Post-Rock Music Guide: History and Sounds of Post-Rock

Post-rock is a style of rock music that foregoes common tropes like blues-based riffing, verse-chorus-verse song structure, flashy guitar solos, and storytelling lyrics. The typical post-rock song or post-rock album tends to feature unconventional song structure, extended instrumental passages, oblique lyrics, and influences outside of blues or classic rock.

While post-rock bands do not typically achieve mainstream popularity, several post-rock groups have gained prominence in the indie-rock world. These include Tortoise, Slint, Sigur Rós, Mogwai, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and Swans.

The term "post-rock" first appeared in print in a Simon Reynolds-penned review for Mojo magazine. From the outset, the term was broadly applied to bands that dealt in atmospheric soundscapes while largely maintaining standard rock instrumentation of guitar, bass, drums, and occasional keyboards.

To create atmospherics, post-rock groups, such as Bark Psychosis, Explosions in the Sky, and Talk Talk, employed regular use of effects pedals like delay and phaser. Some groups, like San Francisco's Tarentel, mined German krautrock for synth-based atmospherics. Iceland's Sigur Rós used string players to build out the ambiance on their breakthrough album, Ágætis Byrjun.

In Chicago, a notable post-rock scene grew around the label Thrill Jockey, home of The Sea and Cake, Isotope 217, and Tortoise. Many Thrill Jockey artists, such as drummer and Tortoise leader John McEntire, come from jazz backgrounds and they bring jazz influences to their band's music. Many Chicago post-rock bands regularly overlapped with those from Louisville, Kentucky, including the now-defunct Rodan, Rachel's, and Slint.

Post-rock describes multiple subgenres of indie rock, all of which break with the conventions of standard rock music. Key elements that define many post-rock bands include:

1. 1. Emphasis on atmosphere: Many post-rock records, from the seminal Tortoise track "Djed" to “They Move On Tracks Of Never-Ending Light” by This Will Destroy You, prioritize mood and atmosphere even more than melody. This gives the genre overlap with the shoegaze scene.
2. 2. Long instrumental passages: Much like the adjacent genre known as math rock, post-rock can be a medium for long instrumental passages with no vocals. The Slint record Spiderland, considered a landmark post-rock recording, has minimal singing but extensive instrumental interplay among band members Todd Brashear, Brian McMahan, David Pajo, and Britt Walford. Mogwai's Young Team is nearly all instrumental.
3. 3. Post-punk energy: Many post-rock bands come from the post-punk or post-hardcore scene and infuse those genres' energy into their records.
4. 4. Progressive song structure: While many rock bands default to a verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus format, the post-rock scene embraces experimentation with song form. Mixed meter and unusual chordal harmony also appear with great frequency. Groups like Do Make Say Think and the Chicago Underground Duo embrace this aesthetic with each new album.

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