Gen Z have brought goth back – and in these spooky times, it’s more politically relevant than ever From brand new bands to the Tim Burton revival, a fresh generation is discovering goth and making it their own.
That was also the decade of the first Whitby Goth Weekend – a twice-annual celebration of goth in the North Yorkshire fishing village where Count Dracula makes landfall in Bram Stoker’s novel – which is going strong to this day.
Goth is having a moment in fashion, too, as Vogue highlighted last year when moved to declare: “Very Mad, Very Maudlin, Very Macabre: It’s Showtime for the Goth Revival”.
“During the pandemic especially, young internet users like me – I was 17 at the time – got [drawn] into a digital world of [goth],” says 22-year-old Angela Rossi of Italian label Gothic World Records.
You can hear it in the doomy new LP from indie songwriter Sharon Van Etten, who walked down the aisle to The Cure’s “Plainsong” and who, in the video to recent single “Afterlife”, is a dead ringer for goth icon Siouxsie Sioux.
