The ritual begins in stark black and white. A laboratory, cluttered with relics and specimens of preserved life, feels less like a recording studio and more like a chamber exhumed from a forgotten silent film. Here, the Turkish duo Ductape, comprising Furkan and Çağla Güleray, move not as musicians but as “alchemists in their own creation myth.” They collect ingredients, smudge the air with smoke, and stir a potion into being.

This is the mise-en-scène for ‘Fine,’ the lead single and invocation for their newly announced album, ‘Faded Flowers,’ set for release in 2026. It is an opening statement of profound artistic seriousness, a deliberate move away from fleeting genre aesthetics and into a more elemental, timeless space.

The sound of ‘Fine’ mirrors its visual counterpart’s spare solemnity. A bassline moves with the tense discipline of a “pulse on the edge of breaking,” a foundation of minimalist dread. Over this, a gorgeous, almost funereal synth line casts a shimmering shroud, illuminating the track’s skeletal frame.

At the center is Çağla Güleray’s voice, an instrument of compelling duality. It is at once “weary and resolute,” the sound of a soul that has not merely endured a trial but has emerged from it with a hard-won, almost unnerving, calm.

Herein lies the album’s apparent mission statement. The song is not about the agony of collapse, but about the “revelation” found within it. For Ductape, losing control becomes an act of awakening; ruin is a landscape where a strange and resilient beauty can be cultivated. This is the “grace that lives inside decay,” a theme that promises to animate ‘Faded Flowers.’

Following their 2022 LP ‘Ruh’ and 2024 album ‘Echo Drama,’ and on the heels of a “relentless tour cycle,” the duo shows no signs of slowing, instead choosing to delve deeper into this potent aesthetic of surrender and rebirth. The choice of alchemy as a guiding metaphor is telling. It is the ancient art of transformation, of turning base materials into gold.

In Ductape’s hands, the leaden weight of pain, loss, and chaos is transmuted into the strange radiance of their art.

The New Anatolian Gothic: Situating Ductape’s Sound

Ductape emerges from the shadow of one of the most unlikely international post-punk success stories of the last two decades: She Past Away. Formed in Bursa in 2006, the band’s 2012 album, ‘Belirdi Gece’ (“The Night Emerged”), became a foundational text for a new generation of gothic music.

Their sound was a potent and instantly recognizable synthesis: the driving basslines of The Sisters of Mercy, the atmospheric gloom of The Cure, and the stark minimalism of Bauhaus, all filtered through a distinctly Turkish melancholic sensibility and delivered, crucially, in the Turkish language.

She Past Away’s global success proved that the anxieties of post-punk were not tethered to post-industrial Manchester or Cold War Berlin; they could resonate just as powerfully from Anatolia, creating a viable path for bands like Ductape to follow.

Ductape, along with contemporaries like the synth-pop outfit Jakuzi, represent a second wave, building upon the foundation She Past Away laid. While the progenitors’ early work was often more guitar-driven, this new school leans further into a pulsing, electronic palette.

Ductape’s sound, as heard on their album ‘Ruh,’ expertly navigates the territory between darkwave, synthwave, and goth rock, crafting soundscapes that swing from “dreamy to sinister.” This evolution marks a deepening of the scene, a confident step beyond homage toward a more nuanced and regionally specific sound.

Central to this project is the artistic choice to sing in Turkish. For a global subculture that has long defaulted to English, this is a quiet act of resistance. Volkan Caner of She Past Away has explained the decision as a matter of sincerity, stating that one’s mother tongue is “the only language that you really feel” and that it allows for a truer expression of life’s difficulties.

This creates a fascinating paradox for the international listener. The unintelligible lyrics strip the music of explicit narrative, forcing a focus on its pure emotional texture—what Caner calls the “spiritual phenomenon” of music that “can touch the soul without the meaning of the lyrics.” The words become another instrument, their phonetic shapes and cadences adding a layer of mystery that deepens the atmospheric gloom.

This is more than a simple importation of a Western style; it is a complex act of cultural translation. The specific malaise that birthed European post-punk—post-industrial decay, nuclear anxiety, Catholic guilt—is not the same as the modern Turkish condition. Yet, Turkish culture possesses its own profound traditions of expressing sorrow and longing, from the refined court music of the Ottoman era to the popular, heart-wrenching ballads of arabesque.

When bands like Ductape and She Past Away channel their modern anxieties—about loneliness, the void, and “religious oppression”—through the formal language of post-punk, they are tapping into this pre-existing cultural attunement to melancholy. They are using the tools of a global genre to articulate a feeling that is both universal and deeply local, forging a powerful hybrid in the process: a new Anatolian Gothic.

A Genealogy of Turkish Dissent

Ductape’s polished, introspective gloom is the most recent echo in a long, often fractured, history of Turkish underground music. To trace its lineage is to excavate a series of “interrupted histories,” each a response to the political and cultural ruptures that have defined modern Turkey. The story properly begins not with synths and drum machines, but with the raw, desperate sound of punk rock fighting for air in the wake of the 1980 military coup.

That coup was a profound cultural trauma, installing a brutal military regime that drove youth culture deep underground. With punk seen as an antagonistic, an-establishment force, and with generals like Kenan Evren publicly expressing their disapproval, any association with the genre became a genuine physical risk. Yet, in the late ‘80s, what has been called “the first punk scene in the entire Islamic world” began to coalesce in Istanbul.

Bands like Headbangers, Moribund Youth, Radical Noise, and Violent Pop carved out a clandestine existence defined by scarcity and ingenuity. Shows were held in basements during broad daylight to circumvent sweeping curfews.

