An overview of the concurrent, interrelated, and offshoot genres of the original synthwave and post-punk sounds from decades past and their 21st century contemporary revival have been mapped by Vice in their, "A Brief History of Musical Waves from New to Next". Assembled in compilations like the now-classic, “The Minimal Wave Tapes: Volume One” which focused on the coldwave and minimal wave strains, and the the recent genre overview presented in “No Songs Tomorrow: Darkwave, Ethereal Rock, and Coldwave 1981-1990”, offer an all-inclusive cornucopia of variables within the subgenre. Taken together, these compilations represent an overarching map of a sound that was born of the settling dust of the tumult of post-punk's upending of the topography of rock and noise music. Expressed through a more uneasy, existential, often edgier and sexually charged sound than their more commercial compatriots, darkwave retained its post-punk values while utilizing the same technology, and dancier, more upbeat tempos of new wave. The balancing act of its particular brand of starkly minimal, angular, existential electronic dance pop of alienation and heartbreak is presented by The Guardian in, “‘The Body was the Drums, the Brain was the Synthesiser’: Darkwave, the Gothic Genre Lighting up Pop”.
A cross-section of artists within this subgenre, Molchat Doma, The KVB, Xeno & Oaklander, Kite, The Soft Moon, Twin Tribes, Drab Majesty, and Boy Harsher, express a spectrum of variations on an aesthetic of darkly romantic, sexually fetishistic, and imperially fatalistic thematic concerns. In describing Boy Harsher's sound as a "moving choker-collar muscle-mash" which "contains a dark power, an atavistic pull", the music press has rightly depicted the central components from which the variables pivot and deviate around. The Turkish duo She Past Away, comprising Volkan Caner and Doruk Öztürkcan, have developed their own particular strain within this sound. One that leans more heavily into the earliest post-punk baritone ruminatuions of bands like Bauhaus, and the dissonant asceticism of Joy Division and Suicide, with musical lines that express a harder, more angular post-punk affinity. Announcing as much in interview, "We are a Gloomy Punk Band in Essence", She Past Away's sound is ironically best represented in the sprawling double disc assembly of remixes by their contemporaries heard on "X". They return domestically with a second leg of their most recent tour on the album, with a date at Seattle's The Crocodile.
