Lyrical Dissonance / Alternative

Alternative Country

• The Old 97's have a song called "Murder (Or a Heart Attack)". It's a pop-rock song unlike most of their output about an incident where lead vocalist Rhett Miller lost his friend's cat while watching it one day.
• Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers: "Goon Squad". Catchy happy tune, good for opening a set and warming up the audience. You could at first take it for a slightly joking tone — "Who let the goon squad in?" — until you get to lines like "There is no more beautiful world".

Alternative Hip Hop

• Atmosphere's "Nothing But Sunshine", set to an inspiring piano sample, begins with the lines: "Now when my mother died / I had to take it in stride / There ain't no room for pride / In watching your father cry / And dad made it until / Maybe a year later / When they found his suicide / At the bottom of a grain elevator". The song continues in that vein, describing the rapper's dysfunctional upbringing, despite the happily-sung titular chorus.
• The Black Eyed Peas' "Where Is the Love?" is a typical soul-song beat with lyrics like "People killin', people dyin' / Children hurt and you hear them cryin' / Can you practice what you preach / And would you turn the other cheek".
• Gorillaz:
  • Gorillaz have a cheery little number on the album Demon Days (Album) called "Every Planet We Reach Is Dead".
  • Much more evident in the song "Superfast Jellyfish". It's a pop-filled silly sugar sparkle... about the devastating effects of consumerism. "The sea is radioactive."
  • "Humility" is un upbeat, beachy-sounding tune about isolation and loneliness.

Alternative Indie

• Evelyn Evelyn's shtick is that the songs are "written by" a set of Conjoined Twins who had terribly awful childhoods. Despite that, the songs use jazz, piano, and circus melodies.
  • "Have You Seen My Sister Evelyn?" is a peppy retraux-sounding song about a woman who Really Gets Around.
  • The lyrics to "Chicken Man" mainly consist of "Chicken Man, Chicken Man, Chicken Man" repeated over and over. It has a very peppy tune as well. Despite sounding comedic, it's actually about the girls being locked inside a cage as young children and begging for their "chicken man" captor to give them food. He actually died and the twins are starving (though they eventually managed to escape).
  • "Sandy Fishnets" has a melancholy piano tune and sounds like it's about a girl who grew up in an orphanage and became a sailor when she grew up. In the context of the Concept Album, it's about a child prostitute who grew "too old" for her clients and was most likely killed on her thirteenth birthday. Her body was dumped into the ocean and she washed up on the shore later. With the childish-sounding lyrics, the only sign of this are the lyrics "We saw them kissing on the lake" and "Uncle Gerald said he liked Christine".
  • "You Only Want Me 'Cause You Want My Sister" is a bit too cheery for a song that ends with a twin killing their sister because she wants to prove that her boyfriend isn't attracted to her sister equally.

