Last Night A Mixtape Saved My Life

Instrumental storms. Mounting tension, tormenting density, sudden clearings and moments of stillness. Shadow. Light. Pianissimo and fortissimo chasing and colliding with each other. Many fans are used to associating sensations like these with the music of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Mogwai, Explosions In The Sky, Mono, Sigur Rós. And with a term: “post-rock”. For some, this term has even become synonymous with the musical style described above, a succession of guitar surges and thinning-outs built on strongly emotional foundations, which others have mockingly christened crescendo-core.

Another label, less widespread but even more descriptive, is soft/loud. Besides the bands mentioned above, the term fits a large host of followers, beloved by a sizeable fanbase yet almost entirely erased from the pages of the major outlets covering independent music. It's toward the galaxy of these “other” disciples of soft/loud that this playlist looks: by choice, it sets aside the tutelary deities who are already well known even to the bulk of “generalist” devotees, and tries to dig a little deeper into a landscape that, over some twenty years now, has become remarkably diverse.

The History of a Genre (Mislabeled)

Before starting the exploration, though, a bit of explanation is needed regarding the title, which tries to distance itself from the identification with post-rock, deeming it misleading. The origins of the term “post-rock”, in fact, were tied to entirely different musical horizons. When, in 1994, The Wire journalist Simon Reynolds coined the label, he meant to refer to bands far removed from the cinematic sound of the five artists cited at the start of this piece. His article (now collected in the anthology “Hip-hop-rock 1995-2008”, published by Isbn) reads: “Recently […] a handful of British artists, galvanized as much by the advances of electronic genres like techno and hip-hop as by free improvisation and the avant-garde, have ventured into still-uncharted territory […]. The list of futurists includes Disco Inferno, Seefeel, Insides, Bark Psychosis, Main, Papa Sprain, Stereolab, Pram and Moonshake, alongside prophetic artists such as Kevin Martin (Ice/Techno Animal/God/EAR) and Mick Harris (Scorn/Lull), former drummer of Napalm Death”. He then goes on to define “post-rock” as the use of rock instruments for non-rock purposes, combined with the widespread use of samplers, sequencers and midi interfaces.

It's clear that something doesn't add up here. The overlap between Reynolds's list and the one that opens our article is genuinely scant: of the latter, only one band is British, and its music has very little to do either with “techno and hip-hop” or with assorted digital wizardry. At the heart of its formula, as with most of the other bands, lie guitars, and their use, however stretched out and strongly geared toward dynamics, certainly seems to fall within rock conventions.

Why, then, “post-rock”? To understand this, we need to trace the term's path in the years following Reynolds's article. Already in the Nineties, a portion of the independent critical establishment appropriated the label and began broadening its scope, first of all to include American acts (especially from the post-hardcore scenes of Louisville and Chicago: Slint, June of 44, Gastr Del Sol, Tortoise; but also Cul De Sac, Labradford) and then, retroactively, other British names: above all, the last, heart-wrenching albums by Talk Talk, led by Mark Hollis.

By the end of the Nineties, right around the release of Mogwai's first works, the term already covered a fairly wide variety of styles, only partly tied to Reynolds's original definition. With a clearly defined formula now set in stone, and the possibility for the genre to reach a much wider audience, the label too was ready for its “big leap”. As journalist Jack Chuter explains in his book “Storm Static Sleep”, “what had started as an academic observation of a process within British and American music began to attract a new wave of bands, many of whom took the loud/quiet template of Slint and stretched it out across landscapes of classical minimalism, drone, shoegaze”. The transition is inexorable: “Just as no post-rock listener would any longer associate the word 'Mogwai' with the fuzzy little creatures from Spielberg's 'Gremlins', post-rock began to sweep away its conceptual origins”. Within a few years, “post-rock” means Mogwai, GY!BE, Explosions In The Sky, Sigur Rós, Mono (and, at least for us Italians, also Giardini di Mirò). Everything else is little more than a memory or a curiosity.

“Death” and Rebirth

And then? Well, and then that's it. For much of the independent critical establishment — the very one that had given rise to the label and turned it into an all-encompassing term capable of capturing the Zeitgeist of a particular phase of the Nineties — once past that handful of key artists, the genre loses its appeal. It's not that bands stop forming — quite the opposite! dozens spring up every year — but the wind has changed. “Fearless. – The Making Of Post-Rock”, Jeanette Leech's substantial 2017 book, stops precisely at those key names. “Post rock e oltre”, by Eddy Cilia and Stefano Isidoro Bianchi, doesn't even get that far (in its defense, it should be noted it came out in 1999).

The genre keeps gaining followers and becoming ever more recognizable: long instrumental tracks with imaginative, endless titles, strongly evocative and even “landscape-like” music in its dynamism, cover art oriented toward a shared aesthetic of natural elegance and desolation. But to part of the music press, these formulas already look stale, “derivative”. This term, particularly sneaky because it's always presented as neutral, is one of alternative criticism's favorite weapons when it comes to writing off entire scenes as mere historical accidents. In a “derivative” genre, conforming to a stereotype matters more than artistic personality, and variety all but disappears, flattened out into the canon. That, at least, is the story we're told.