Fanzines like Trasho Mondo were painstakingly assembled with a do-it-yourself cut-and-paste aesthetic, while the arrival of Western records, often smuggled into the country by jet pilots, was a quasi-mythical event. This was a scene forged in a climate of fear, its energy necessarily reactive and urgent.

By the 1990s, it had evolved, absorbing the influence of American hardcore and crossover thrash bands like Suicidal Tendencies and D.R.I., and connecting with a global do-it-yourself network through collaborations with bands from Belgium, Portugal, and Mexico.

But even this was not the true origin point. To find that, one must go back further, to the 1960s and ‘70s and the psychedelic dawn of Anatolian Rock. This was the first, and perhaps most significant, fusion of Turkish and Western musical forms.

Artists like Erkin Koray, who famously electrified the traditional saz, Barış Manço, a beloved cultural icon, and Cem Karaca, the powerful voice of protest, blended the melodies and instrumentation of Turkish folk—itself rooted in the ancient Aşık bard tradition—with the mind-expanding sounds of Western psychedelic and progressive rock.

In the politically turbulent 1970s, against a backdrop of rising violence between the left and right, Anatolian Rock became the soundtrack of the resistance, its lyrics openly critical of the state. This flourishing, politically potent movement was effectively decapitated by the 1980 coup, which censored, imprisoned, or exiled many of its key figures, leaving its promise unfulfilled.

Anatolian Rock established the crucial precedent for all that followed: the radical idea that one could be both modern and authentically Turkish, that a hybrid musical language could be a powerful tool of cultural and political expression. The scenes that followed exist in its shadow.

The punk of the ‘80s was a direct reaction to the coup that destroyed Anatolian Rock. The darkwave of today, arising in a new era of global connectivity and renewed conservative social pressure, feels haunted by these pasts. The overt political rage of Cem Karaca and the physical aggression of ‘90s hardcore have been sublimated, turned inward.

The “collapse” and “ruin” that Ductape explores can be read not just as personal angst, but as the inherited psychic weight of these earlier, violently interrupted movements. Their music is a séance, channeling unresolved energies into a new, atmospheric form.

The Persistence of a Shadow

The music of Ductape and their contemporaries is inextricably linked to the geography, both physical and cultural, of modern Turkey.

Istanbul, the nation’s cultural heart, has always been a city of profound liminality, a “transition country between continents and cultures.” This position as a bridge between East and West is a source of immense creative fusion, but it is also the fault line for the persistent tensions between secularism and conservatism, tradition and modernity, that animate Turkish society. Underground music has long been the space where these tensions are negotiated and expressed.

The political subtext of the current darkwave scene is palpable, if rarely explicit. The “negative aspects of life” and “religious oppression” that She Past Away cite as lyrical themes are the direct result of navigating a deeply conservative, “99% Islamic country” where alternative lifestyles are often met with suspicion.

This reality is compounded by the physical transformation of cultural spaces. The gentrification of areas like Istanbul’s Taksim Square, which began in earnest during Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s mayorship in the mid-’90s, has systematically erased the physical locations—the bars, record shops, and venues—that once nurtured the punk scene, a process that director Mu Tunç laments “just took culture away.”

The retreat into the dark, interior worlds of goth and darkwave can be seen as a logical response to the shrinking of public space for alternative expression.

This marks a significant shift from the overt engagement of previous generations. The Anatolian Rock of the ‘70s was explicitly political; Cem Karaca’s 1975 album with the band Dervişan was titled ‘Yoksulluk Kader Olamaz’ (“Poverty Can Not Be Destiny”), a direct lyrical confrontation with state narratives.

As one study on the history of Turkish rock music notes, the shift to neoliberalism after the 1980 coup correlated with a change in lyrical content, moving from “overtly socio-political to having no relation to such matters or to adopting implicit and indirect language.”¹ Ductape’s thematic focus on internal collapse and psychic survival fits this model perfectly. It is a form of atmospheric resistance that turns inward when the space for outward confrontation has been constrained.

The Beauty of Ruin, The Promise of Rebirth

To return to Ductape’s alchemical chamber is to see their art in its full context. The central theme of ‘Fine’—finding beauty and rebirth in collapse—is not merely a personal or aesthetic choice. It is the defining narrative of Turkish subcultural history. Time and again, the scene has been fractured by political force, its progress interrupted and its spaces erased. Yet, from the ruins, something new has always managed to bloom.

The forthcoming album’s title, ‘Faded Flowers,’ serves as a powerful metaphor for this entire legacy. The flowers are the unfulfilled revolutionary promise of Anatolian Rock, the raw, fleeting energy of the ‘80s punks, the memories of clubs and communities lost to gentrification. Ductape’s work is an act of gathering these faded, pressed blossoms from the archives of a haunted history and arranging them into a new, somber, but arrestingly beautiful bouquet.

Therefore, the a alease of ‘Faded Flowers’ should be seen as more than just a highly anticipated album within a niche global genre. It is the latest chapter in a long, resilient, and uniquely Turkish story of artistic dissent. The music of Ductape, and the potent scene it represents, is a testament to the enduring power of subculture to create profound spaces of meaning and resistance, even—and perhaps especially—when that resistance must be whispered in the dark. Theirs is a sound that has earned its shadows.

Reference

1. Ongur, Hakan Övünç, and Tevfik Orkun Develi. ‘Rereading Turkey’s recent history through the lens of rock music: how rock has lost its socio-political edge in neoliberal times.’ ResearchGate, accessed October 12, 2025. ↩︎