Rick's b.log - entry 2026/02/02

What makes a song "goth"?

Before anyone starts arguing about black lace, eyeliner, or whether that band "counts actually", it helps to know where goth came from...and, crucially, what it isn't.

Goth didn't spring out fully formed in 1980 (though The Cure's "Seventeen Seconds" had a major influence), it crept in through the cracks left behind when punk burned itself out and post-punk started asking awkward questions instead of just smashing things. In the very late 1970s and early 1980s, a handful of bands took punk's DIY attitude and stripped out the bravado. What they put back in was space: Atmosphere, melancholy, basslines more melodic than the melody, and drums that sounded less like a riot and more like a slow and inevitable march towards something unpleasant.
Joy Division, Bauhaus, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Cure, and early Sisters of Mercy weren't trying to be cheerful or relatable or even radio-friendly. They were interested in alienation, mortality, obsession, romantic ruin, and the sort of emotions you get when you stare at a wall for a bit too long and finally start thinking clearly.
It was music for people who felt out of step with reality and decided to examine that feeling rather than drown it in a pint or three.

Importantly, goth was never just a handy euphemism for "sad music". Folk music can be sad, and far too many Irish ballads are. Country music can be sad, and god knows we've had plenty of songs where even the guy's dog up and leaves in the end.
Goth, however, is about aesthetic sadness. That is to say sadness with intent, structure, and a sense of drama. Pain, but framed. Darkness, but deliberate. Gothic horror and self-awareness are commonplace.

From there it spread, mutated, and melded with industrial, darkwave, ethereal, and any other genre willing to admit that life doesn't always resolve neatly by the final chorus.

Which brings me to the point of today's blog article...

A thoroughly unscientific and highly subjective but otherwise correct guide to determining if a song is "Goth"

At some point in every vaguely alternative person's life, they will ask the question "is this goth?", while providing a link to something with an acoustic guitar, quivering autotuned voice, and lyrics about a breakup that lasted longer than the relationship.

One word: No.

Rather than sighing heavily and muttering something about Bauhaus or Lacrimosa under our breath, it's time to provide a clear, structured, and completely subjective set of questions to determine if the song you're listening to is goth, or goth enough to pass as goth (most of us aren't fussy, you'll understand why by the end).

Welcome to Rick's Goth Diagnostic Scoring System™.

Step One: Assess the state of mortality of the song's protagonist

• If the protagonist wants to die: +1 point
  A classic, this is a solid opening move.
• If the protagonist dies during the song: +2 points
  Good storytelling.
• If the protagonist was already dead before the song started: +3 points
• If the protagonist is happier that way: double the score

Additional modifiers:

• The protagonist is a ghost watching their loved ones carry on without them: +2
• Protagonist is undead, cursed, or trapped between worlds: +2
  • ...and is really tired of this endless torment: +2
• Death is treated as romantic, inevitable, or mildly preferable to continuing: +1
• At the point of death, the gloomy song switches to a major key and sounds 'happy': +10
  • ...and plays out with an epic, but not flashy, five minute guitar solo: +10
• If the song opens with "I woke up this morning feeling fine": -30 points

Step Two: The emotional palette

• Grief is described as something that lingers: +1
• Love exists, but is doomed by time, distance, or death: +1
• The song is less interested in resolution, it's about acceptance: +2
• Sadness is treated as a fact of life rather than a something to be fixed: +2
• Everything is resolved by the final chorus: -3
  • ...unless the resolution is by dying: +2
• The solution involves "dancing through the pain": -4
  • ...or "throwing your arms in the air", etc: -4
• Gratuitous Spanish: -5
  • ...unless it's a Spanish language song: +5
• Somebody says "it'll be alright" (or any phrases like that) and the song agrees with them: Immediately disqualified!
• It features kissing or sex: -10
  • ...unless metaphysical, with a vampire, or anything drawn from Gothic literature or mythology: +10

Step Three: Vibes

• The bass line is doing most of the emotional work: +1
• Drum machine that sounds like it was programmed by someone who hasn't slept: +1
  • ...and is complicated enough that you struggle to work out what time signature the song is in: +3
• Synths are cold, distant, or funereal: +1
  • ...and something is pretending to be a pipe organ: +2
• A choir appears for no obvious reason except ambience: +2
  • ...and they are just vocalising, not singing words: +5
• Excessive reverb that implies a large empty space or emotional void: +1
• Tempo suitable for swaying, not jumping: +1
  • ...tempo faster than a resting heartbeat: -3
• A "drop": -10
• Hand claps: -10
• Anything clearly engineered to do well on streaming platforms: -50

