Genre Guide: Post Punk
Today we shall have the second installment of me diving into the confusing world of music genres and trying to make sense of it somehow. Post Punk literally means after punk and therefore it's used to describe music that came out after punk, much like New Wave that I wrote about last week. But unlike…
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Delta Mode
Today we shall have the second installment of me diving into the confusing world of music genres and trying to make sense of it somehow. Post Punk literally means after punk and therefore it’s used to describe music that came out after punk, much like New Wave that I wrote about last week. But unlike New Wave, the term Post Punk wasn’t just slammed on any band and song that happened to come out during the beginning of the 80s.

Even though I used to think Post Punk sounded nothing like punk, it can be considered as a form of punk. It was heavily inspired by the punk rock bands and their aggressive, raw nature, but it was a more artistic take on their attitude. There was a diversity of different types of bands associated with the term Post Punk, but what often connected them was complex, diverse melodies and songs, different from the simplicity of punk rock itself. Quite often Post Punk was dark and used synthesizers.

Probably the most famous Post Punk bands that really fit the genre are Joy Division and The Cure. Joy Division is considered sometimes as the forefathers of the whole genre and their music is still quite close to punk rock, but it’s a lot more melodic and darker than their main inspiration Sex Pistols, for example. Some other important Post Punk artists include Wire, The Fall, Jesus and the Mary Chain, Echo and the Bunnymen, Killing Joke and Talking Heads. According to allmusic.com U2 and Depeche Mode would be Post Punk as well, but I feel like those are quite debatable names and at least to me not the ones I think of first when I think of Post Punk. This once again proves us how difficult it is to actually define genres and which bands belong to them.

Post Punk laid the basics for many other genres that would come later on. Later in the 80s it would become the alternative rock of the 80s and many other, smaller genres, such as gothic rock and industrial music.

However, in the early 2000s Post Punk made a return in the form of Post Punk Revival. This term was widely used to describe British and American alternative rock bands such as Franz Ferdinand, Interpol, Editors, The Killers, Arctic Monkeys, The Strokes… The list of these bands just goes on and on and the Post Punk Revival scene has been a very commercially successful one. These bands are often inspired by some of the Post Punk and New Wave artists and also garage rock, combining the two to create a certain kind of alternative rock sound that’s became very popular in the 2000s and have remained popular ever since.