Goth is back and for good reasons: Inside the gothic revival
From brand new bands to the Tim Burton revival, a fresh generation is discovering goth and making it their own. Ed Power investigates what goth looks like in the 2020s – and why it’s back now
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Dressed in all black and grey and wearing a vintage hat at an angle, Jojo Orme, also known as Heartworms, looks every inch the new goth on the block. As the highly acclaimed singer and producer reels off a list of influences that include Tim Burton and The Cure, she explains she is happy to be associated with the g-word – a genre that Gen Z has embraced with macabre gusto.
“The baroque, Edgar Allan Poe’s poems, the imagery of being alone. The pain. The punishment,” says Orme, listing melodramatic ingredients poured into her dark and stormy debut album, Glutton for Punishment. “Goth can evolve. It doesn’t just have to be what it was in the 1980s.”
Goth – loosely defined as bleak, atmospheric music with an element of the ethereal – was for decades synonymous with leather trousers, dry ice and theatrically gloomy practitioners such as The Sisters of Mercy and The Cure. Those associations are still valid, as we were reminded when the Cure’s magnificent fourteenth album, Songs of a Lost World, mooched straight to the top of the charts in November.
But, as Orme says, 21st-century goth moves in mysterious ways and has been championed by a younger generation, born too late to recall the heyday of Siouxsie Sioux or The Sisters of Mercy’s Andrew Eldritch. Goth’s hinterland is vast for Gen Z: it encompasses both the pop-positive onslaught of Glutton for Punishment and the alien folk music of Welsh-language trio Tristwch Y Fenywod, whose self-titled album was one of 2024’s most surprising.
Even beyond these more stereotypically “goth” artefacts, its influence is everywhere. You can hear it in the doomy new LP from indie songwriter Sharon Van Etten, who walked down the aisle to The Cure’s “Plainsong” and who, in the video to recent single “Afterlife”, is a dead ringer for goth icon Siouxsie Sioux. It’s in the Eurovision-slaying “Ouija pop” of Irish singer Bambie Thug and the primordial folk-horror of Nordic-German ensemble Heilung.
Beyond music, the goth resurrection has been pushed onwards by the Tim Burton revival that has seen Wednesday conquer Netflix and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice work its black magic at the box office (both starring Jenna Ortega, It-girl of 21st-century gothdom). Robert Eggers’s recent remake of Nosferatu, for its part, channelled the essence of goth via Bill Skarsgård’s show-stopping moustache and a performance by Lily-Rose Depp that could have come straight from a 1983 Siouxsie and the Banshees photoshoot.
Lily Rose Depp in ‘Nosferatu’ (Focus Features LLC)Goth is having a moment in fashion, too, as Vogue highlighted last year when moved to declare: “Very Mad, Very Maudlin, Very Macabre: It’s Showtime for the Goth Revival”. The magazine defined the look as “anything as long as it’s rooted in a celebration of darkness”. Billie Eilish, Southern Gothic singer Ethel Cain and rapper Doja Cat were among the pioneers, leading Vogue to proclaim: “... the bats have once again left the belfry; welcome to the season of the witch.”
Like most current trends, the great goth revival is partly a social media phenomenon. During the Covid-19 pandemic, dozens of GothTok accounts sprang up on TikTok as Gen Zers celebrated their love of goth music, fashion and literature online. Follow the “gothgirl” hashtag and you’ll disappear down a virtual warren that leads to all sorts of bleak and eerie places. Here, influencers done up like Brandon Lee in The Crow (or FKA Twigs in the 2024 Crow reboot) offer tips such as “use velvet to add a gothic touch to workwear.”
Southern Gothic: Ethel Cain in artwork for her recent release ‘Perverts’ ( Silken Weinberg)“During the pandemic especially, young internet users like me – I was 17 at the time – got [drawn] into a digital world of [goth],” says 22-year-old Angela Rossi of Italian label Gothic World Records. “It’s making a comeback because these subcultures were never really dead, and social media helped younger generations dig back into these things.”
