Darkwave and Synth Goth

The term appeared in print in 1977. Sounds magazine ran a feature on Kraftwerk's Trans-Europe Express and called it “cold wave”—a name for something that hadn't quite frozen yet. Two years earlier, Kraftwerk had sketched it out with Radio-Activity: frigid melodies, brittle percussion, machines dreaming in minor keys. By 1979, Martin Hannett was stripping rock music to its skeleton at Strawberry Studios in Manchester, producing Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures. The Cure's 'A Forest' proved that spartan mood pieces could chart. None of this was called darkwave yet. It was punk's DIY ethos colliding with newly affordable synthesizers.

Darkwave emerged as a term in the early 1980s across continental Europe. German magazines like Zillo used it to describe the gloomy, melancholic variant of new wave spreading through bedrooms and small studios. The timing mattered. Portable Minimoogs and Korg MS-20s had broken the prog wizards' stranglehold on synthesizers. A Korg MS-10 and a rhythm machine cost a few hundred guilders. Any disaffected post-punk kid in Nijmegen or Turin could suddenly conjure atmospheres that previously required an orchestra. The music that resulted was colder than new wave, darker than synthpop, more introspective than either.