Gen Z have brought goth back – and in these spooky times, it’s more politically relevant than ever

Decades of leather trousers and gloomy practitioners are being embraced by a new generation - (Silken Weinberg/Gilbert Trejo/Netflix/iStock/Getty)

Dressed in all black and grey and wearing a vintage hat at an angle, Jojo Orme, also known as Heartworms, looks every inch the new goth on the block. As the highly acclaimed singer and producer reels off a list of influences that include Tim Burton and The Cure, she explains she is happy to be associated with the g-word – a genre that Gen Z has embraced with macabre gusto.

“The baroque, Edgar Allan Poe’s poems, the imagery of being alone. The pain. The punishment,” says Orme, listing melodramatic ingredients poured into her dark and stormy debut album, Glutton for Punishment. “Goth can evolve. It doesn’t just have to be what it was in the 1980s.”