Post punk emerged from the death of punk rock music. Its sense of anti-establishment was temporarily fitting and influential but didn’t pass the test of time. Post punk era legend Genesis P-Orridge described the appeal as "Punk is about saying 'Fuck you', post punk is about saying 'I’m fucked.'" The subgenre grabbed the attention of Brits as it was intensely relatable in a time of mass unemployment and industrial decline; the average working Brit was highly susceptible to a loss of career, with unemployment at a high of 3.3 million in 1984. These artists created a sense of misery and pain that was intensely relatable in the context, proving Brits found it much easier to wallow in sorrow rather than rebel against the establishment.
Post punk music enjoyed success from its more complex nature. Punk was often equipped with three chord progressions and limited substance, whereas post punk adopted elements of modernist art, literature and romanticism. It held musical variation, with synths, organs, strings, and lots of reverb. It introduced newfound deeply complex and dense lyricism. Artists cooked up plenty more food for thought in deeply multifaceted songs. The adoption of retro art in this music created the sense of yearning and nostalgia we all know and love in post punk music.
Post punk emerged with bands such as Joy Division, Wire, The Fall, and Talking Heads, who gave us stripped-down, raw, yet hypnotic and dark sounds, such as Wire’s Pink Flag (1977), introducing angular guitar work to the genre. After the tragic death of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis in 1980, the early 80s saw an introduction of more electronic sounds to punk. In the formation of New Order assisted by the likes of the Cure and the Human League, synths were often heavily incorporated into tracks, assisting the distinctive hypnotic sound. The genre's experimental nature even lead to the development of genres such as shoegaze, new wave and goth.
We are now at an age of a ‘post punk revival’, with artists such as IDLES, Shame, Squid and recent BRIT-winners Fontaines D.C. under the spotlight as they adopt the iconic elements of the genre’s spoken word vocals and hypnotic, melancholy composition. Post punk not only had Britain lovestruck in the 1980s, but now in the modern day.