darkwave
darkwave noun: a musical movement that originated in the late 1970s, combining elements of new wave and gothic rock with dark, thoughtful lyrics and an undertone of sorrow.
Noun
darkwave (uncountable)
- A musical movement that originated in the late 1970s, combining elements of new wave and gothic rock with dark, thoughtful lyrics and an undertone of sorrow.
- As well as mainstream pop you'll find dance, funk and all kinds of club music, world music and even very select genres such as darkwave medieval, darkwave gothic to darkwave neofolk.2002, Jules Brown, Dinah Gardner, Hong Kong and Macau, page 315
- Since the 1980s, several goth substyles have mixed the Batcave heritage with other musical genres into new goth substyles. New wave was gothed into darkwave, classic rock into gothic rock, and metal into gothic metal. […] The term darkwave originated in the 1980s as an indicator of the “dark”...2015, Isabella van Elferen, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Goth Music: From Sound to Subculture, Routledge, →ISBN, page 25
Forms of darkwave
| alternative form | dark wave |
|---|
Origin of darkwave
From dark + -wave, meaning the “dark” counterpart of new wave.
Words formed from darkwave
Questions about darkwave
- What does darkwave mean?
- Darkwave means a musical movement that originated in the late 1970s, combining elements of new wave and gothic rock with dark, thoughtful lyrics and an undertone of sorrow.
- What part of speech is darkwave?
- Darkwave is a noun.
Words near darkwave in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: darkwave (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “darkwave.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/darkwave. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.