When it was released last year, Halsey’s acclaimed album If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, found the US singer shedding the polite sad-girl pop of her previous three albums to embrace her identity as a woman, a mother and a seductress, with the support and encouragement of Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

The songs were lustrous with spectral piano, driving synths, and apocalyptic and biblical references. Halsey fans may have heard it all anew, but for those of us who dressed like Robert Smith or Siouxsie Sioux-meets-Beetlejuice in clubs like Melbourne’s Abyss, Subculture or Cabaret Nocturne or Sydney’s Club 77 and Hellfire Club circa 1998 to 2010, it was thrillingly familiar.

In the same way that everything ’90s is new again, so is gothcore (or “undead, undead, undead” in the timeless words of Bauhaus’ Peter Murphy). Sandwiched between the New Romantics and the synth-driven late-‘80s and the rave explosion of the ’90s, the gothcore sound is all big metal guitar riffs, swirling panoramic synthesizers, a pounding dance-floor beat and thunderous, malevolent bass lines.

If there’s any doubt about its resurgence, Nine Inch Nails headlining tours throughout Europe with Nitzer Ebb, Ministry’s return to touring, UK post-punk pioneers Bauhaus’ reformation, and gloom icons The Sisters of Mercy’s upcoming Australian dates leave no doubt the synth-goth sound that blitzed through ’90s clubs like Doc Martens and a whole lot of eyeliner is back in a big way.

At a glance, the revival makes sense. As the planet continues to heat up and we negotiate a life in which pandemics come in waves as a matter of course, a younger generation of listeners have connected with the genre’s melancholic tragi-drama.

Relying on primarily bass and minor chords, the genre emerged, most notably in the UK, from the 1970s post-punk scene. Borrowing the snarling bass and tribal percussion from their post-punk predecessors, goth bands took their lyrics into a more existential, supernatural realm. Bands like Theatre of Hate and The Sisters of Mercy delivered their nihilistic, gloom-laden response to Britain’s late-’70s Winter of Discontent, where “the old order was dying and the new was struggling to be born,” as Phil Tinline wrote for the New Statesman.

Forty years later, as Vladimir Putin aggressively attacks Ukraine under the auspice of “de-Nazification”, China and Iran continue to silence dissent, and governments globally take advantage of pandemic conditions to increase their authoritarian measures, is it any wonder those dusty Siouxsie and the Banshees albums are resonating anew?

But gothcore, encompassing bands old and new, is multi-faceted. Whether it’s the melodic dark-wave of US bands Health and Crosses, solo stars Zola Jesus and Chelsea Wolfe, or the post-punk whiplash of locals Bitumen and Party Dozen, there’s a wealth of snarling, seething, sultry new albums recently released and forthcoming.