Alternative Metal

• Alice in Chains' "No Excuses" fits into this. A light, upbeat, acoustic song that makes the listener want to sing along due to the whole campfire-ish vibe it gives off... but then when you listen to the lyrics and know about the band, you realize that it's about the singer's heroin addiction, and how his friend, the guitarist, is coming to terms with it, and how he can't change it. The circumstances of the singer's death only serve to make it more depressing.
• Faith No More played with this at times:
  • "Edge of the World" is a drunken but romantic-sounding barroom jazz tune about a pedophile luring his new victim. And, oh yeah, it comes right after a brilliant note-for-note rendition of "War Pigs" by Black Sabbath.
  • "RV" is a bubbly song (sounding suspiciously like the underwater theme from the original Super Mario Bros.) all about the musings of an abusive white-trash loser living in a trailer.
  • "Be Aggressive", adopted from the classic cheerleading song, is a positive-sounding song about swallowing cum.
• Ghost lives this trope. They play catchy, melodious '70s rock... with over-the-top Satanic lyrics. For example, the chorus to "Deus In Absentia" is deceptively upbeat-sounding, but here's a snippet:
  The world is on fire
  And you are here to stay and burn with me
  Our funeral pyre
  And we are here to revel forevermore
• The one instance of Country Matters on Korn's profanity-strewn album Follow the Leader appears on the chorus of "Cameltosis" and, along with other friendly phrases like "you trick-ass slut", appears alongside one of the album's smoothest, most laid-back choruses.
• Melvins:
  • "Black Bock" is uncharacteristically mellow for the band, employing Folk Rock-ish clean electric guitar, cheerful whistling, and calmly sung vocals. It seems to be about someone who tortures and kills animals for pleasure (the very first line is "I slit the throat of a billy goat and let it bleed", and the narrator also warns the listener to "keep your dog away from me"). It makes sense in an odd way because the narrator says that he's happy.
  • By contrast, "The Man With The Laughing Hand Is Dead" is very slow and ominous sounding, but is actually a tribute to the ventriloquist Senor Wences.
• Soundgarden's "My Wave" is an example of in-song dissonance. The verses are basically an exhortation to do whatever you want ("if it feels alright"), and then the chorus suddenly switches out of nowhere to a fuck-off-leave-me-alone sentiment ("Don't come over here / Piss on my gate / Save it, just keep it / off my wave"). The verses are anchored by a grungy heavy-metal riff, but as is Soundgarden's wont, the song takes a left-field twist with bright, psychedelic-influenced choruses and coda.
• The tool song "Die Eier Von Satan" ("The Eggs of Satan") features snarling German vocals making triumphant declarations to a cheering crowd while heavy guitars and industrial noises grind in the background. The result sounds disturbingly like a satanic Nazi rally nightmare. However, the lyrics turn out to be a recipe for hash cookies. The recipe's name, "The Eggs of Satan" is also a juvenile pun, since "eggs" is a slang term for testicles in German. The singer repeatedly screams, "Und keine Eier!", meaning "And no eggs!", to explain that the recipe lacks literal eggs.

