Dark Reprise / Music

• Nena's hit "99 Red Balloons" is a song about 99 red balloons being mistaken for a threat on radar and the nuclear holocaust starting. It's not exactly a sunshine song, but it's rather upbeat. Then the melody and lyrics turn soft and wistful for the final verse:
  99 dreams I have had
  And every one a red balloon.
  It's all over and I'm standing pretty
  In this dust that was a city.
  If I could find a souvenir
  Just to prove the world was here...
  And here is a red balloon
  I think of you and let it go...
• The Who's The Kids Are Alright from My Generation: The middle two sentences ("I know, if I go, things will be a lot better for her. I had things planned, but her folks wouldn't let her.") change the meaning of repeated verse.
• In The Protomen, Mega Man declares "As I live, there is no evil that will stand, and I will finish what was started - the fight of Protoman", when he first decides to avenge his brother. He repeats the line near the end of the opera, only this time, he's referring to trying to force humanity to fight for itself by allowing Dr. Wily to slaughter it.
• Arcade Fire's album The Suburbs, about the appeal and dream-crushing nature of the aforementioned place, ends with a dark reprise of the titular song, representing (in one interpretation) the overwhelming nature of the suburbs. It ends with a slow fadeout of the words "Sometimes I can't believe it/I'm moving past the feeling", implying that while the protagonist once railed against the suburbs vociferously, he has given up his fight as futile.
• Muse has the song Hyper Music which is an upbeat noise rock song... and also Hyper Chondriac Music, which is the same song but done in a mournful acoustic style. The lyrics were about someone going through a breakup and the stages of anger and depression respectively.
• Skinny Puppy's Remission has "Glass Houses", and its more sinister reprise, "Glass Out".
• Cord Lund's I Wanna Be in the Cavalry and its reprise: The first song is an upbeat country song about a young recruit, full of eagerness and enthusiasm who wants to join the cavalry. The reprise is a song about the hardships of being of a cavalryman in the 19th century, disease, starvation, and the elements and all. To add to the bleakness, the narrator is a soldier in an army fighting a losing war.
• In Joanna Newsom's album Have One On Me, the final song, Does Not Suffice, is a Dark Reprise of the central In California. Whilst In California is about the evaluation of a relationship, which is threatened by distance, homesickness and a fear of commitment, Does Not Suffice is a definite break-up, as the voice describes packing her belongings and leaving her lover, stating that "everywhere I tried to love you is yours again and only yours". The "chorus" of In California, which focused entirely on a sense of indecision, is echoed in Does Not Suffice by a series of resigned, defeated lalala's, which fade away as they are overwhelmed by strings and a burgeoning, crashing electronic drone (a stark mechanical presence in an album full of pastoral imagery). Definitely darker.
• In "Leave The Bourbon On The Shelf" by The Killers, it's the line, "And I love you endlessly, darling, don't you see, I'm not satisfied." The line isn't as noticeable at first, because it goes by quickly and the music is still playing, but when the music fades out and the song puts special emphasis on it by making it the last line in the entire song, it seems like they are trying to tell you something. And they are: The next song in the trilogy, "Midnight Show", has the narrator killing his ex-girlfriend, whom the first song was also for.
• Evillious Chronicles:
  • "Daughter of Evil", begins with the line, "There was, once upon a time, an evil kingdom that no one dared to face, and the ruler was a girl so mean, a little princess of only age fourteen". This line is repeated at the end, right before the princess is about to be executed- though it is really her twin brother taking her place.
  • In "Drug of Gold", the line "The two of us going won't be so bad" is repeated twice. The first time, it refers to the singer learning that his fiancée's dream is to travel around the world. The engagement is broken off, and the singer later starts working as his former fiancée's chef, under a false identity, becoming increasingly horrified by just what she has become. The second time the line refers to him resolving to poison her and himself.
• In the Vocaloid song "Kagome, Kagome" (Circle You, Circle You), Miku and Luka singing the words to the game (which is a real game, by the way) starts out already being extremely creepy. But when you find out their reasons for being in the abandoned orphanage and the things that happened in the orphanage before it was deserted, you realize that they are very likely murderous ghosts. The line gets even darker when they sing it a second time.
• Ne-Yo's album Libra Scale opens with "Champagne Life", which is an easygoing, upbeat party tune, full of vitality and celebratory swagger. The album closes with "What Have I Done", a regretful look back at past mistakes and broken love whose backing track echoes the carefree tune of "Champagne Life" with piercing guilt.
• Lit's "Miserable" has this happen all within the chorus: "You make me cum/You make me complete/You make me completely miserable."
