Post-rock
Post-rock is a subgenre of experimental rock that emphasizes texture, atmosphere, and non-traditional song structures over conventional rock techniques. Post-rock artists often combine rock instrumentation and rock stylings with electronics and digital production as a means of enabling the exploration of textures, timbres and different styles. Vocals, when present, are often used as an instrumental layer, with many bands opting for entirely instrumental compositions. The genre began in indie and underground music scenes, but deviated.
The term post-rock was coined by music journalist Simon Reynolds and popularized in his review of Bark Psychosis' 1994 album Hex. He later expanded the concept as music "using rock instrumentation for non-rock purposes". The term has since developed to refer to bands oriented around dramatic and suspense-driven instrumental rock, making the term controversial among listeners and artists alike.
Groups such as Talk Talk and Slint are credited with producing foundational works in the style in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The release of Tortoise's 1996 album Millions Now Living Will Never Die led to post-rock becoming an established term for the genre in music criticism and journalism. In its second wave, post-rock diversified into subgenres, influencing indie rock, electronica, and certain forms of metal.
Characteristics
Post-rock emphasizes the use of textures, timbres, and non-rock influences, often featuring little or no vocals. Rather than relying on traditional song structures or riffs, it—as a musical aesthetic—focuses on atmosphere and mood to create a musically evocative experience. Post-rock incorporates stylings and traits from a variety of musical genres and scenes, including indie rock and its forms like slowcore and math rock, as well as krautrock, ambient music, psychedelia, progressive rock, space rock, tape music, minimalist classical, British IDM, jazz, dub, post-punk, free jazz, contemporary classical and avant-garde electronica.First wave post-rock groups often exhibited strong influence from the krautrock of the 1970s, particularly the motorik, the characteristic krautrock rhythm, and its one- or two-chord melodicism, with these influences also being pivotal for the substyle of ambient pop, where the framework of post-rock is applied to indie pop. Post-rock acts frequently blend traditional rock instrumentation and stylistic elements with electronic and digital production, using this combination to explore a wider range of textures, timbres, and musical styles. The genre originated in the indie and underground music scenes of the 1980s and 1990s, but as it moved away from traditional rock elements, it became increasingly distinct from the conventions of indie rock of that era.
Instrumentation
Though typically performed using standard rock instrumentation—guitars, bass, drums, and keyboards—post-rock compositions often subvert the expected uses of these instruments, for example by employing guitars as noise generators or focusing on sonic texture rather than melody. However, instruments were often used in non-traditional ways, acting as a "palette of textures" rather than for their conventional rock roles. It can be lengthy and instrumental, containing repetitive build-ups of timbres, dynamics and textures, often making use of repetition of musical motifs and subtle changes with an extremely wide range of dynamics. In some respects, this is similar to the music of Steve Reich, Philip Glass and Brian Eno, pioneers of minimalism who were acknowledged influences on bands in the first wave of post-rock.Guitars, rather than serving melodic or riff-driven purposes, are often employed as tools for texture and atmosphere. Artists manipulate timbre through alternate tunings, effects like delay and distortion, EBows, and looping, sometimes processing guitars to the point of becoming unrecognizable. Drums and percussion in post-rock frequently defy traditional roles, drawing inspiration from krautrock's hypnotic "motorik" beats and dub's spacious, bass-heavy rhythms. It can feature, as is prominently the case in the first wave, multiple drum kits, irregular tempos, and/or minimalist patterns that prioritize mood over groove. The bass guitar often assumes a central role in shaping post-rock's atmospheric depth, diverging from standard rock's rhythmic lock with the bass drum, extending from post-punk. Influenced by dub and ambient music in addition, basslines may consist of sustained drones, pulsating loops, or sparse, resonant notes that anchor the composition's harmonic framework, differing from the walking bass trope of conventional rock.
With the increasing accessibility of samplers in the late 1980s, bands drew inspiration from contemporary electronica and experimental electronic music to restructure their compositions with sampling. Samplers, along with sequencers and MIDI setups, allowed for both ordered and chaotic elements to coexist within a single piece. The recording studio is regarded as an essential component of the creative process in post-rock. English acts such as Disco Inferno, Insides, Seefeel and Third Eye Foundation made the recording studio an active component of composition, employing hardware for live processing and sampling, and software like Cubase to sequence tracks, fragmenting and reassemble guitar sounds and vocals as abstract sonic material over drum patterns and beats.