Step Four: Lyrical content

• Death that is not metaphorical: +2
• Loss that cannot be undone: +2
• Illness, decay, or watching someone disappear in slow motion: +3
• Memory, regret, or the passage of time as the antagonist: +2
• Based upon classical horror stories (like Frankenstein, anything by Lovecraft, etc): +5
• Based upon ancient mythology: +3
• About sex or love: -10
  • ...unless forbidden in ways that transcend time and/or logic: +10

Step Five: Tot up the damage (and consider how you feel about it)

This is important.

Goth isn't about ticking boxes for the sake of it. The scoring system is just a way of describing something more nebulous: emotional weight. Goth songs accumulate gravity. They don't rush. They don't apologise. They sit with feelings that most genres treat as an inconvenience or something to be skipped over entirely and ask, "Okay, so how do we actually feel about this?".

If your final score is high and you feel oddly calmer, strangely understood, or like someone has articulated something you never quite managed...
...then congratulations. That's the point.

Goth music does not exist to cheer you up. It exists to let you empty the bin. It acknowledges that sadness, grief, anger, and despair don't simply vanish just because the tempo picks up or the lyrics insist that everything will be fine. We all know it won't. Instead, these songs give those emotions shape, texture, substance, and a place to go hang out.

This is why a goth song can be about death, loss, or existential dread and still feel comforting. It's not wallowing, it's processing. Catharsis, if you like, with bass.

And once you've experienced that, it becomes very hard to get excited about songs whose entire emotional arc consists of mild romantic inconvenience followed by a key change, and a chorus that repeats a dozen times because you just know there are dance moves to go with it.

This brings us neatly to the problem with love songs...

Here's the thing:

People do fall in love.
People do have sex.
Whoo. Well done. Round of applause and a cuddly toy for our winners.

But:

People also lose parents. Partners. Children. Friends.
People watch hospital machines go quiet.
People survive things they didn't want to survive.
Fuck cancer.

Where are the songs about that, hmm?

Goth doesn't avert its eyes. It says "Yup, that happened, let's talk about it".

"But Isn't This Just Emo?"

Let's say this in as few words as possible. I know, hard for me, I'm already wasting words in this line talking about wasting words in this line...

• Emo is immediate, raw, and personal.
  "I am hurting and I need you to know right now."
• Goth is reflective and distant, sometimes theatrical; to contemplate mortality, loss, decay, memory, and the slow erosion of everything you love.
  "Yes, the pain exists. It always has. Light a candle and sit down with me."

Emo externalises the emotions.
Goth curates them.

If Emo is crying on the bedroom floor at 2am, Goth is that calm moment at 3am when you realise that this isn't new, it's happened before, probably will again, and somehow that makes it just a little bit better.

Clothing, lace, and all the other stereotypes

You do not have to wear black lace, eyeliner, or boots that could survive a minor apocalypse to be goth (any or all, regardless of your gender)...
...but let's not pretend that it doesn't help.

Goth is less about the uniform and more about the state of mind. It's the willingness to look directly at the bits of life that polite society would rather skip over. Death. Grief. Obsession. Regret. Existential pain. A dozen kinds of trauma. The uncomfortable fact that love doesn't always win but bad guys do, and sometimes everything just...stops.

The clothes are simply a visual shorthand for saying "I'm okay with talking about this".

Some of us die a little inside every time we have to endure yet another algorithm-approved, beige, mass-produced love song that lasts exactly long enough to avoid being skipped.

Goth notices this and says nothing. Your pain is real. So it just raises an eyebrow and puts on something with a six-minute runtime and no chorus. Because it's about the catharsis. It's about facing thoughts and feelings and emotions that commercial radio is too scared to go anywhere near.

It will leave you calmer, not happier - and that's about as goth as goth can be.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go listen to something about beautiful ruins and irreversible loss and feel oddly better about everything.

Your comments:

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jgh, 2nd February 2026, 21:12

Going through your flowchart, and On Ilkley Moor Bah Tat is goth. :)

Rob, 5th February 2026, 13:07

First gf have me a mix tape with Bauhaus featuring heavily. Possibly The Cure too, given I ended up buying the VHS of one of their albums. These days I pretty much listen to anything with a heavy beat and a discernable tune. I guess tastes change.

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