Gothic Folk

Gothic folk is folk music saturated with the gothic imagination: murder ballads and ghost lore, apocalyptic prophecy, ruins, winter and religious dread, sung over acoustic instruments that are often left deliberately stark. It grew from two directions at once — the apocalyptic folk of British post-industrial acts such as *Death in June* and *Current 93*, who stripped folk song to guitar, drone and chant in the 1980s, and the American gothic songwriting of *Wovenhand* and *Chelsea Wolfe*, where folk forms carry fire-and-brimstone imagery. The shared ground is an atmosphere of beautiful desolation, and a repertoire in which death is the central character.