Post-punk revival
A rock movement that revived post-punk’s angular guitars, danceable rhythms, and minimalist style, gaining prominence in the late 1990s and 2000s.
Turn on the Bright Lights: Interpol’s 2002 debut album, marked by stark guitars, restrained vocals, and urban unease. It became one of the movement’s defining albums.
Post-punk: A diverse late-1970s and 1980s rock movement that pushed punk toward experimentation, art, and new rhythmic approaches. It supplied the revival’s central musical vocabulary.
Interlocking guitar parts: A guitar arrangement in which separate parts fit together rhythmically and melodically rather than duplicating one another. Revival bands used this technique to create motion without relying on heavy chords.
James Murphy: An American musician and producer who founded LCD Soundsystem and co-founded DFA Records. His work linked the revival’s guitar bands to New York dance-punk and club culture.
Indie rock: A broad rock category associated with independent music scenes, labels, and approaches to songwriting and production. The revival became one of indie rock’s dominant early-2000s directions.
Is This It: The Strokes’ 2001 debut album, built around terse songs, interlocking guitars, and a rough-edged production. Its success helped bring guitar minimalism back to the center of popular rock.
Punk rock: A rock style that emerged in the 1970s, favoring short songs, direct performances, and rejection of rock convention. Post-punk revival bands inherited punk’s economy while softening or redirecting its attack.
Dance-punk: A rock style that joins punk-derived instrumentation and energy to dance music’s steady, groove-centered rhythms. It names the revival’s most direct meeting of club rhythm and guitar rock.
DFA Records: An independent record label founded in New York in 2001 by James Murphy, Tim Goldsworthy, and Jonathan Galkin. The label connected post-punk revival sounds with dance music and an influential New York scene.
Garage rock revival: A late-1990s and early-2000s revival of raw, blues-influenced garage rock, often played with deliberately rough production. It overlapped with the post-punk revival but favored a looser, more garage-centered sound.