Post-rock
Instrumental. Usually no vocals at all.
In short
Rock instruments used for texture and crescendo rather than for choruses. The song climbs for ten minutes and detonates once.
How it sounds
- A long crescendo: the piece starts near silence and ends in a wall of sound.
- Guitars with delay and reverb used for texture rather than riffs.
- Almost always instrumental, with pieces running eight to twenty minutes.
Hear what that means
- The build, announced by the drums
Explosions in the Sky - The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place
Nine and a half minutes, no words, and the whole narrative carried by one instrument entering and leaving. Nothing else has to change for the song to turn a corner.
Open on YouTube - The quiet before the loud
Nearly six minutes of one near-silent figure, and then the whole band at once with no warning. Played loud enough to hear the quiet part, the entry is genuinely alarming - which is why post-rock records are mastered so wide.
Open on YouTube - A voice used as an instrument
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - F♯A♯∞
No authorised upload of this record exists.
A spoken fragment over strings and tape hiss, treated as one more texture rather than as a narrator. No authorised upload of this exists, so the link opens a search - the record is worth the extra click.
Search YouTube for it
Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. Each opens at the start of the recording. 1 of 3 has no video yet and opens a search.
The specifics
- Tempo
- 60-140 bpm
- Song length
- 7-15 min
- Tuning
- Standard and clean, with the distortion held back so that it can arrive once, at a point the whole song has been arranged around.
- Production
- Wide, patient and largely unprocessed. The recording's job is to keep a very quiet passage and a very loud one on the same record without compressing the distance between them.
- Written about
- Mostly none — the great majority is instrumental, and the track titles carry whatever argument there is
What each part is doing
- Guitar Arpeggios through delay, two or three parts interlocking rather than one part with accompaniment. Chords are voiced to leave the third out, so nothing commits to major or minor.
- Bass Frequently the lead voice in the quiet sections, and the instrument that signals a change is coming by moving before anyone else does.
- Drums The genre's actual narrator. The build is announced by the kit — a ride cymbal, then a snare pattern, then everything — and no other instrument has to change for the song to turn.
- Voice Usually absent. Where it appears it is a sample, a field recording or a spoken fragment, treated as one more instrument rather than as a singer.
What it isn't
That post-rock means the loud-quiet crescendo. That form is one solution the genre arrived at around 1997 and then over-used, not its definition. The original idea was narrower and stranger — rock instruments used for something other than rock, with the guitar treated as a timbre rather than a riff machine — and the earliest records under the name are closer to dub and minimalism than to any build-and-release. The crescendo became a cliché because it worked, which is a different fact about it.
Told apart from
- Post-metal / atmospheric sludge Post-metal is this form built on a sludge riff and a scream — Isis and Neurosis where post-rock has Mogwai. Same architecture, metal materials.
- Progressive rock Prog shows you the difficulty. Post-rock hides it: the time signature is usually plain 4/4 and all the interest is in dynamics, which is the harder trick to notice.
- Space rock Space rock repeats to induce a trance and stays at one level. Post-rock repeats to build tension it intends to break.
- Math rock Math rock shares the clean interlocking guitars and the odd metres, and points them at agitation rather than release. It is post-rock that refuses to resolve.
The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.
History
The term was coined by the critic Simon Reynolds for music made with rock instruments but organised by other logic. Mogwai and Godspeed You! Black Emperor brought the extreme dynamics; Explosions in the Sky gave the genre its film-score format. Post-metal is the branch that applies the same structure with heavy amplification.
Descended from
Siblings on this branch
Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree
- Desert rock 1.4 apart by rating · meets it at Rock
- Gothic rock 1.4 apart by rating · meets it at Rock
- Shoegaze 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.