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‘The body was the drums, the brain was the synthesiser’: darkwave, the gothic genre lighting up pop

Emerging from the gloomiest corners of the 80s underground, this synth-driven, nihilistic sound is now getting billions of streams. Its past and present creators explain why they turn to the dark side

The two-minute burst of pulsating, icy synth-pop – depicting an objectified and emotionally disengaged love affair – has been sticking out a mile in the charts next to Sabrina Carpenter, Kendrick Lamar and the ranks of earnestly strummed acoustic guitars. Gut was even in the earliest incarnation of Einstürzende Neubauten, a band who rejected the gloss of the era perhaps more vehemently than any by pilfering from building sites to make instruments, recording music under motorways, and drilling through walls at shows. Similarly, the Belarus outfit Molchat Doma, signed to the relatively cult underground label Sacred Bones, got huge when their music began to accompany a TikTok fashion challenge, as well as numerous Soviet-era videos of brutalist architecture and the like.

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