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Sign upAs Rossi says, goth hasn’t exactly returned from the beyond the grave. While the 1980s are regarded as its glory years, the genre has always bubbled away in the background, like an introvert at a party. In the 1990s, it acquired a cyberpunk aesthetic with The Matrix and the future-shock music of Nine Inch Nails while retaining a dark and miserable core. That was also the decade of the first Whitby Goth Weekend – a twice-annual celebration of goth in the North Yorkshire fishing village where Count Dracula makes landfall in Bram Stoker’s novel – which is going strong to this day.
One reason for its remarkable longevity is that goth has always been about more than simply music or fashion. As a genre, it holds a mirror up to its time and place. In the 1980s, its popularity coincided with global uncertainty, political extremism and the trauma of potential nuclear annihilation. In her 2023 chronicling of the genre, Season of the Witch, journalist Cathi Unsworth goes so far as to draw a line between goth pioneer Siouxsie Sioux and political disruptor Margaret Thatcher. To paraphrase her book, both were lower-middle-class women from the vast grey nowhere of British suburbia remaking a male-dominated world in their image. Each was a product of a Britain sloughing off the old and becoming, for better or worse, something new.
Today, society is arguably more troubled than it has been since the 1980s. As in the early days of The Cure and The Sisters of Mercy, world peace is under threat. But instead of nuclear destruction, the existential danger keeping young people awake at night is looming environmental collapse. That may explain why many new goth bands look to the natural world for inspiration.
As in the early days of The Cure and The Sisters of Mercy, world peace is under threat ( Getty Images)“From a kind of environmental perspective, we’re all interested in nature worship. Seeing the world descend into ecological crisis now – it’s hard not to be focused on a sense of mourning for that,” says Leila Lygad, drummer with Tristwch Y Fenywod, that Welsh-language all-female trio. “Tristwch Y Fenywod” translates as “The Sadness of Women”, and their sinister, haunting songs are a black valentine to underdogs and outsiders – people who feel excluded, whether that be because of their gender or their use of Welsh.
“Goth should always represent the underdog and the outsider,” says Lygad. “The side of culture neglected by the status quo for whatever reason. It was important that we tried to champion that minority. It’s not necessarily about a genetic or a cultural heritage – ideologically, we’re quite against nationalism. But we want it to represent something that is often othered, like femininity, queer identity.”
Tristwch Y Fenywod also follow in the tradition of goth’s esoteric wing, the hallucinatory likes of Dead Can Dance and Cocteau Twins (early stars of the 4AD label) whose music had the Narnia-like quality of taking the listener far beyond their everyday experiences.
We want it to represent something that is often othered, like femininity, queer identity
Tristwch Y Fenywod drummer Leila Lygad
“I grew up in north Wales. For me, the sound of a lot of those 4AD bands… it’s the same feeling I get when I’m in those places,” says lead vocalist Gwretsien Ferch Lisbeth. “I remember the first time I heard the Cocteau Twins. I had already moved away from north Wales – it transported me back to all these places from my childhood. The language was an everyday part of my experience living there: there is something about it... the historical aspect of it being an older language than English and having a cultural mythology that takes you quite far back into the history of Britain… It has this mystical quality that is very evocative.”
Spooky: Heartworms in artwork for her latest single, ‘Mad Catch’ (Gilbert Trejo/Press)The other incontrovertible truth about goth is that, in a world beset by political and economic uncertainty, there is something hugely comforting about grandiose, melodramatic music. Turning up the volume on the Heartworms album or Tristwch Y Fenywod’s debut is like curling up with a good horror book while a storm creaks and rumbles outside. They have a deliciously doomy sensibility that you can wrap around yourself like a dark, heavy blanket. It’s a feeling that will have been as familiar to the original goth fans poring over the lyrics to The Cure’s Pornography in their bedrooms as to young people today lost in the music of Tristwch Y Fenywod or Heartworms.
“People are trying to find a place to escape, an alternative one,” reflects Rossi of Gothic World Records. “Escaping from real world problems such as the major conflicts that we are seeing right now, Russia and Ukraine, Palestine and Israel. A lot of people find comfort in darker atmospheres, whether it’s the music or just the fashion.”
Described like that, goth has the quality of a protective charm in troubled times. Perhaps goth is best described as a morbid subculture that makes us feel alive.
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