Post-punk revival

Based on Wikipedia: Post-punk revival

When Rock Music Remembered How to Be Dangerous

Picture the musical landscape of the year 2000. Nu metal bands in baggy cargo shorts screamed about their childhood traumas. Teen pop dominated MTV with choreographed dance routines. And in Britain, a parade of indistinguishable post-Britpop bands churned out pleasant, forgettable guitar songs designed to offend absolutely no one.

Into this swamp of safe commercialism walked a generation of young musicians who had been digging through their parents' record collections. They'd found something there—angular guitars, urgent rhythms, a sense that rock music could actually mean something, could actually feel dangerous. And they decided to bring it back.

This was the post-punk revival, though you might also hear it called the indie rock revival or the garage rock revival, depending on which bands you're talking about and who's doing the talking. The labels never quite fit, which was part of the point. These weren't bands interested in fitting neatly into boxes.

What Exactly Is Post-Punk, Anyway?

To understand the revival, you first need to understand what was being revived.

When punk rock exploded in 1976 and 1977, it was a glorious mess—three chords, leather jackets, and a raised middle finger to the bloated rock establishment. But some musicians who came up through punk wanted to push further. They kept punk's rebellious spirit and do-it-yourself ethos, but they started experimenting. They added synthesizers. They incorporated disco rhythms. They wrote lyrics that were cerebral and artsy rather than simply angry.

Bands like Joy Division, Wire, Gang of Four, and Siouxsie and the Banshees created something new in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Music journalists, scrambling for a label, called it "post-punk"—the thing that came after punk. It was characterized by angular, jagged guitar lines, propulsive bass, and a certain emotional coldness mixed with intensity. The look was stark: black clothing, severe haircuts, an art school sensibility.

This era overlapped significantly with new wave, a broader and more commercially friendly movement that shared some of post-punk's adventurousness but wrapped it in more accessible pop packaging. And parallel to both, garage rock—raw, stripped-down rock and roll inspired by the scrappy bands of the 1960s—never really went away, bubbling along in underground scenes.

All of these threads would come together in the early 2000s.

The Year Everything Changed

In 2001, two albums dropped that would redirect the course of rock music.

The first came from a New York City band called the Strokes. Their debut, Is This It, sounded like nothing else on the radio at the time—and yet it sounded deeply familiar, like a memory of something you'd heard but couldn't quite place. The songs were propulsive and catchy, built on interlocking guitar parts that seemed simple but weren't. Singer Julian Casablancas filtered his voice through distortion, making it sound like it was coming from a transistor radio or an old television. The album debuted at number two on the British charts and cracked the top forty in America.

The second album came from Detroit. The White Stripes were a two-piece band: Jack White on guitar and vocals, Meg White on drums. That's it. No bass player. They dressed exclusively in red, white, and black, and they told interviewers that they were brother and sister (they were actually ex-husband and wife). Their third album, White Blood Cells, stripped rock and roll down to its absolute bones—thundering drums, fuzzed-out guitar, Jack White howling like a man possessed. It spawned two transatlantic hit singles.

These weren't the only bands making noise. The Hives from Sweden released a compilation called Your New Favourite Band that hit number seven in the United Kingdom. Their gimmick was that they all wore matching suits and moved with synchronized precision, like some kind of garage rock boy band. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, wearing their leather-clad influences on their sleeves, released their debut to strong British sales. The Vines came from Australia with Highly Evolved, which cracked the top five in multiple countries.

The press went absolutely berserk.

The Saviors of Rock and Roll (Allegedly)

Music journalists are always looking for a trend to name, a movement to proclaim, a savior to anoint. In 2002, they found their story. Rolling Stone put it on their cover in big block letters: "Rock is Back!"

The narrative was irresistible. Here were young bands in skinny ties and shaggy haircuts, playing actual guitars, rejecting the synthetic sounds and commercial calculations that dominated the charts. They were "authentic." They were "real." They were going to rescue rock and roll from its corporate captivity.

Predictably, the backlash came almost immediately. Critics accused the bands of being image-conscious poseurs, of recycling sounds that weren't even that old, of being overhyped by a desperate music press. Some dismissed them as tuneless, derivative, or both.

Music critic Simon Reynolds, one of the definitive historians of post-punk, offered a more nuanced view. He noted that while these bands were clearly drawing on the past, most of them weren't really doing straight revivalism. "Apart from maybe the White Stripes, none could really be described as retro," he observed. They were using the past as a jumping-off point, not a destination.

The diversity of influences made it hard to pin down what, exactly, these bands shared. Was this a garage rock revival? A new wave revival? A post-punk revival? Music historian Eric James Abbey suggested that the "garage" label was often applied loosely, a way for bands to claim some underground credibility regardless of what they actually sounded like.

The Second Wave

Whatever you called the movement, it worked. The breakthrough of the Strokes and White Stripes opened doors for a flood of other bands.

