Darkwave is the gothic, synth-driven genre that grew out of 1980s post-punk, and in 2024 it stopped being a niche: The Guardian’s definitive June 2024 feature declared it “the gothic genre lighting up pop,” built around Artemas and his global #1 “i like the way you kiss me,” alongside Mareux, Boy Harsher, Molchat Doma and Twin Tribes. Here is what the revival actually is, where it came from, and how the artists The Ring covers sit inside it.
What is darkwave, exactly?
The lineage The Guardian traced runs back to The Cure, Depeche Mode, Clan of Xymox and Malaria!: cold synths, romantic dread, basslines that feel like a pulse slowing down. The modern wave keeps the atmosphere and swaps the distribution: instead of goth clubs, the songs break on TikTok, where an icy synth loop and one obsessive lyric make a perfect fifteen-second world. Guardian writer Daniel Dylan Wray described the sound of its biggest hit as “pulsating, icy synth-pop” with “unabashed, unpolished lyricism.”
The revival’s roster, per that feature, spans Mareux, Boy Harsher, Ekkstacy, ThxSoMch, Twin Tribes, the KVB, Molchat Doma and Pastel Ghost. On Reddit, r/darkwave name-checks Artemas alongside Mareux, Molchat Doma and Ekkstacy as a leading figure of the genre’s streaming-era wave.
Why is Artemas the face of it?
Numbers, mostly. “i like the way you kiss me,” released independently on March 19, 2024, hit #1 on global Spotify within weeks, peaked at #12 on the Hot 100 and #3 in the UK, went RIAA 3x Platinum, and racked up nearly 2.5 billion TikTok views by the end of April 2024. Wikipedia’s entry describes the track’s “moody 80s and pulsating synths” and “dark, retro-futuristic sound collage.” It was the moment the revival produced an inescapable pop hit rather than a playlist curiosity.
The irony is that the genre’s figurehead rejects the whole framing. “I don’t perceive myself as part of a specific scene; I exist independently,” Artemas has said, and his line to The Guardian doubles as the revival’s thesis statement:
As a romantic, I yearn for a specific sound... We don’t have scenes; we just have playlists and an endless supply of music.Artemas, The Guardian
Where do The Ring’s artists fit?
The darkwave revival is the moody outer ring of a bigger movement this site maps constantly: dark pop, the toxic-obsessed alt-pop lane where Reddit’s recommendation threads file Artemas directly beside Dutch Melrose and Ari Abdul. The borders are porous by design. Artemas co-produced and features on Nessa Barrett’s “Mustang Baby,” a straight darkwave crossover. Isabel LaRosa, whose whispered gothic pop shares the same DNA, opened his 2026 LOVERCORE Tour. And Dutch Melrose’s recent run, documented in Match Made in Hell, leans into exactly the shadowy territory the revival made commercially safe.
Goth clubs had door policies. Playlists don’t. That is the whole revival in one sentence.
Why it matters
Genre revivals usually flatter nostalgia. This one changed the economics. Darkwave’s new hits are largely self-made and self-released: “i like the way you kiss me” carried no label credit at release, produced in roughly three hours by an artist who had scrapped his catalog a year earlier with about 100 fans. The revival proved that the darkest corner of pop could mint global #1s without a machine behind them, and every artist in the toxic-pop lane inherited that proof.
The sound will mutate; Artemas has already pushed his own version toward ’80s new-wave romance on LOVERCORE and Berlin-warehouse tempos on getting up to no good. But the door the revival opened, playlist-native gothic pop with no gatekeepers, is staying open. The scene The Ring covers walks through it weekly.