Vocals and structure
Vocals play a much lesser role in most post-rock and are sometimes entirely absent. When post-rock bands have vocalists, their performances are often non-traditional, with them employing vocals as purely instrumental efforts and incidental to the sound. Vocals are often presented as spoken word, found audio samples, or stylized delivery such as murmured or shouted passages. Bands often treat the voice as an additional instrument. Lyrics, if included, are often non-narrative, poetic, or opaque, reflecting themes of alienation, ambiguity, or abstraction.While the verse-chorus form is not exempt from the ethos of post-rock, in lieu of typical rock structures, groups make greater use of soundscapes and abstraction. Reynolds states in his essay "Post-Rock" from Audio Culture that "a band's journey through rock to post-rock usually involves a trajectory from narrative lyrics to stream-of-consciousness to voice-as-texture to purely instrumental music". Songs in the genre can include climactic endings alongside buildups of textures and timbres, used to provide closure in otherwise linear compositions. This structural trope became a hallmark of second wave post-rock, where bands focused on dramatic, suspenseful instrumental rock; this usage of the term became controversial among both listeners and musicians.
Etymology
The term post-rock was first coined by the English music journalist Simon Reynolds in a Melody Maker article in late 1993, which is the earliest instance of him using the term. He later employed it in a review of Bark Psychosis' 1994 album Hex, published in the March 1994 issue of Mojo. Reynolds further developed the concept in a May 1994 issue of The Wire, defining post-rock as "using rock instrumentation for non-rock purposes, using guitars as facilitators of timbre and textures rather than riffs and power chords". He further expounded on the term that:Reynolds, in a July 2005 entry in his blog, said he later found the term not to be of his own coinage, writing in his blog "I discovered many years later it had been floating around for over a decade". In 2021, Reynolds reflected on the evolution of the style, saying that the term had developed in meaning during the 21st century, no longer referring to "left-field UK guitar groups engaged in a gradual process of abandoning songs texture, effects processing, and space", but instead coming to signify "epic and dramatic instrumental rock, not nearly as post- as it likes to think it is".
The earliest use of the term cited by Reynolds dates back as far as September 1967. In a Time cover story feature on the Beatles, writer Christopher Porterfield hails the band and producer George Martin's creative use of the recording studio, declaring that this is "leading an evolution in which the best of current post-rock sounds are becoming something that pop music has never been before an art form". Other uses of the term include its employment in a 1975 article by American journalist James Wolcott about musician Todd Rundgren, although with a different meaning. It was also used in the Rolling Stone Album Guide to name a style roughly corresponding to "avant-rock" or "out-rock", the latter of which became synonymous with post-rock during the first wave. Alternately, an April 1992 review of the single "Stacey's Cupboard" by 1990s noise pop band the Earthmen by Steven Walker in Melbourne music publication Juke describes the song as a "post-rock noisefest".
History
1960s–1980s: influences and precursors
In music journalism and criticism, various retroactive examples have been given of precursors to post-rock. For instance, with regard to the 1960s and early 1970s in music, the "dronology" of The Velvet Underground, most apparent on their 1967 album The Velvet Underground & Nico, was referred to by Reynolds in 1994 as having significantly influenced much "of today's post rock activity" in the first wave, especially with regard to the 1990s space rock revival. Both the American experimental electronic rock band Silver Apples and Germany's krautrock scene which included Can, Neu!, Faust and Cluster were prevalent influences on post-rock in the first wave.The post-punk and no wave movements—via acts like Sonic Youth, Glenn Branca, and Ut—experimented with dissonance, non-linear structures, sustained tones, and noise, challenging rock's musical and performative norms. Similarly, This Heat, which formed in 1976, demonstrated an emphasis on texture, significantly unconventional musical stylings, and repetitive structures.
Stylus Magazine observed that David Bowie's 1977 album Low, produced by Brian Eno, would have been considered post-rock if released twenty years later. Louder also described the English post-punk band Wire as "the genre's godfathers", highlighting their 1979 studio album 154 as an early precursor that signposted the beginning of post-rock.
British post-punk band Public Image Ltd have been seen as pivotal for post-rock, with the NME describing them as "arguably the first post-rock group" when referring to their first few albums. Their 1979 album Metal Box almost completely abandoned traditional rock structures in favor of dense, repetitive dub- and krautrock-inspired soundscapes and John Lydon's cryptic, stream-of-consciousness lyrics. The year before Metal Box was released, PiL bassist Jah Wobble declared that "rock is obsolete".