So by the time they ended up in London at the back end of last year to headline Colours Hoxton, the band already had an audience in place, ready and willing to party. They’re kids who spent their sole EP and this year’s standalone single, “Walk In The Woods,” caught in a rush of living in the moment, adrenaline buzzing, asking to be heard for once. –Ryan, Stella Donnelly’s writing merges the candid honesty of a diary entry with the punchy witticisms of a stand-up set. –James, When they’re not penning comics, Joanna Sternberg records songs fit for New York’s anti-folk era in the early 2000s, the scene that birthed the Moldy Peaches and Diane Cluck. The Cassandra Complex (UK) The four-piece reconfigure the genre’s moodiest, most poignant moments into their own distinctly emotive sound. This is Goth history folks. One of our top picks for band’s to see is Icelandic trio Kaelan Mikla, whose album Nótt eftir nótt was our pick of the album of the year 2018. Dylan Brady and Laura Les echo the maximalist, masochistic spirit of 2019. This year is no different, and the crop of 2019 musicians is just as inspiring as ever. Their debut album, Not An Exit, is restless and introspective, a meditation that overflows. The prodigious Julien Chang enrolled in Ivy League classes, signed a record deal to become labelmates with Alvvays and SOPHIE and Julia Jacklin, and released a debut that swirled together neoclassical, psych, progressive jazz, folk, synth-pop, and more. Here was a queer black kid from just outside Atlanta who, against all odds, managed to completely upend the country and pop music establishments with little more than some social-media savvy, a $30 Nine Inch Nails beat, and some goofy-ass cowboy raps about the horses in the back. It's not unwarranted: Anything You Want would fit on a Lynyrd Skynyrd best-of and Shine could be a lost Otis Redding song, while most bands get through their careers without writing anything as striking as the spooky, backwoods gospel of Alabama. photograph by Karla Vazquez Portillo / M-Theory Audio. Fraser Lewry Thank you for signing up to Classic Rock. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.

You can hear echoes of Parquet Courts and Protomartyr’s spoken-word freak-outs and jittery guitars, sensitive and catchy late-’90s alt-rock, Pavement-esque slow-burners, and some emo intonation. That heaviness is there in “Pop Out,” Polo G’s rob-the-party breakout hit. Perri has also played with Shinedown, Perry Farrell and Matt Sorum, so he clearly knows what he's doing, but The Underground Thieves feels like a project that takes everything he's learned and packs it into one luminescent, enormously ambitious  project that's defiantly his own. –Nina, Atlanta Millionaires Club by Faye Webster, In a deft move of self-mythologizing, Fontaines D.C. provided the manifesto for their ascendant 2019 right out the gates, an already oft-quoted line from Dogrel’s charging opener “Big”: “My childhood was small/ But I’m gonna be big!” Ireland might be a small place, but it’s often the people from the smallest places, the people hungry to see the rest of the world, that make the biggest sounds.

And if not, well, we’ll always have “Old Town Road.” –Peter, The story of Mdou Moctar is already a rich one, from building his own first guitar as a child to starring in a Tuareg-language remake of Purple Rain. Festival with Bauhaus, Blondie, Devo, Echo and the Bunnymen, and More Canceled, Korine Beat the Quarantine Blues with Streaming Concerts, Bauhaus Paris Gig to be Rescheduled due to Pandemic, SXSW Cancelled Amidst Corona Virus Concerns, Philadelphia’s Premier Synth-Pop Band Korine to Launch Nationwide Tour this Spring, Bauhaus Announce Concert in Paris This April, Horizoned on the Line: A Review of Peter Murphy’s “Mr. In 1993 the brothers wrote and composed the vocals on two Front 242 albums Up Evil and Off. The Atlanta singer-songwriter didn’t turn alt-country on its head with Atlanta Millionaires Club, but she did dress it up enough to give folk-pop and soft-rock fans a natural in to the genre. The Foreign Resort (DK) –Tom, Though their Bandcamp descriptor “glitter emo alt rock” is apt, the power of Snarls lay in their heart. Their debut Saints And Sebastian Stories is spellbinding, like encountering an old friend in a dream and discovering they have superpowers. Bands to See at 2019’s Wave Gotik Treffen —The World’s Largest Goth Festival. 1984 brought further explorations into the world of electronic body music with the 3-song Man In A Trance EP and 2 tracks on the live concert compilation Mask Promotion both records released on Front 242′s Mask Music label. Murder at the Registry (DE)

And let us not forget of the best classic post-punk bands still around, Sad Lovers and Giants, who will surely give one of the best performances of the entire festival lineup. To illustrate this point, here is the band’s bio courtesy of Dark Entries Records: “Parade Ground has always been the duo of brothers Jean-Marc and Pierre Pauly from Brussels, Belgium formed in 1981. And of course, the audience will be packed with goths both old and young for Escape with Romeo’s set, singing along to “Somebody”. –Peter, Until The Tide Creeps In by Penelope Isles, All over the pop charts, you’ll hear rappers experimenting with Auto-Tuned melody.

Whether airy and aloof or heavy with a lingering drawl, their voices are both eerie and mesmerizing.

The band is made up of ex-members of other Irish bands, including Ghost Estates, The Things, ... Irish sextet THUMPER are the new, frenetic voice of paranoia in 2019. King Dude (US) The Australian singer-songwriter’s debut full-length, Beware Of The Dogs, is a master class in laughing through your tears and growing from the pain. In their two years as a band they’ve opened for Guns N’ Roses, The Who and Slash, and become the first unsigned band to top Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Songs chart – with the ace When I’m Gone. These cookies do not store any personal information. They come from a classical and folk background but together they play an amped-up fusion of delta blues and filthy, garagey rock’n’roll. © White Lies have played Wave Gotik Treffen only once before, commenting at the time that they never played a Goth Festival before.

Debut album Natchez has given them an expanding fan base across the States and brought them support gigs with names like Slash and The Struts. Louder is part of Future plc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. –Nina Corcoran, Dry Cleaning came together in a somewhat atypical way — three musicians who’d already been through the ringer with failed projects, finding their spark with a frontwoman who had no musical experience.

If you’ve already checked out the multi-million-viewed Youtube videos for Wolf Totem and Yuve Yuve Yu, you’ll know what these striking Mongolian mavericks are all about. Her lyrics come from stray details and overheard conversations and YouTube detritus — the jumble of a mind in an era of too much information and too many stimuli, the outpouring of it all ultimately making Dry Cleaning somehow therapeutic.