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Thu 4 September 2025 1:00, UK
Most people, when thinking of goth rock, come up with the same handful of names: The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, but who launched the vessel?
For the most part, it’s hard to describe goth rock. Especially when the main feature of bands like The Cure is making music that sounds like the convoluted nature of life.
Perhaps that isn’t the worst place to start. After all, goth rock became synonymous with swirling guitars, more accessible melodies set to heavy, gritty beats that blended morbid beauty with a sense of foreboding. Obviously, it wasn’t always as simple as that, but the main element was how it slowed down the early aggression of punk and made it poetically existential.
Crediting The Cure with where it all started is always tempting, especially as they came so early on in the movement and are still revolutionising it today. But according to Lol Tolhurst, it’s not quite as simple as that. According to him, The Cure and the Banshees “just are the fertile ground that Goth sprang from”. All they did was build upon the hard work punk and rock pioneers had done before.
But often they didn’t even associate with that, because when they first went to America around 1980, people would ask them what kind of music they played. To which Robert Smith would say, “We just play Cure music”. That taps into the point Tolhurst also explored throughout Goth: A History, in that its origins are hard to pinpoint because the music relies so heavily on emotion and viscera. And when you go into that hole, a start point becomes far more blurred.
What album launched goth rock?
If we’re to dismiss the goal of finding a precise beginning and look at the record that was so groundbreaking, musically and aesthetically, that it launched the entire genre, it becomes clearer. Because when people say goth rock, if their thoughts don’t immediately go to Smith and his eerie soundscapes, it’s usually Bauhaus. In 1979, Bauhaus released ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’, the song said to have launched the genre.
While people had laid the groundwork, this leaned into all the features of gothic new wave, including the romanticisation of dark themes and regurgitation of old, gothic texts. Peter Murphy said it was written as a bit of a joke, but that unintentionally contributed to the gothic wave, too, considering one of its main features often came with the kitsch nature of the aesthetics themselves.
Their debut, incidentally considered the first-ever goth rock album, In The Flat Field, was released in 1980. Then came a wave of dark wave bands, The Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees included, injecting more gothic-adjacent aspects into their music. Most of the time, it was about owning resignation in the face of troubling times, which is a huge part of what made The Cure so endearing. It was mainly filled with that mantra that seemed to centre around the idea that it didn’t matter that things were awry, because nothing mattered anymore anyway.
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