In New York, Yeah Yeah Yeahs—fronted by the incendiary Karen O—parlayed their underground buzz into a major label deal. Interpol channeled the brooding atmospherics of Joy Division into a more polished package. LCD Soundsystem merged post-punk aesthetics with dance music production. The Walkmen, the Rapture, TV on the Radio, Liars—Manhattan's Lower East Side was suddenly the center of the rock universe again.

The British response was even more enthusiastic. Franz Ferdinand emerged from Glasgow with a sound that explicitly referenced the angular post-punk of bands like Wire and Gang of Four. Cultural theorist Mark Fisher pointed out their debt to the often-overlooked Scottish post-punk scene of the early 1980s—bands like Josef K and the Fire Engines. (Franz Ferdinand would eventually cover the Fire Engines' "Get Up and Use Me," making the connection explicit.)

Bloc Party arrived with urgent, syncopated guitar parts and lyrics about modern alienation. Kaiser Chiefs brought a more anthemic, crowd-pleasing approach. The Libertines injected a chaotic romanticism, their story of co-frontmen Pete Doherty and Carl Barât becoming as famous as their music—a tale of creative partnership, drug addiction, and spectacular self-destruction that seemed ripped from the mythology of rock and roll itself.

The Killers came from Las Vegas with a sound that split the difference between new wave synths and arena rock bombast. Kings of Leon evolved from scruffy Southern garage rock toward something more expansive and commercially dominant. The Hold Steady wrote literate songs about Midwestern desperation that read like short stories. The National built slow-burning songs around baritone mumbles and gradually intensifying arrangements.

The Arctic Monkeys and the Internet Revolution

And then there were the Arctic Monkeys, who did something genuinely new.

The Sheffield band's rise to fame had almost nothing to do with the traditional music industry machinery. Their early demo recordings spread through online file sharing and social networking—this was 2005 and 2006, the early days of MySpace, when the music industry was still trying to figure out what the internet meant for them.

By the time Arctic Monkeys released their debut album, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not, in January 2006, anticipation had built to unprecedented levels. The album became the fastest-selling debut in British chart history. Their first two singles both hit number one.

The songs themselves were remarkable—sharp observations of British nightlife delivered in thick Sheffield accents over propulsive indie rock. Singer Alex Turner proved himself one of the sharpest lyricists of his generation, capturing the desperate glamour and mundane absurdity of going out on a Friday night in ways that felt instantly recognizable to anyone who'd lived it.

But perhaps more significantly, the Arctic Monkeys represented a new model for how bands could build audiences. They proved you didn't need radio play or music television to reach people. You just needed good songs and an internet connection.

Landfill Indie and the Law of Diminishing Returns

Success breeds imitation, and by 2007 and 2008, the scene was drowning in imitators.

A flood of bands emerged playing what was recognizably "the sound"—jangly guitars, British accents, catchy but increasingly formulaic songs. The Pigeon Detectives. Milburn. The Fratellis. The Rifles. The Wombats. Scouting for Girls. They weren't bad bands, necessarily, but they'd filed off the edges, smoothed out the quirks, and homogenized the sound into something safe for radio rotation.

Andrew Harrison, writing for The Word magazine, coined a devastating term for this wave of bands: "landfill indie." The implication was brutal—this music was disposable garbage destined for the dump.

In a 2009 article for The Guardian, journalist Peter Robinson declared landfill indie officially dead, blaming the three bands he saw as the final straw: Scouting for Girls, the Wombats, and the short-lived Joe Lean and the Jing Jang Jong. "If landfill indie had been a game of Buckaroo," he wrote, "those three sent the whole donkey's arse of radio-friendly mainstream guitar band monotony flying high into the air, legs flailing."

A decade later, Vice would single out Johnny Borrell of Razorlight as the symbolic avatar of everything that went wrong. Borrell had been adjacent to the Libertines scene, present for some of the movement's most creative and chaotic moments. But his own band was, in the magazine's words, "spectacularly middle-of-the-road"—proof that proximity to genius doesn't guarantee it.

What Came After

By the end of the 2000s, the initial energy had dissipated. Many of the bands had broken up, gone on hiatus, or changed direction so dramatically they were barely recognizable. The Strokes released increasingly sporadic and divisive albums. The White Stripes formally disbanded in 2011. The Libertines imploded, reformed, imploded again.

The cultural conversation moved on. Critics began championing indie rock bands that were more musically complex and emotionally vulnerable—Arcade Fire, Death Cab for Cutie, Bon Iver. The stripped-down garage aesthetic gave way to something more ornate and orchestrated.

But post-punk never really went away. It just went underground again.

Throughout the 2010s, bands continued working in the tradition. Parquet Courts in New York made twitchy, anxious songs about modern life. Protomartyr in Detroit channeled post-industrial despair into something cathartic. Iceage in Denmark and Viagra Boys in Sweden proved the sound had international staying power. Preoccupations in Canada (originally called Viet Cong, until that name proved too controversial to continue) carried the torch of atmospheric, rhythm-driven rock.

Some of the original revival bands returned, too. Franz Ferdinand reunited and continued touring. The Strokes came back with albums that were better received than their mid-career work. Arctic Monkeys reinvented themselves multiple times, eventually landing on a lounge-influenced sound that bore little resemblance to their debut but kept them commercially vital.

