San Francisco, CA · darkwave · post-punk

Provoker

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Bay Area darkwave with a slick, sinister R&B undertow — goth music you can actually move to, horror-movie romance included.

Provoker began in 2015 as a solo project of Jonathon Lopez, who was writing scores for fictional horror films. He met singer Christian Crow Petty at a screening of the film The Greasy Strangler and began sending him instrumental pieces to record vocals over, merging Lopez's synth-driven writing with Petty's background in R&B songwriting. Bassist Will Palacios joined soon after.

The music sits between darkwave, post-punk and slow-moving R&B, built from synthesizers, reverbed guitar and prominent basslines, with Petty's vocals delivered in a low croon over mid-tempo grooves. Horror and noir imagery run through the band's records and videos, an extension of the project's origins scoring imagined films.

The band released its debut EP, Dark Angel, in 2018, followed by the album Body Jumper in 2021 on the Swedish label YEAR0001, which Pitchfork scored 7.0, praising Petty's songwriting on themes of despair and self-punishment. A second album, Demon Compass, arrived in 2023, with a deluxe edition following in 2024.

A third album, Mausoleum, followed in 2025, made with producers including Kenny Beats and drawing on Petty's childhood and his parents' spirituality. Reviewers described it as tightening the band's production while pulling back from the overtly supernatural themes of earlier records, even as the haunted characters and settings remained.

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darkwavepost-punk