That viral moment and the pitch-perfect darkness of the band's track "Sudno (Boris Ryzhy)" — a musical setting of the eponymous writer's poem "Enameled Bedpan" — caused the band to gain such widespread attention that they're now able to tour the world. That includes here in Florida, where Molchat Doma will play Fort Lauderdale's Revolution Live on Thursday, January 30, with openers Sextile. But it also likely introduced a whole generation to the sad sounds of goth music.
Below, New Times offers a brief primer on the must-know goth acts to make sure you're ready to succumb to the darkness.
Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures/Closer/"Atmosphere" (1978-80)
Joy Division is possibly the most gothic band ever despite not being a part of the gothic genre itself. Due to the tragic and untimely death of lead singer Ian Curtis in 1980 and its reformation as the more pop-oriented New Order soon after, the band more or less missed out on the movement's coalescence in the early '80s. Yet it's hard to imagine what the sound would be without the group's revolutionary sound, epitomized by Curtis' bleak lyrics and deep, sonorous vocal delivery and the forward-thinking production of Martin Hannett, who gave the punk rockers a spacious, subterranean sound that was unique for the time. In fact, Hannett may be responsible for coining the genre by calling Joy Division's output "dancing music with gothic overtones." Joy Division's entire brief discography is essential listening for any self-respecting music fan and still holds up as some of the best ever made, from the claustrophobia of "She's Lost Control" from Unknown Pleasures to the dark storytelling of Closer's "Atrocity Exhibition." But a highlight is the 1980 single "Atmosphere," an eerily baroque ballad marked by thunderous drums and shimmering synths that set the pace for bands like the Cure. The music video for the song directed by Anton Corbijn, featuring mysterious hooded figures wandering across a monochrome landscape interspersed with photos of Curtis and the rest of the band, is also darkly beautiful and goth as hell.Bauhaus - "Bela Lugosi's Dead" (1979)
Joy Division may have been a primary influence on the goth rock sound, but Bauhaus defined it with this one epic single. Deeply indebted to the also-ascendant dub reggae genre with its skittering drumbeats, bass-driven melody, and echoing vocals, "Bela Lugosi's Dead" is one of the most hypnotic, atmospheric songs ever recorded, casting listeners as participants in a funereal ritual of "virginal brides" and "translucent black capes." It singlehandedly established the goth genre's pivot away from postpunk, shifting away from political and psychological content toward evocative imagery, in this case describing the (un)death of the titular actor's most famous character, Dracula: "The bats have left the bell tower/The victims have been bled." The band would later play the song in an actual vampire movie, Tony Scott's The Hunger from 1983.Siouxsie and the Banshees - Juju (1981)
Make any Mount Rushmore of goth music figureheads, and Siouxsie Sioux ought to be dead center. The sole regular member of the Banshees along with bassist Steven Severin, she and the group initially rode the postpunk wave with singles like "Happy House" and "Hong Kong Garden." But they were children of the glam era, drawn to aesthetics more than politics — Sioux and Severin met at a Roxy Music concert — and as music historian Steve Mercer described in Simon Reynolds' postpunk history book Rip It Up and Start Again, they and other goths desired "the excitement of punk but not the mundane element." Juju from 1981 is generally considered the band's ultimate goth statement and one of the movement's finest, most influential moments. Per Reynolds: "The album blueprinted an absurdly large proportion of goth's musical and lyrical themes. With 'Sin in My Heart,' 'Voodoo Dolly,' 'Halloween,' 'Spellbound,' and 'Night Shift,' the Banshees explored ideas of magic and the supernatural for the first time." The band would continue to shift styles and membership throughout the '80s until its disbandment, at times going pop with a Beatles cover ("Dear Prudence") and dropping alt-rock anthems such as "Cities in Dust." Robert Smith of the Cure once filled in on guitar for a few years in the mid-'80s. Speaking of him:The Cure - Disintegration (1989)
The Cure was the most famous and successful of the goth rockers, and part of that is because they were the poppiest of the lot. They could do the bleak atmosphere thing, sure — "A Forest" off 1979's Seventeen Seconds certainly lends them plenty of cred — but when most people think of Robert Smith and co. they think of the romantic melodrama of "Just Like Heaven" and "Friday I'm In Love." By the end of the decade, Smith — depressed, pushing 30, and self-medicating with LSD — felt it was enough. They needed to get back to the bad old days. Disintegration resulted, and it sees the Cure at its peak, imbuing its wistful, accessible love songs with the ethereal power and ageless romanticism that goth excels at. This is the record that generated "Pictures of You" and "Lovesong," both massive hits. But the band also delivered gloom-soaked reveries such as "The Same Deep Water as You" and "Prayers for Rain," luxuriating in the longer track lengths the then-new CD format allowed. It's a major statement if there ever was one, and arguably the best record the genre has ever produced.Kino - Zvezda po imeni Solntse/Chorny Albom (1989)
