2. The Sisters of Mercy | "This Corrosion"

"This Corrosion" by The Sisters of Mercy from the album Floodland (1987)

Bauhaus may have stumbled across goth by haphazardly mixing Bowie with a delay pedal, but it was the Sisters of Mercy who mutated the bashful movement into capital-G goth. Forming dense and powerful dirges out of inhumanly low vocals and shredding noise, Andrew Eldritch took a sad-sack Leonard Cohen obsession and fused it with an intense urge to rock. Sisters clicked where many fellow gothers faltered, mostly because their stamina-testing pummeling always kicked maximum ass even when it was lyrically moping in the corner. Their zenith was their commercial peak, as Eldritch teamed with Meat Loaf/”Bat Out of Hell” songsmith Jim Steinman and a 40-piece choir to fashion this eight-and-a-half-minute tower of gloom, turning a sniping jab at an ex-bandmate into a Wagnerian shitkicker of truly epic proportions.
 Daniel Brockman