Gothic music

This article is about the music style. For other uses of the term Goth, please see Goth (disambiguation).

Gothic music or gothic rock or gothic or goth is a style of popular music, often with an esthetic and dark atmosphere, belonging to rock music and often classified as a particular branch of new wave; it separated from post punk in late 1970s. Some representative artists of the earliest Gothic music are Joy Division, Bauhaus, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Cure, Christian Death, The Sisters Of Mercy, Fields of the Nephilim, Clan of Xymox, Xmal Deutschland, Virgin Prunes, possibly Killing Joke or Nick Cave and so on. With meditation and retrospection, Gothic musicians always try to find a different way of thinking about life, like trying to find beauty in life, pain and death.

Because Goths tend to be non-violent, pacifistic and tolerant, the style of Gothic music is elegant and gloomy, sometimes quiet, sometimes more energetic, combined with classical, metal and electric elements. People can feel something unique such as misty voice and dissociable chord hunting in the background.

There are many subtribes in Gothic music such as:

• Ethereal Voices (Cocteau Twins, Ophelia's Dream, Black tape for a Blue Girl),
• Darkwave (Switchblade Symphony, Love Is Colder Than Death, Sopor Aeternus & The Ensemble Of Shadows),
• Neo-classic (Autumn Tears, Ataraxia, Stoa, Rajna, Lacrimosa),
• Industrial Rock (The Leech, Nine Inch Nails, Vanity Beach),
• Goth Metal (Tristania, Type O Negative, My Dying Bride, Sirenia),
• Goth-pop (H.I.M, Evanescence, The 69 Eyes)
• and so forth.

The first use of the term "Goth" in its meaning of a 20th/21st-century cultural movement is believed to have been on a British Broadcasting Commission (BBC) TV program. Anthony H. Wilson, manager of Joy Division, described the band as Gothic compared with the pop mainstream. Then the name stuck.