Darkest Hour / Music

Darkest Hours in music.

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• Rock and Roll circa 1960. Elvis had turned to Frank Sinatra-style pop after his Army hitch, Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly were dead, Carl Perkins had never really recovered from his car accident (and was playing mostly country), Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis were reeling from sex scandals, and Little Richard had quit to become a minister. It got better.
• "Our Solemn Hour" by Within Temptation.
  In my darkest hours I could not foresee that the tide could turn so fast to this degree
  Can't believe my eyes
  How could you be so blind?
  Is the heart of stone, no empathy inside?
• Franco De Vita: The theme of "¿Dónde está el amor?" (Where Is Love?). In this song, the world has been corrupted by prejudices, resentment, selfishness and insecurity; compassion ceased to exist, and there's nothing good to believe in anymore. Franco frequently asks where love has gone, and prays so his voice can allow him to keep denouncing the injustices, and so his heart keeps beating for him to live for long enough to see love once again.
• "In My Darkest Hour" by Megadeth
• "End of All Hope" by Nightwish
• Explicitly invoked in "The Devil Came Back to Georgia"
  Johnny did you ever know that time keeps marching on
  The coldest hour is the one comes just before the dawn
  The Devil's Back in Georgia will you stand up to the test
  Oh will you let the Devil be the best.
• In choral settings of the Christian Mass, the music often lands in a minor key and slows down in the section of the Credo when Christ is crucified. When, in the next sentence, he is resurrected, the music perks right up into a major key and the tempo moves briskly along.
• Without question the absolute darkest hour in Ludo's rock opera The Broken Bride is when the Time Traveller is at the apocalypse and decides to destroy his Time Machine, marooning himself there and severing himself from his beloved wife forever, to release the only things that may have a chance at destroying the zombie-making, soul-devouring Dragon: Pterodactyls.
• Shinedown references this in their song, "The Sound of Madness." Potentially subverted, though, as the following line gives a potential Hope Spot:
  The darkest hour never comes in the night; When ya gonna wake up and fight?!
• The album Rain of a Thousand Flames from Rhapsody of Fire.
• The Manual (the Timelords' guide to creating a #1 hit single, no money or talent necessary) tells its user to schedule a week in the recording studio actually creating the single, and warns that Tuesday will be wrecked by depression and self-doubt. The only solution is to press on: by Wednesday, everything should start to make sense again.
• The point of Wednesday 13's song, "We All Die:"
  No matter what, you always put a smile upon my face
  Just know that I love more than anything, just in case
  We all die...
• The movie version of the Transformers theme describes this trope quite well and name drops it:
  Something evil's watching over you
  Comin' from the sky above
  And there's nothing you can do
  Prepare to strike
  There'll be no place to run
  When your caught within the grip
  Of the evil Unicron
  (chorus)
  Strong enough to break the bravest heart
  So we have to pull together
  We can't stay worlds apart
  To stand divided we will surely fall
  Until our darkest hour
  When the light will save us all
• Imagine Dragons has quite a few songs with this kind of vibe, such as "Demons," "Lost Cause," and "Nothing Left to Say."
• The phone call at the end of "Young Lust" from The Wall: Pink finally gets through to his wife, only to learn that another man is answering the phone. What's more, he has to learn this through the dispatcher. At that point, he well and truly disconnects from the world around him.
  • "Run Like Hell" and "Waiting For The Worms" act as another one, with Pink in full-bore fascist mode, inciting his fans to violence. It is only when Pink realizes just what the hell he is doing in "Stop" that things take a turn for the better.
• REO Speedwagon's "One Lonely Night": "They say it's darkest just before the dawn."
• Tom Waits, an earlier version of "More Than Rain" (and some live versions) contains, among other similarly depressing lines, "We're on the darkest stretch of the road."
• Referenced in the Mountain Goats song "No Children"
  Our friends say it's darkest before the sun rises
  We're pretty sure they're all wrong
• Florence and the Machine's song "Shake it Out".
  I like to keep my issues strong
  It's always darkest before the dawn
• The final verse of Bob Seger's "Night Moves" (according to Word of God):
  Strange how the night moves, with autumn closing in
• Paul Kelly's "Bradman" (about Australian Cricket legend Don Bradman):
  A team came out from England,
  Wally Hammond wore his felt hat like a chief
  All through the summer of '28/'29
  They gave the green caps no relief
  Some reputations came to grief
  They say the darkest hour is right before the dawn
  And in the hour of greatest slaughter, the great avenger is being born
  But who then could have seen the shape of things to come?
  In Bradman's first Test, he went for 18 and for 1
  They dropped him like a gun.
• Kamelot's concept albums Epica and The Black Halo tell a two-part story of a man on a final journey to discover the meaning of life, not knowing that his soul has been wagered in a bet between Heaven and Hell. Almost the entire second album acts as a Darkest Hour for the protagonist, after the tragic event that occurs at the end of the first album.
• Unblack metal (or Christian black metal) is this to the general Christian metal.
• Zucchero: The theme of "Miserere" (Miserable), and to an extent the album of the same name it hosted. It tells about Zucchero's profound sorrow following his worst moments in life, and how he tries to cope with it by celebrating life. The song and its album were recorded around the time the musician divorced from his first wife, and was a way to express his heartbreak. A factor that actually helped him overcome the depression was that the song was also made as a duet with Pavarotti, who himself faced many struggles in his life and thus could relate to Zucchero's own.

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