Rockpedia
Rock branch Full entry · 1978

Post-punk

Emerged 1978 Origin United Kingdom Subgenres 7 Vocals Sung
Heaviness
3
Speed
5
Melody
6

Sung. Melodic singing throughout.

In short

Punk asking what comes next: melodic bass up front, dry guitar, space and cold. Possibly the most fertile branch in all of rock.

How it sounds

  • The bass carries the melody; the guitar plays short, dry figures with chorus or flanger.
  • Dry-toned drums with plenty of space in the mix — you can hear the room.
  • Irregular structures, cold dynamics, abstract or political lyrics.

Hear what that means

Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. Every second here is the uploader's own, read from the recording's tracklist.

The specifics

Tempo
110-150 bpm
Song length
3-6 min
Tuning
Standard, and the guitar is frequently played high on the neck in single notes rather than chords — thin, trebly and deliberately unsupportive.
Production
Cold and spatial. Martin Hannett's work on the defining record put every instrument in a different acoustic space, recorded the drums piece by piece, and used digital delay before anyone else had one — the production is the band's third member.
Written about
Alienation, Industrial decline, Consumption and politics, Interiority

What each part is doing

  • Guitar Angular single-note lines with no distortion and no power chords, often high on the neck, leaving the bottom of the arrangement deliberately empty for the bass.
  • Bass The lead instrument, and the genre's clearest break with punk. Played high, melodic and forward in the mix — Peter Hook's parts are the tunes people remember.
  • Drums Metronomic, tom-heavy and treated: gated, delayed and frequently recorded drum by drum. Post-punk is where the kit stops being a performance and becomes a sound.
  • Vocals Spoken, chanted or sung flat, low in the register and mixed inside the track rather than over it — the opposite of punk's shouted-over-the-top delivery.

What it isn't

That post-punk means 'after punk' chronologically. It is a specific set of decisions rather than a period: strip the distortion, hand the melody to the bass, treat the studio as an instrument, and take influence from dub, funk and the avant-garde rather than from rock and roll. Wire's first record came out in 1977, the same year as the Sex Pistols' — the genre is contemporaneous with the thing it is supposedly after, and was made largely by the same audience.

Told apart from

  • Punk rock Punk plays fast barre chords and shouts. Post-punk is the same people eighteen months later removing the distortion, promoting the bass and slowing down.
  • Gothic rock Goth is post-punk's darker wing hardened into a scene, with chorused guitar, drum machines and an explicit aesthetic. The music overlaps almost entirely at the start.
  • New wave New wave is the pop-facing side of the same moment — keyboards, hooks and a record deal. The bands were frequently on the same bills.
  • No wave No wave is the New York extreme: atonal, confrontational and briefly, deliberately unlistenable. Post-punk kept the song; no wave did not.

The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.

History

After 1978, the bands that came out of punk refused to repeat the formula. Joy Division used space and reverb as material, Gang of Four imported funk and Marxist theory, Wire reduced everything to geometry. This branch has the highest number of descendants in the whole tree: goth, new wave, industrial, coldwave and most of what happened after 2001.

Descended from

Branches into

Siblings on this branch

Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree

  • Krautrock 1.0 apart by rating · meets it at Rock
  • Math rock 1.0 apart by rating · meets it at Rock
  • Space rock 1.4 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.