Teen Gothic

Full disclosure: I would not consider myself a goth, but I have been getting more and more into goth music over the course of the last couple of years, but it is not really the genre that my heart most belongs to.

What I've noticed about some "goth discourse" on line is this term "goth-adjacent", which is used to define bands/artists that are maybe not necessarily goth, but are included in the scene in some marginal way because they're played at clubs, or have a similar vibe, or for whatever reason have been swept up into the vernacular of the general "goth-o-sphere".

Now, I find a term like this kind of useful, but it does have a down-side of being rather vague, and what some consider goth-adjacent can change depending on where people are from, or even when it was that some artists came into their scene.

So if I was listening to a mixture of goth bands like Switchblade Symphony, Love Like Blood, The Frozen Autumn, or Mephisto Walz, how many degrees of separation are there between those, and artists like Collide, BlutEngel, Mortal Love, or Autumn Tears?

So I guess I'm curious to hear from goths themselves what they consider goth-adjacent, why (what was the actual goth music that would be played back-to-back with said goth-adjacent groups), and what they think the relationship is between those bands/artists and the general goth scene? It might also be interesting to hear where people are from/when they came into the scene to add context.