johnny goth

“I never thought that I could be my own artist”, explains Johnny Goth in a wide ranging interview with Pigeons and Planes. Despite producing music for his highschool band, it wasn’t until he discovered artists like Alex G and Teen Suicide that he saw a blueprint for what would become Johnny Goth. In the five years since his first single, he’s amassed an ever growing following that could be likened to a cult, with fans excitedly dropping skull emojis in the comments section of his Instagram as they await his first proper album.

On The Great Awakening, Johnny Goth builds out his gorgeously morose universe in high-def, marrying Marilyn Manson industrial with Robert Smith’s overcast pop, and the wounded intimacy of Elliott Smith with a pained angst not unlike Lil Peep. The end result is a widescreen goth-rock vision fully realized, and were it not for the stadium sized anthems sprinkled across it’s 10-songs, it could serve as the score for a Tim Burton film (it’s not wholly unthinkable, Johnny played Jero Leto’s body double as the Joker in Birds of Prey).

Driving acoustic guitars and shimmering leads introduce “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head” before crumbling bass and nauseating synths erupts for the massive chorus, recalling Hybrid Theory era Linkin Park and Deftones washes of distortion. “Hit Me Right” and “Sanctus Dominae” creep with sputtering trip-hop rhythm, while songs like “Hallelujah” and “Who Should It Be?” invoke morbid goth opera for maximum tension.

On his first proper album, Johnny Goth fills the void that’s been left in the bedroom pop universe, taking the genre’s intimacy and infusing it with the same aggression and scope that propelled so many of the 90’s best artists to chart topping success.

Find Johnny Goth on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and SoundCloud