• Green Day's "¿Viva La Gloria? (Little Girl)" from their Rock Opera 21st Century Breakdown is a Dark Reprise of one of the earlier songs, "¡Viva La Gloria!" While the latter is that of one of the main characters, Christian, praising and encouraging Gloria to "start a war", the former is that of Christian accusing her of being a useless "dirty liar".
• In the Domain concept album The Last Days of Utopia, this song is played when the main character is washed up on the shores of the titular city, and is breathtaken at its majesty. Later on, after the destruction of the island and with the main character floating alone lost at sea, we get this.
• Happens within a single song for The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets' concept album The Shadow Out of Tim. The song is called "Operation: Get the Hell Out of Here," and the chorus goes "Take your time, take your toll, everything's under control/Execute Operation: Get the Hell Out of Here" until after the last verse of the song, where the protagonists accidentally unleash an Eldritch Abomination, it's changed to "Take your life, take your soul, everything's out of control/Execute Operation: Get the Hell Out of Here".
• The last song of Caamora's opera based on the novel She, The Fire of Life, is full of these.
  • Partway through the song, Leo reprises part of a much earlier song, Covenant of Faith. But instead of hopeful and optimistic, it's now full of despair. The line "But I won't turn back from this journey that I take" in Covenant refers to his exploration of the lost island they've washed up on, whereas in Fire he's referring to his decision to bathe in the Fire of Life and rule the island as its immortal king.
  • Shortly after, Ayesha's "Wait for me" chorus has the same melody as the instrumental introduction to the song, but with a quiet, almost ethereal quality to it.
  • Finally, the ending chant of "She Ayesha, She Immortal" is the same as the one in the prologue of the entire opera, except now it sounds hectic and desparate as the volcano erupts around the protagonists.
• "The Princess Who Sleeps In A Glass Coffin" from Sound Horizon's Märchen, Snow White sings a darker, more vindictive version of the song's first verse once she's revived.
  With skin white as sorcery, hair black as obsidian,
  And lips red as the flame, I have been reborn.
  If your burning envy has made you sin, then with burning shoes,
  You shall dance until you die!
• Front 242's Front By Front reprises "Until Death (Do Us Part)" as "Agony (Until Death)".
• The fourth (and final) movement of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 4 in F Minor (Op. 36) can qualify as this. Right after the fast, energetic melody at the very start, a fairly light and upbeat version of a Russian melody "In the Field Stood a Birch Tree" follows, played by flute and oboe. The melody returns later in the movement, much more melancholy, and slower in tempo. Listen to this for an example, and particularly, listen to 0:15, 1:35, and 4:05. This is perhaps even more pronounced in his ''Symphony No. 6 in B Minor"" (Op. 74). Light and joyful second theme of the first movement is used in a minor key in a unusually slow, depressive and hopeless fourth (and final) movement. Moreover, some parts of a similarly light second movement appear as a coda of the fourth movement, but now they transform into a shape of a funeral march. The fact that the author has died only nine days after the first performance of this symphony cannot make symbolism any stronger.
• Maurice Ravel's La Valse can be considered as a deconstructed variation. The piece itself can be considered as a homage to Johann Strauss, but with nasty twists. The first half of the piece starts with a set of melodies; some are sweet, others are exciting, all are generally benign. The second half shows fragments of the melodies arranged differently, becoming progressively more jerk-y and dissonant. The piece tries to bring itself together back again at the end (with a repeat of the first melody), but utterly fails, resulting in an atonal, dissonant, and savage danse macabre ending. All of this alludes to the rise and decline of 19th-Century Vienna, and eventual destruction by World War I. Read this Other Wiki page for more info.
• Pink Floyd's The Wall has a couple:
  • "In the Flesh?" opens the album with Pink discussing his vaguely defined issues: "If you wanna find out / What's behind these cold eyes / You'll just have to claw your way through this disguise." When it repeats on the fourth side, it's about his (perhaps imagined) descent into fascism ("If I had my way, I'd have all of you shot!")
    • The film adaptation takes it further, where "In the Flesh" is redone in an orchestral format in order to fit with Pink's hallucination of him speaking at a Neo-Nazi rally instead of performing at a concert.
  • "Another Brick in the Wall"'s three versions go from laments about Pink's childhood and education to a violent rejection of all human contact as he retreats behind his self-built Wall.
  • At the very beginning of "In The Flesh?" we hear very soft, calm music which is pretty easy to not notice and the first couple words we hear are "...we came in?" At the end of the album in "Outside the Wall" is the exact same music and in the closing seconds of the album we hear "Isn't this where-". It's worth nothing that "Outside the Wall" is about Pink finally escaping from behind the emotional wall he's built between himself and everyone else, so "Outside the Wall" leading back into the very beginning (which after the soft part turns into the same music as in the later "In the Flesh" when he's at the height of his troubles). In case you haven't put it together yet, he's right back where he started.
