Siouxsie & The Banshees

Siouxsie Sioux and Steve Severin formed the Banshees as confrontational performance artists who happened to make music — their first "gig" at the 100 Club Punk Festival in 1976 was twenty minutes of improvised noise involving a drummer who had never played drums and Siouxsie reciting the Lord's Prayer over a guitar riff. By the time they released The Scream (1978), the noise had acquired structure and their version of post-punk was formally the most unusual of any of their contemporaries: John McKay's guitar was a maze of non-rock tunings and angles; Kenny Morris's drumming arrived at the beat from odd directions.

What followed — Join Hands, Kaleidoscope, Juju, A Kiss in the Dreamhouse — constitutes one of the most consistently interesting catalogs in post-punk, each album reorganizing the band's sound around new obsessions. Siouxsie's voice, which could be ice-cold or operatically theatrical, became the template for goth femininity in a way that was actually more complicated than the aesthetic it inspired. The Banshees' guitar textures — those eerie arpeggiated lines on "Spellbound" or "Slowdive" — run directly through shoegaze and dream-pop in ways that remain under-acknowledged.