on YouTube at 26:06 - Where it starts
Post-punk's space and dread with an aesthetic attached and held. Musically this is barely separable from what Joy Division were doing; the difference is that goth chose a look and stayed.
Open on YouTube
Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. 1 of 3 is cued to a second read from the upload's own tracklist.
The specifics
- Tempo
- 90-130 bpm
- Song length
- 4-7 min
- Tuning
- Standard, with the guitar run through a chorus pedal and a long reverb — the effect chain is more identifying than the tuning, which is ordinary.
- Production
- Cavernous. Long reverbs on everything, the drums frequently a machine, and the bass mixed forward. The space in the recording is the genre's principal instrument.
- Written about
- Death and decay, Religion, ambivalently, Desire, Romantic literature
What each part is doing
- Guitar Chorused and reverbed rather than distorted, playing high arpeggios and single-note figures. The chorus pedal — splitting the signal and detuning one half — is the sound of the genre.
- Bass The lead melodic instrument, played high with a pick and mixed forward, carrying the tune the guitar is decorating.
- Drums Frequently a drum machine, and deliberately so: the mechanical insistence under a very human vocal is part of the effect. Where a human plays, the toms dominate.
- Vocals Low, declamatory baritone, delivered with theatrical seriousness. Goth is one of the few rock genres where a deep male voice is the convention rather than the exception.
What it isn't
That goth is defined by its subject matter. Death and romance are conventions rather than requirements, and the genre is much more reliably identified by production: chorused guitar, forward bass, drum machine, and reverb long enough to place the record in a building rather than a room. Plenty of goth songs are about very ordinary things, and they still sound unmistakably like goth.
Told apart from
- Post-punk Goth is post-punk's darker wing hardened into a scene with an aesthetic. Musically they overlap almost entirely at the start; the difference is that goth chose a look and stayed there.
- Deathrock Deathrock is the American parallel, faster and closer to punk, with horror imagery played more theatrically and less romantically.
- Coldwave / minimal wave Coldwave is the European synth-led wing, colder and more electronic, with the guitar frequently absent altogether.
- Gothic metal Gothic metal takes this atmosphere onto the metal branch by way of doom — down-tuned, much heavier, and usually with a female lead voice.
The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.
History
Bauhaus released a nine-minute single about an actor from vampire films in 1979 and invented a genre by accident. The Sisters of Mercy added the drum machine and the sunglasses; The Cure added melody. The aesthetic — make-up, black, funereal romance — passes directly into gothic metal, doom and symphonic black metal.
Descended from
Branches into
Siblings on this branch
Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree
- Shoegaze identical ratings · meets it at Rock
- Neo-psychedelia 1.0 apart by rating · meets it at Rock
- Alternative rock 1.0 apart by rating · meets it at Rock
Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim.