Post-punk bands you should know, from Pere Ubu to the Smiths

Post-punk bands took punk’s freedom and used it to rebuild rock music from the bass upwards. If you need the core list: Joy Division, Wire, Gang of Four, Public Image Ltd, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Fall, The Slits and Magazine. Most of them formed in 1976 or 1977, inspired by the first wave of punk, and made their key records between 1978 and 1981. They kept the independent labels and the refusal to play by the rules, but they listened to dub, funk, German electronic music and art theory rather than to the Stooges. The 20 bands below run from Cleveland in 1975 to Manchester in 1984. For the history of the term, read our guide to post-punk.

How we chose

A band made the list if it shaped how post-punk sounded or how it was released, and if its key records came out by 1984. We give the year and city of formation and one record to start with. Bands that most people file under synth pop or new wave are in our list of new wave bands.

The list

1. Pere Ubu (Cleveland, 1975). Formed before punk had a name in Britain. Their first single 30 Seconds Over Tokyo (1975) and the album The Modern Dance (1978) mixed garage rock with tape noise and synthesizer squeals. There is a good case that the first post-punk band came from Cleveland, not London.
2. Wire (London, 1976). Their debut Pink Flag (1977) cut punk into fragments; Chairs Missing (1978) and 154 (1979) added space and keyboards. Start with Chairs Missing to hear the turn.
3. Siouxsie and the Banshees (London, 1976). They played their first gig at the 100 Club punk festival in September 1976, improvising. Two years later The Scream (1978) had a cold, cavernous sound that was nothing like the Sex Pistols. Start there.
4. The Fall (Manchester, 1976). Mark E. Smith led the band through dozens of line-ups until his death in 2018. Live at the Witch Trials (1979) is the first album; Hex Enduction Hour (1982) is the one many fans would pick.
5. Joy Division (Salford, 1976). Formed after the Sex Pistols’ gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, first called Warsaw. Martin Hannett’s production on Unknown Pleasures (Factory, June 1979) gave them space and coldness. Ian Curtis died in May 1980, and Closer followed two months later. Start with Unknown Pleasures.
6. Magazine (Manchester, 1977). Howard Devoto left Buzzcocks after the Spiral Scratch EP and formed a band with keyboards and ambition. Real Life (1978) is the start.
7. Public Image Ltd (London, 1978). John Lydon’s band after the Sex Pistols, with Jah Wobble’s dub bass and Keith Levene’s metallic guitar. Metal Box (1979) was first issued as three 12-inch records in a round metal canister. Start with that, or its later double-LP version Second Edition.
8. Cabaret Voltaire (Sheffield, 1973). Experimenting with tapes and electronics years before punk, they found an audience through it. Red Mecca (1981) is a good entry.
9. Gang of Four (Leeds, 1977). University students who wrote about politics and everyday life over sharp, funk-driven rhythms. Entertainment! (September 1979) is one of the most influential guitar albums of its decade.
10. The Mekons (Leeds, 1977). Gang of Four’s friends and rivals from the same university, sloppier and warmer. Their early singles on Fast Product mattered as much as any album.
11. The Slits (London, 1976). An all-female band that learned to play in public. Cut (Island, September 1979), produced by Dennis Bovell, brought reggae and dub into post-punk more completely than any other record.
12. The Pop Group (Bristol, 1977). Furious, political and close to free jazz. Their debut Y (1979) is still hard to listen to, which is part of its point.
13. The Raincoats (London, 1977). Their self-titled album on Rough Trade (1979) used violin and odd rhythms and is a cornerstone of feminist rock.
14. Killing Joke (London, 1978). Heavy, tribal and dark. The debut Killing Joke (1980) influenced metal and industrial music.
15. The Cure (Crawley, 1978). Started as a spiky guitar trio with Three Imaginary Boys (1979) and became a gloomy, atmospheric band with Seventeen Seconds (1980) and Pornography (1982). Start with Seventeen Seconds.
16. Bauhaus (Northampton, 1978). Their first single Bela Lugosi’s Dead (1979) runs for over nine minutes and is generally named as the starting point of gothic rock. In the Flat Field (1980) is the first album.
17. Echo & the Bunnymen (Liverpool, 1978). More melodic and psychedelic. Crocodiles (1980) and Heaven Up Here (1981) are the place to start.
18. Mission of Burma (Boston, 1979). American post-punk that used tape loops live. Vs. (1982) influenced a generation of US college rock bands.
19. Einstürzende Neubauten (West Berlin, 1980). Played metal, concrete and power tools as instruments. Kollaps (1981) is the radical start. They sit at the crossroads of post-punk, industrial music and the West Berlin side of the Neue Deutsche Welle.
20. The Smiths (Manchester, 1982). Their debut The Smiths (February 1984) marks the end of the post-punk period: guitar pop on an independent label, Rough Trade, that reached number two in Britain.

The American and German side

In New York, a harsher parallel movement played at the same time: no wave, with bands such as DNA, Mars and James Chance and the Contortions. In West Germany, Düsseldorf’s DAF reduced post-punk to sequencer and voice, and the Hamburg and Berlin scenes produced bands like Abwärts and Malaria!. These belong in the same story and are covered in our genre guides.

The revival

The phrase post-punk came back around 2002, when Interpol’s Turn On the Bright Lights and then Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party borrowed the sound of Joy Division and Gang of Four. More recent bands described as post-punk include Fontaines D.C. from Dublin, Idles from Bristol, Shame from London and Molchat Doma from Minsk, whose cold, Soviet-tinged records found a huge audience online. If you came here because of them, the first ten entries above are where their sound comes from.

Where to start

Play Unknown Pleasures, Entertainment!, Metal Box and Cut back to back. That gives you atmosphere, funk, dub and the radical do-it-yourself spirit that held them together. For what came before, read the list of punk bands; for the scene in which Siouxsie and the Banshees first appeared, read London 1976.