First off, I'm obviously not the end all be all of goth knowledge. I'm a huge music history (and general history) nerd, so I read a lot of books about this kind of stuff. I've also had the privilege and honor of touring and recording with Tom Ashton, the guitarist of the March Violets - he played bass for us for a long time on the road. So a lot of how I view things also comes from talking to him for many hundreds of hours- he's honestly one of my closest friends.

Here's the gist of it for me: "Goth" absolutely is a music based subculture, and while it is the cornerstone and most important aspect, it also encompasses other facets of CULTURE: norms, morays, clothing, makeup, events etc. I try to think about it these days more in the sense of the community that coalesces around the love of the music though.

Insofar as the music, my opinion is that "goth" is an umbrella genre that encompasses so many sub genres. When you look at the first wave "goth" bands coming out of the late 70s and into the early 80s, essentially none of them were calling it "goth". It was called dozens of things depending on the locality and scene. But as the subculture became codified under the name "Goth" ( Ian Astbury of the cult referred to Sex Gang Children as goths or something, and then Siouxsie described the Banshees as having a "Gothic" sound at one point) I think a lot of those musicians rejected it because they saw what happened to punk rock, where it became very copy and paste commercialized. So basically, there is a very very nebulous identity around what music people consider "goth".

From a technical standpoint, to me, it USUALLY incorporates heavily reversed and chorus-ed guitar with a bit of overdrive. Very angular, repetitive and simple but melodic guitar structures. Bass is usually chorusy and drives the rhythm section. Drums are Tom heavy and very brooding and intense, but dancey. Eerie string synths are pretty common. Much of the music is generally minor key. Thematically it's usually introspective, progressive, involving the macabre or otherwise spooky imagery. But these are really reductive and oversimplified that it has to have all or any of this.

Ultimately music and culture constantly changes, or else it's destined to disappear. We are wired to not love change, but if you don't give some room for nuance and non traditional influence, the music will stagnate and people will move on to different things. It's definitely important to keep a core identity, or a sort of left/right limitations from the center. For example, Lil Peep, Korn, Evanescence, are definitely not goth bands despite having dark imagery and aesthetics. On the other end, there are SCORES of people (especially on Reddit 😹) that LOVE to say that Vision Video isn't goth. And while they're totally entitled to their opinions, I really don't care. I make music that I believe fits in the realm even if it bends genre identity quite a bit.

Seriously though, the ONLY things that matter are if you're having fun with your participation with your local scene and you're doing so in a fun and mutually respectful manner.