It’s a great time to be a post-punk fan.
The genre — rather, a term used for a collective of musical subgenres ranging from shoegaze and alternative, to goth and guitar pop — remains one of the most influential styles of rock music, greatly important to the development of indie music through the last thirty years of the 20th Century. Post-punk has its fingerprints on almost all of independent rock music: grunge bands like Pearl Jam and Nirvana, Britpop acts like Oasis and Suede and indie guitar bands like the Smiths or R.E.M., are all products of the first post-punk movement. Its DIY principles, literary inspiration, and artistic production style set the foundation upon which independent music would be built; the blueprint for an entire artform.
But the classic post-punk sound, pioneered by bands like Joy Division, The Fall, Siouxsie and the Banshees, dissipated years ago. As specific sounds bound by strong genre groupings began cropping up across the music world in the UK, Europe, and America, the term post-punk slowly disintegrated into an overarching alternative label. The genre quickly morphed into many different styles, including subgenres like goth, industrial and indie pop. But while alternative music touched the musical hearts of millions of people throughout the next few decades, the post-punk sound was dormant.
After the collapse of Britpop and Grunge in the late 1990’s, a new post-punk movement rose from their ashes. This garage rock revolution was fronted by bands like the Strokes and Interpol in the States, and the Libertines and Bloc Party in the U.K. But, as genres tend to do, it quieted down towards the end of the 2000’s, even after several stellar albums. A softer, more tuneful type of indie arose, incorporating gentler genres like folk and pop. This change is audible in the rise of bands like Arcade Fire, Cage the Elephant and Real Estate, whose Top-50 friendlier and softer style of rock went on to define the last few years of the 2000’s and first few years of the 2010’s.
But the last few years in indie have been different.
In 2010, Calgary-based band Women released their second LP, Public Strain. It’s noisy, cryptic, and far from the public eye even for some of the most passionate indie listeners. But even so, its sound was a predictor — thought not necessarily an influencer — for the next few years in punk music.
In 2012, two crucial but not overtly popular albums were released: Detroit-based Protomartyr’s All Passion No Technique, and Stockholm-based Holograms’ Holograms. The former marked the entrance of one of the 2010’s most important and far-reaching post-punk outfits onto the music scene, and while the self-titled Holograms album failed to reach large indie audiences across the Atlantic, it’s an energetic, fun album that touches on all the points that make post-punk a worthwhile genre, taking influences from genre staples like Dead Kennedys and Bauhaus to deliver a warm expression of capitalist life and deadly imperialism.
This trend continued, and indie audiences noticed. In 2013, Danish band Iceage released their second album You’re Nothing to massive critical acclaim, solidifying their spot on the indie scene. In the UK, London-based all-female band Savages released their first record, the acclaimed and popular Silence Yourself, for which they received a nomination for the Mercury Prize and a place in Pitchfork’s 200 Best Albums of the 2010’s. Its sound, influenced heavily by predecessors such as Siouxsie and the Banshees and Magazine, remains a staple of the genre seven years later.
It’s hard to pinpoint the exact cause of this shift in sound as popular indie dived towards a darker, harder atmosphere. Unlike the early 2000’s garage revival, there was no single tragedy like 9/11 to obscure the public mood; though the economic crash of 2008 still rings in many millennials’ ears, its trappings weren’t visibly influential towards rock music at the end of the decade. It could be that post-punk’s DIY ethics were appealing to one of the most underpaid generations in modern history. It could be that the lyrically dense content of the music provides solace or comfort in a world repeatedly ravaged by capitalism. Or that its sound, even with the artistic inspirations post-punk’s first generation reveled in, is simple and easy to understand. It can be angry and loud, it can be quiet and reserved, sensitive and emotional.
Its sonic influences are numerous, with older post-punk bands like Joy Division, the Cure, the Fall and the aforementioned Siouxsie and the Banshees audible in the basslines, drums, and synthesizers, while in the guitars, the influence of later bands like Interpol, TV On the Radio, LCD Soundsystem, and The Walkmen ring true. The punk tradition of never hiding your influences is one that carried over across the decades. Just as bands like Oasis never shied away from their admiration of the Sex Pistols and Beatles, the new generation of post-punk rockers scarcely refuse to hide the influence of their predecessors.
After Women dissolved in 2012 — just as the movement was picking up speed — a sort of a reformation came from its ashes in Viet Cong. Their 2015 eponymous album was another landmark of the revival, a hidden indie gem that boasts loud, abrasive Interpol-esque guitars, and marching epics of despair and desperation. The same year, Protomartyr released their third album, The Agent Intellect off Hardly Art Records to universal acclaim; the Atlanta-based Algiers released their eponymous debut off of Matador Records to warm reviews; and Dublin-based quartet Girl Band debuted with Holding Hands with Jaime, prompting comparison to post-punk icons such as Nick Cave.
The long line of stellar albums continued largely unbroken by new and older bands as the decade continued. Viet Cong — now renamed to Preoccupations — released their next self-titled album to acclaim in 2016. The next year saw another string of critically reviewed LP’s, including Savages’ second album Adore Life, Algiers’ second album The Underside of Power, D.C.-based Priests’ Nothing Feels Natural and Bristol-based IDLES’s debut album, Brutalism. The aforementioned Holograms released their third full-length album, Surrender. In North America, Montreal-based Ought released their second album, Sun Coming Down, while Protomartyr released their fourth album, Relatives in Descent to widespread acclaim, marking a new turn in the Detroit band’s sound.
The next two years saw continued post-punk success; London-based Shame’s Songs of Praise landed them popularity in the U.K. music press, as IDLES released their next album Joy as an Act of Resistance to great acclaim; Chicago-based Deeper released their self-titled debut to warm reception, and Ought released their third album, Room Inside the World, to critical attention.
Another Dublin-based band, Fontaines D.C. released their debut Dogrel, a post-punk record inspired by Dublin life and literature, to universal praise, landing them a Mercury Prize nomination. In the same year and same city, The Murder Capital released their debut, When I Have Fears, to critical acclaim, just before Girl Band saw the release of their second album Talkies, rounding out a near-perfect trifecta of Dublin post-punk albums.
Ranking genre movements in music is an impossible metric, but it’s worth considering the track record of other similar movements when looking at the current post-punk revival. Over a dozen exceptional albums by several artists — some of whom are not even named in this analysis — over the course of almost ten years is impressive; few subgenres can manage such a streak of quality. And it doesn’t seem that in 2020 the movement is slowing down. This year saw another strong Algiers release, a wildly popular and acclaimed Fontaines D.C. record, a fifth Protomartyr album, an IDLES album on the way, and another release by Shame hinted heavily at on their social media.
It can’t be known how much longer this movement will last before it loses steam. It might be only a few more years before bands start to change direction into something more concise or focused; the genre could be dropped as mysteriously as it began, confined back to tiny niches in indie record stores and clubs. Still, it’s too simplistic to write the revival off as a trend — musical trends scarcely last more than a few years, and they scarcely unite music scenes oceans away into one tight-knit community as the contemporary revival has. But if the bands within the movement continue pumping out quality timeless music, then there’s no doubt that it’ll be welcome in indie music.