An alternative view is this: variety and personality, entirely obvious to fans of the genre, fall off the radar of a know-it-all critical establishment obsessed with “innovation”, leading it to conclude it's best to move on. The pattern, of course, only applies to those areas that are aesthetically “peripheral” enough to indie/alternative ideology that they don't seem to deserve unwavering attention in their own right: what can be dismissed as “derivative” is the “long tail” of post-rock, or today's neo-prog scenes; certainly not yet another post-punk revival, or the perfectly dignified but musically anything-but-surprising comeback of some sacred cow.

Just as soft/loud drops off the radar of independent culture, though, it comes into contact with other listener communities. Beyond fans with an alternative background who, aided by the possibilities offered by forums and other digital platforms, seize the chance to break free from the gatekeeping of specialist critics, this new offshoot of post-rock also intrigues young fans of progressive rock, post-hardcore and screamo enthusiasts, and devotees of metal and its more expansive, extreme fringes. More and more second- (or maybe third-?) generation bands are formed with the explicit goal of playing “post-rock” in the manner of GY!BE and company, but the gaze of these new musicians is aimed above all — and not by chance — at the formula of Texans Explosions In The Sky. While Glasgow's Mogwai drew on Slint, My Bloody Valentine and God Machine, and Japan's Mono set out to “stretch to infinity” the outros of U2 songs, Explosions In The Sky had in mind the enveloping sound of The Cure and the interlocking guitars of Metallica. And, needless to say, the overwhelming crescendos of Mogwai themselves, pioneers of that emotional territory.

While the founding fathers of soft/loud proudly claimed their music's supposed “punk” affiliation, the new generation is far more willing to acknowledge its closeness to contemporary progressive and to the decidedly adjacent post-metal scene. Websites and magazines devoted to progressive rock now regularly cover soft/loud releases, and England's ArcTanGent festival, held in Somerset since 2013, was born as a stage specifically dedicated to the genre but soon expanded to also include math-rock, post-prog, post-metal, djent and (surprisingly, though not all that surprisingly) synthwave acts.

Listening Guide

The selection of tracks on offer bears witness to this reorientation of expressive references, which began around the early 2000s and continues to this day. The playlist opens with artists fairly clearly falling within the GY!BE orbit, gradually veers into Explosions In The Sky and Mogwai territory, and increasingly abandons its forerunners to pursue more heterogeneous stylistic directions. Already by around the fifth track, electronic and nu jazz elements make their way in (the Australian Tangents, one of the more recent inclusions), while in the following tracks the melodic and muscular component increases (reaching its peak with Dublin's God Is An Astronaut). After a detour through near-Celtic themes courtesy of Northern Irish outfit And So I Watch You From Afar (currently among the most respected names in the scene), the energetic tones lead into decidedly electronic lands, well represented by the new direction of the much-loved 65daysofstatic and by the progressive electronic romanticism of home-grown act Port-Royal.

A gentle passage between IDM and downtempo (Arms and Sleepers, Youth Pictures Of Florence Henderson) leads into perhaps the most surprising twist: songs with vocals! A wide range of acts, from France's Mermonte to Japan's Jyocho and a whole host of American artists in between, combine the genre's typical climaxes, illuminations and mood shifts with structures closer to pop, borrowing elements now from math, now from emo, and at times from the new choral sensibility that ran through the indie-pop world around the turn of the millennium.

The results, more often than not, are among the most overtly progressive that the genre has produced. The last, broad subgenre explored by the compilation is that of harder sounds, akin to so-called post-metal and to the more cinematic side of screamo. We chose to avoid cornerstone names like Isis, Pelican and Cult of Luna, which might be better suited to a future dedicated feature, and instead keep the focus on borderline projects like Caspian, Russian Circles or Red Sparowes, alongside a few one-of-a-kind picks such as South Korea's Jambinai or Sweden's Suffocate For Fuck Sake, who, with their overt nods to Godspeed You! Black Emperor, in a way bring the mixtape full circle.

United Kingdom, Japan, United States, France, Italy, Ireland, Korea, Sweden; progressive and emo, folk and electronic, math and pop, metal and minimalism – despite those who simplistically dismiss the genre as a mere copy of a copy, the richness of the soft/loud field is remarkable, both stylistically and geographically, and it now encompasses highly diverse fanbases. We could, in fact, have padded out the selection even further: elaborate scenes have developed in Poland, China and Thailand, and as for the latter, there's even a 2012 short available on YouTube titled “Post Rock A Documentary Film”. But the playlist was already long enough. Three hours and twenty minutes, thirty-two tracks. Torrential, and even a touch exhausting. Perfectly in keeping with the subject at hand.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

14/12/2025