The Third Wave: Crank Wave and Beyond

And then, in the late 2010s, something happened in South London.

A cluster of bands emerged from venues like the Windmill in Brixton, many of them working with producer Dan Carey and his label Speedy Wunderground. They were playing music that was clearly descended from post-punk, but stranger, more experimental, harder to categorize.

Black Midi made music that careened wildly between genres within single songs, combining math rock complexity with noise rock aggression and jazz improvisation. Squid layered talk-sung vocals over rhythms that wouldn't sit still. Black Country, New Road mixed post-rock crescendos with klezmer-influenced violin and lyrics delivered in deadpan spoken word. Dry Cleaning featured a singer who half-spoke observations that sounded like overheard fragments of conversation set to propulsive post-punk backing tracks.

From Ireland came Fontaines D.C., channeling literary Dublin into something urgent and anthemic, and the Murder Capital, darker and more intense. Idles from Bristol brought a confrontational political edge and a frontman who screamed about vulnerability and toxic masculinity. Sleaford Mods—a duo from Nottingham making minimalist electronic punk—had been working since the early 2010s but found wider audiences alongside this new wave. Yard Act emerged from Leeds with sardonic spoken-word narratives over relentless rhythms.

NME called this movement "crank wave" in 2019. NPR writer Matthew Perpetua coined another term in 2021: "Post-Brexit New Wave." He described the common thread as "U.K. bands that kinda talk-sing over post-punk music, and sometimes it's more like post-rock."

Why It Keeps Coming Back

There's something about post-punk that makes it endlessly revisitable, endlessly relevant.

Part of it is musical. The template is flexible enough to accommodate wildly different approaches—you can make dance music from it, or noise music, or something in between. The emphasis on rhythm and texture over conventional melody means there's room to experiment without losing the essential drive.

Part of it is economic. Post-punk is music that can be made cheaply, without elaborate production or expensive studios. A few instruments, a practice space, and you're in business. This makes it perpetually attractive to young musicians without resources.

But perhaps the deeper appeal is ideological. Post-punk emerged from a moment of economic crisis and social fracture in late-1970s Britain—unemployment, strikes, the sense that the postwar consensus was crumbling. It was music for feeling both angry and alienated, both politically engaged and personally uncertain.

That emotional territory keeps proving relevant. The 2008 financial crisis. Austerity. Brexit. The pandemic. Each new wave of young musicians finds in post-punk a vocabulary for articulating their specific anxieties, their particular sense that something is deeply wrong with the way things are.

The Strokes sang about the boredom and privilege of young New Yorkers in the early 2000s. Arctic Monkeys documented the rituals of British youth culture with anthropological precision. Fontaines D.C. channeled Irish literary tradition into songs about gentrification and displacement. Dry Cleaning turned the detritus of contemporary life—Instagram, dead malls, fleece blankets—into absurdist poetry.

Different eras, different concerns, same fundamental impulse: take the tools of post-punk and use them to make sense of the present moment.

The Authenticity Trap

One thing worth noting, because it keeps coming up in discussions of this music: the obsession with "authenticity."

The post-punk revival was often framed as a return to something "real" in contrast to the manufactured pop and commercialized rock of the time. The bands wore vintage clothes. They referenced obscure influences. They played "real" instruments. They were positioned as the antidote to artificiality.

But this framing was always somewhat misleading. These bands were just as calculated in their image-making as any pop star—they just chose to project a different image. Cultivating the appearance of not trying is still trying. Curating a vintage aesthetic is still curating.

Moreover, the insistence on dividing music into "authentic" and "fake" categories tends to obscure more than it reveals. Some of the most interesting music of the era came from artists who didn't fit neatly into the revival narrative—who mixed electronics with guitars, who embraced rather than rejected pop structures, who didn't dress the part.

The landfill indie phenomenon was, in part, what happens when authenticity becomes a formula. Once everyone knows what "authentic" is supposed to look and sound like, it becomes just another set of conventions to follow—and following conventions is the opposite of authentic.

The third-wave post-punk bands, interestingly, seem less invested in this authenticity discourse. They're comfortable mixing in elements that earlier revival bands might have considered uncool—jazz, electronics, spoken word, whatever serves the song. They're less concerned with recreating a specific era's sound than with taking post-punk's toolkit and using it however they want.

Where It Goes From Here

Predicting the future of any musical movement is a fool's game, but post-punk has proven remarkably durable. We're now more than two decades into the revival, and the third wave shows no signs of slowing down. Young bands continue to emerge, finding new variations on the template.

What seems clear is that post-punk, in some form, will keep coming back. Its combination of accessibility and experimentation, of visceral impact and intellectual ambition, hits a sweet spot that musicians keep rediscovering. The specific sounds evolve—the drum machines get more prominent, the guitars get weirder, the singers talk more than they sing—but the fundamental energy persists.

And every few years, when the cultural moment is right, when young people are anxious and angry and looking for music that captures how they feel, someone picks up a guitar, plays a jagged riff over an insistent beat, and the whole cycle begins again.