It's hard to talk about any band from the former Soviet Union without mentioning Kino, inarguably the most important rock act to emerge from behind the Iron Curtain and one that Molchat Doma has cited as an influence. They certainly weren't goth — the subculture did not exist in the Soviet period, and even more conventional rock music had been stifled for years prior to Gorbachev's liberalization policies, with Western records smuggled in on X-ray plates. But the bleakness of life under the repressive Soviet government filtered into Kino's music, which is more philosophical and soul-searching than mainstream Western rock but perfectly in tune with Russian sensibilities (living in the dark, frigid country at all is sort of goth in and of itself). The group's charismatic frontman, Viktor Tsoi, holds much in common with Ian Curtis, both because of his iconic deep voice, introspective lyricism, and early death on the cusp of wider fame. (Tsoi died in a car accident in 1990, ten years after Curtis died by suicide.) The band was also much more successful within Russia than Joy Division was, playing its final show for 62,000 fans at Luzhniki Stadium. The song "Khochu peremen" ("I Want Change") became a symbol of the country's pre-collapse reform era and continues to be a popular protest anthem in post-Soviet states. Kino's final two albums, Zvezda po imeni Solntse ("A Star Called Sun") and the posthumous untitled record known as the Chorny Albom ("Black Album"), see the band at its most thoughtful. Tsoi surveys the degraded landscape of his homeland in songs like "Pachka Sigaret" ("Pack of Cigarettes"), depicting a traveler with an aimless life who can survive one day more thanks to the simple pleasure of a smoke in his hand.Depeche Mode - Violator (1990)
Depeche Mode was still a teeny-bopper synthpop act when goth culture was in its formative years, but looking back today, few would doubt the gothic bona-fides of a record like Violator. The band had been drifting into darker territory for most of the '80s, finding musical kin with early industrial and EBM bands like Ministry and Front 242 — the former's darkwave hit "(Every Day Is) Halloween" is something of a Goth anthem itself — but retaining a pop sensibility. Violator represents the pinnacle of that approach: It's shadowy, sensual, and dramatic all at once, finding room for brawny rock ("Personal Jesus"), moody ambiance ("Waiting for the Night"), and erotic soul filtered through mechanical instruments ("World in My Eyes"), all anchored by Dave Gahan's deep, sexy baritone. The MIDI horns and choral synths on "Enjoy the Silence" may have put the track in the top ten of Billboard's Hot 100, but they also represented a new phase for the goth movement, one where drum machines and synths gave the sound new life.Have a Nice Life - Deathconsciousness (2008)
As the '90s dawned and grunge brought rock back into the mainstream, goth culture declined in favor of other subcultures and styles like shoegaze, nu metal, and emo. As independent artists and labels began to gain influence in the 2000s thanks to the pre-Spotify internet's democratization of distribution, subcultural genres began to reassemble themselves. Labels such as Sacred Bones, who signed Molchat Doma in 2020, began to reissue old goth and darkwave bands and support new acts such as TRST, while new subgenres such as witch house and emo rap brought goth aesthetics and themes into new genre territory.If there's one record from this era that makes sense to include here, however, it's got to be the magnificently brutal debut album from Connecticut band Have a Nice Life. Full of dirge-like drums with guitars soaked in reverb and fuzz, sounding as if it were recorded in an actual gothic church, Deathconsciousness brought gothic rock into bold new territory by introducing the production-forward heaviness of shoegaze and drone metal into the genre. The heavy, foreboding double LP would never have caught fire if it had not been for the internet ecosystem of the day. Users on sites like RateYourMusic and 4chan's /mu/ board, almost uniformly the kind of weirdo music nerds to whom the doom-laden record would have appealed, boosted the album to mythological status, enticed by grim track titles like "Bloodhail" and "I Don't Love" and its bold album cover, using Jacques-Louis David's iconic history painting The Death of Marat. It helps that the music itself is so gloriously morose, doomer-core before the term was even invented. The group's follow-up records, 2014's The Unnatural World and 2017's Sea of Worry, might even be spookier.
Molchat Doma - Etazhi (2018)
And now we come full circle. Molchat Doma ("Houses are Silent") may have found viral fame thanks to TikTok, but the band's appeal lies in its ability to synthesize and combine various influences into a compelling whole on records like 2018's Etazhi ("Rooms"). Egor Shkutko's echo-soaked vocals are clearly influenced by classic singers like Ian Curtis, Viktor Tsoi, and Peter Murphy of Bauhaus. The lo-fi drum machine sounds recall Kino as well as Soviet acts like Alyans, and comparisons can also be made to New Order and other synthpop acts thanks to the overall brighter arrangements and higher tempos — the drum pattern that opens the viral track "Sudno (Boris Ryzhy)" sounds nearly identical to the one from Michael Sembello's Flashdance soundtrack hit "Maniac." Where the band feels least imitative is in Roman Komorgortsev's melodic guitar lines, which are a far cry from the shredding of earlier goth bands, and in the Soviet-retro-inspired aesthetic, swapping ornate cathedrals and crypts for brutalist concrete and Communist ruins. This begs the question, is Molchat Doma really goth or something else? Does pure goth culture even exist anymore? Or has it been distilled and blended with other scenes so much that it might as well be (un)dead? You be the judge.Molchat Doma. With Sextile. 7 p.m. Thursday, January 30, at Revolution Live, 100 SW Third Ave., Fort Lauderdale; jointherevolution.net. Tickets cost $34.50 via ticketmaster.com.
