Maybe it’s Hot Topic’s fault. No, that’s not it. How about our severely-fucked state of affairs, from the economy to the environment to the music industry itself? Come to think of it, that might explain why monochromatic shades of industrial, goth and dark-wave music continue to creep into the cool kid crowd, making them suddenly want to wear Doc Martens and explore leather-bound editions of Rimbaud and Baudelaire. Or at the very least, try and find the ‘deeper meaning’ in the one-note serial killer scores of Salem.

Which leads us to Judged By Twelve Carried By Six, the oppressive post-punk debut of Blessure Grave, a San Diego band that shared a split 7-inch with Cold Cave last year for a reason: both artists make bleak-but-strangely beautiful nods to the black-lit bands ‘goth kids’ have gotten into without fail since the early ’80s, from the cultish nightcrawler cuts of Bauhaus to the outer limits of Christian Death, Killing Joke and Death In June.

There’s a couple key differences with Blessure Grave, though. For one thing, they possess the focus Cold Cave lacks, making for a discomforting listen that plays out like one long death grip. (Cold Cave, on the other hand, bounce between nihilistic noise and minor-keyed synth-pop from track to track.) To put it in terms we can all understand, songs like “The Cycle” and “In the First Place” sound like a pitched-down Interpol, as if Carlos D won a coin toss in the studio and assumed the songwriting duties for the group’s fourth album. This is music you curl up in a ball to; music you play in the dark without dashes of irony; music that’s, well, a genuine downer. Which is to say it isn’t for everyone, but if you have the slightest interest in a suitable soundtrack for our darkest days, read on, as frontman T. Grave shares a definitive guide to “thirteen essential goth, industrial and post punk albums for those into gloom and doom.”