• The Cruxshadows' Ethernaut gives "Winter Born" a dark reprise with "A Stranger Moment", which uses the same progression as the former's main riff and verse. The formers' lyrics speak of a hero's Last Stand in a Darkest Hour, while the latter appears to be about the character's Apocalyptic Log or a Message in a Bottle to his loved ones.
• In !HERO: The Rock Opera, there's a Dark Reprise Medley. Right after "Execute" on the same track, there's the reprise to "Intentions" where Jude is Driven to Suicide for betraying Hero, and then immediately after that there's the reprise to "Hero" and "Lose My Life With You" as the characters singing it realize that Hero is dead.
• The Frozen Autumn's Fragments of Memories includes an instrumental lonely piano and strings reprise of the already gloomy "Winter" from Pale Awakening.
• Jason Webley's Against the Night has a Dark Reprise in the form of Again the Night, which drops the guitar and percussion, turns the accordion up to a mourning roar, changes Jason's voice from smooth to gravelly, and makes the lyrics even MORE melancholy than the original.
• Interface's The Perfect World album zigzags this trope with "Square One", a desperate reprise of "It Begins Today", which segues into the Triumphant Reprise "Back To the Beginning".
• Bumblefoot's song "Normal" received two different Dark Reprises. The first, on the same album as "Normal" (aptly titled "Normal") is "Shadow" and is about how he starts to fall back into his depression after finally having been normal for a short time. The second is more of a Spiritual Successor, though. On the album released after "Normal", titled "Abnormal", we get the title-track, "Abnormal", which is where he's completely crazy and depressed again. Also, "Shadow" is the second-to-last track on "Normal", followed by "Thank You". "Abnormal" is the first track on "Abnormal", making the connection a bit clearer.
• On DJ Shadow's album Endtroducing....., the already eerie "Transmission 1" which appears near the start of the album is made even more haunting in "Transmission 3", the album's finale. This track is fuzzier and more distorted than the original, and ends with a spine-chilling Twin Peaks sample.
• Gentle Giant's album begins with "Proclamation", a song narrated by the oppressive ruler of a kingdom. At the end of the album, the song "Valedictory", which uses the same melody as "Proclamation", is instead narrated by the man who took control and tried to make the country a better place, having become just as oppressive and tyrannical as the ruler before him.
• In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Neutral Milk Hotel's holocaust-themed concept album, has a few of these:
  • The King of Carrot Flowers Pt. 1 is immediately followed by The King of Carrot Flowers Pt. 2 & 3, which has a much darker, heavier sound than the original track (which is largely acoustic), though the subject matter is a bit lighter, since the first song dealt largely with abuse and incest while the second one talks about spiritual reverence.
  • Two-Headed Boy receives a more standard Dark Reprise in Two-Headed Boy Pt. 2, which is much slower than the original and ties together the original song's ideas about intimacy and identity with the album as a whole's themes of grief, perversion and tragedy.
    And when we break, we'll wait for our miracle
    God is a place where some holy spectacle lies
• VNV Nation's Empires album reprises the upbeat "Rubicon" as the melancholy "Distant(Rubicon II)".
• Amnesiac by Radiohead features a darker, more orchestral-sounding reprise of "Morning Bell" from Kid A in the form of "Morning Bell/Amnesiac".
• Ween: The Mollusk has a distorted version of the opening track, "I'm Dancing In The Show Tonight", as a hidden track following a few seconds of silence (and then ambience) on "She Wanted To Leave".
• The Caretaker's Everywhere At The End of Time album series, an auditory depiction of the progression of dementia, invokes this with its samples of classical and ballroom jazz tunes, several of which were used on the project's prior albums. For example, the "Hell Sirens" section of Stage 4 is a heavily slowed down and degraded version of the intro to "Granada" by Mantovani and His Orchestra, previously sampled on Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia; and "Place In The World Fades Away", the final track of the series and project as a whole, representing a moment of terminal lucidity before the protagonist's death, resamples the choral piece "St. Luke Passion, BWV 246", which first appeared in "Friends Past Reunited", the closer of The Caretaker's debut album Selected Memories From the Haunted Ballroom.
• Answer the Call, a Baldur's Gate III Filk song by Jonathan Young, Colm McGuinness, and Rachel Hardy, starts off as a fairly upbeat, triumphant song about the call to adventure and heroism. Then Rachel Hardy, takes over for the final verse, which is slower and much more sinister, encouraging the listener to given in to the tadpole's influence and become a mind flayer. She even corrupts the final rendition of the chorus.