Dead Can Dance

Dead Can Dance arrived in London in 1982 with post-punk ambitions, unemployment benefit, and a tower block flat on the Isle of Dogs. What Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard built from there resists tidy summary: medieval European modes folded into Gregorian chant folded into African polyrhythm, Gerrard's voice functioning less as a singing instrument than as something for which no instrument category yet existed. By 1993, *Into the Labyrinth* had sold half a million copies worldwide and landed on the Billboard 200 — 4AD's highest-selling act, built entirely on music that no radio format had a slot for. They disbanded in 1998, reunited twice, and in 2026 began releasing new material on their own Holy Tongue Records imprint.