Cold Wave
Cold wave is a bleak, minimal style of post-punk from late 1970s and early 1980s France and Belgium, with icy synthesizers, drum machines and detached vocals.
French and Belgian bands took the gloom of British post-punk and stripped it down: thin, chorus-laden guitars, prominent bass, simple machine rhythms and vocals that sound distant or numb, often sung in French. It is sparser and colder than gothic rock and closely related to minimal wave and darkwave. A revival began in the 2000s as old recordings were reissued and new bands adopted the sound.
Artists it is known for: KaS Product, Asylum Party, Trisomie 21.
- Family
- Alternative & Indie
- On Spotify
- A current genre
- What it is
- A genre
- From
- France and Belgium, late 1970s
- Also called
- coldwave
- Trackify listeners who play it
- 3%
About 2,700 of 83,000 Trackify listeners with public profiles have cold wave among their top artists of the last four weeks. Rounded; updated 13 November 2026.
Cold Wave artists
Kino
Joy Division
Molchat Doma
Siouxsie and the Banshees
Mareux
Bauhaus
Sisters of Mercy
London After Midnight
Lebanon Hanover
Twin Tribes
The cold wave artists most Trackify listeners have in their top fifty. Each opens on Spotify.
Sources
The definition is written for this site from open sources, and was checked against them on 13 November 2026.