‘The body was the drums, the brain was the synthesiser’: darkwave, the gothic genre lighting up pop

Emerging from the gloomiest corners of the 80s underground, this synth-driven, nihilistic sound is now getting billions of streams. Its past and present creators explain why they turn to the dark side

For whatever reason, there is a huge appetite right now for music that embraces a moody, minimalist, synth-heavy, often lo-fi sound that feels redolent of an amphetamine-charged squat party in 1980s West Berlin.

Take I Like the Way You Kiss Me, by British-Cypriot musician Artemas Diamandis, who performs as Artemas. The two-minute burst of pulsating, icy synth-pop – depicting an objectified and emotionally disengaged love affair – has been sticking out a mile in the charts next to Sabrina Carpenter, Kendrick Lamar and the ranks of earnestly strummed acoustic guitars. “We made the song in about three hours, I posted it the next day, then things went crazy,” he says. On release in March it leaped to No 1 in numerous countries and on Spotify alone it has had over half a billion streams – and is just one of many mega-streamed songs in a similar ilk.