The sub genres of rock music: a working list of every branch, explained

The sub genres of rock music are not a taxonomy in the scientific sense. Nobody sat down and defined them; they were named after the fact, usually by journalists, often as an insult, and the names stuck because everybody needed something to write on a poster. What follows is a working list of rock sub genres — each one explained by what it changed, roughly when it arrived, and what it handed to whatever came next.

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Where this list comes from

Any list of this kind is a compromise between two bad options. Split too finely and you end up with forty branches that differ by a guitar pedal. Split too coarsely and you file the Ramones and Pink Floyd in the same box. The twenty entries below are the ones that turn up in nearly every serious account, arranged by the year each became identifiable rather than by how popular it later became. Where two rock sub genres are usually confused with each other, the difference is explained in the note beside them.

The first split: rock and roll becomes rock

Rock and roll arrives in the mid-1950s as a specific thing: a backbeat, a twelve-bar blues structure, an electric guitar and a rhythm section, played fast. Within a decade it has divided. The British invasion turns it into a songwriting form; garage bands strip it back to three chords and enthusiasm; psychedelia pours studio effects over it. By 1968 the word rock has separated from rock and roll, and the first genuine sub genres of rock exist as distinguishable things: hard rock, progressive rock and the beginnings of heavy metal.

The 1970s then produced the pattern that every decade since has repeated. A form gets complicated and expensive; a younger set of bands reacts by making it simple and cheap again; the simple version gets complicated in its turn. Prog produced punk. Punk produced post-punk. Post-punk produced everything from goth to dance-punk.

The sub genres of rock that punk made possible

Punk in 1976 is the hinge. It contributed little musically that garage rock had not already done, and it changed the infrastructure completely: independent labels, seven-inch singles, fanzines, a circuit of small venues, and the assumption that a band could record and release without anyone's permission. Every branch after 1978 grows in that soil.

Post-punk is where things get interesting. Freed from punk's own rules almost immediately, bands took the same independence and pointed it at dub, funk, free jazz and electronics. The bass carries the melody, the guitar becomes a percussion instrument, and the song stops being obliged to have a chorus. Art punk, math rock, dance-punk and a good deal of what gets filed as indie all descend directly from those four or five years.

Types of rock music that named themselves

From the 1990s on, the types of rock music multiply faster than the music changes. Shoegaze, grunge, britpop, post-rock, math rock and emo all arrive within about eight years of each other, and several of them were named by a single journalist in a single review. Grunge is a Seattle marketing term that describes an approach to volume. Shoegaze is an insult about stage presence. Post-rock describes what a band is not doing.

That is not a criticism. Names that start as jokes are often the most useful ones, because they describe something a listener can actually hear. The other types of rock music from the same period that were named respectfully (alternative, modern rock) describe nothing at all and have aged much worse.

Rock sub genres explained, and why the arguments never end

Every classification of this kind has the same weakness: bands do not stay in one box, and the interesting ones are usually in two. A record can be indie pop in structure and hardcore in volume. A band can spend one album in post-punk and the next in something closer to glam. The list is a map of tendencies, not a set of pigeonholes, and anyone who has ever argued about whether a band counts as post-punk has discovered this the hard way.

This matters practically as well as pedantically. The sub genres of rock music that a band gets filed under determine which shelf the record sits on, which festival books them and which writer is sent to review them. The Victorian English Gentlemens Club were variously called art punk, post-punk, indie rock and pop by publications reviewing the same album, and the band's own answer, pop that sometimes forgets the chorus, is at least as accurate as any of them. Read the rest of the family tree through indie pop and rock and roll.