Alternative Pop

• "You're Gorgeous" by Babybird sounds like a warm love ballad, but the lyrics are about a male photographer who exploits his models (some of which are implied to be possibly underage) to market sex.
• "Tie the Rope", by The Format. Sung to a fairly upbeat tune, the second verse begins with: "You'd rather watch me drown / Than see your hands get wet / You took the plot from stage to screen / And turned into an epic scene". This pales in comparison to the chorus:
  Just tie the rope and kick the chair
  Leave me hanging there, gasping for air
  Yeah, don't mind me three feet from the ceiling
• "Big Wave" by Jenny And Johnny has an upbeat, summery feel, especially due to the Surf Rock-influenced guitar tone and harmonized "doot doo" backing vocals. However, the first verse is about financial ruin due to overspending, the second verse is about being over-medicated for depression, and the bridge is about infidelity. Rather than anything related to surfing or spending time on the beach, the "big wave" repeatedly mentioned in the chorus seems to be a metaphorical deluge of further problems that these situations will cause.
• This is pretty much Melanie Martinez's shtick. She sings really dysfunctional pop tunes dressed in pastel colors and sweet lolita-type attire. The Concept Album Cry Baby is nothing but Tear Jerker and Nightmare Fuel in a sugary tune.
  • "Dollhouse" is about a family trying to appear happy when the father is a cheater, the mom is depressed and alcoholic due to her husband's infidelity, and the son uses drugs.
  • "Sippy Cup" is a sequel song. It's still a sweet song despite the mother killing her husband. It also discusses depression, insecurity, and eating disorders.
    Blood still stains when the sheets are washed
    Sex don't sleep when the lights are off
    Kids are still depressed when you dress them up
    And syrup is still syrup in a sippy cup
    He's still dead when you're done with the bottle
    Of course it's a corpse that you keep in the cradle
    Kids are still depressed when you dress them up
    Syrup is still syrup in a sippy cup
  • "Pity Party" is about the protagonist of the album, dubbed "Cry Baby", throwing a birthday party but no one showing up. She tries to act dismissive and make light of the situation (for example, now she can eat all the cake herself), however, it turns into a Sanity Slippage Song where she breaks down into an angry, sobbing mess.
  • "Tag, You're It" is about a "wolf" kidnapping Cry Baby, after she dumped her boyfriend for not coming to her birthday. It also sounds heavily like it involves Attempted Rape. It brings to mind images of Little Red Riding Hood and has the "wolf" being creepily childish ("playing tag" while kidnapping her, saying nursery rhymes, etc). At least there's a voice distortion for the "wolf" that makes the song ever-so-slightly less peppy sounding.
    Running through the parking lot
    He chased me and he wouldn't stop
    Tag, you're it, tag, tag, you're it
    Grabbed my hair, pushed me down
    Took the words right out my mouth
    Tag, you're it, tag, tag, you're it
  • "Milk and Cookies" is about Cry Baby poisoning her kidnapper by slipping poison in his milk and cookies.
  • "Play Date" is a song that uses board games and games in general as a metaphor for a woman who is in love with a man who only uses her for sex.
  • "Teddy Bear" is a cheery-sounding song about a woman whose boyfriend turns into a Domestic Abuser and attempts to murder her. She dumps him but he begins stalking her.
• Timbuk 3's discography is an exercise in Black Comedy. For example, "Life is Hard" is a peppy melody about people debasing themselves for money.
• Most Twenty One Pilots music is this:
  • "Guns for Hands" is an upbeat-sounding song about trying to stop teen suicide.
  • "Glowing Eyes" is easily one of the band's happiest-sounding songs, but is about holding onto depression because it's easier than coming to terms with oneself and fighting depression.
  • "The Run and Go" has a catchy tune and an easily joined whistling section with an energetic chorus, despite talking about how he won't let anyone, be them a person or God, help him in his depression. Only in the bridge does the depressing theme of the song shine through in a quiet, miserable-sounding section. Of course, the bridge is immediately followed by more of the whistling and the next round of the chorus.
  • "Fake You Out", for all its fast-paced quirky synth, is about Tyler lying about himself to others and to God.
  • "Not Today" describes Tyler's struggles with depression and states the dissonance explicitly: "Listen, I know this one is a contradiction because of how happy it sounds, but the lyrics are so down."

Alternative Rock

• 10,000 Maniacs:
  • The child abuse-themed "What's the Matter Here" is disconcertingly cheerful; thus the maximum creepy points during the line sung from the father's point of view.
  • "Like the Weather" is one of the bounciest, jauntiest, most danceable paeans ever to crippling depression and inability to get out of bed.
    Do I need someone here to scold me
    Or do I need someone who'll grab and pull me out of four-poster dull torpor pulling downward?
    For it is such a long time since my better days
    I say my prayers nightly this will pass away
  • "Candy Everybody Wants" could also qualify. The lyrics, if read without knowing what the band sounds like, seem like a punk or nu-metal about how mass media is rotting our brains. The song? A cheerful-sounding little pop-rock ditty.
• AFI:
  • While most of their songs are played straightly depressing, the song that launched the band into mainstream stardom, "Girl's Not Grey", has one of their most poppy and upbeat tunes... and is about a guy contemplating his death/suicide/dark fate that very night.
  • While not a single, Davey and Jade's side project Blaqk Audio pulled it off again with "Snuff on Digital". The chorus may seem pretty romantic at first... until you realize that the best interpretation is that of a guy jumping off a building and taking his girl/fan down with him.
• Almost every single one of The All-American Rejects' songs is upbeat. Almost every single one of their songs is about breakups. They also have "Move Along" in the same vein, which is about someone trying to prevent from committing suicide.
• Angels & Airwaves:
  • "Sirens" has the band's signature upbeat sound... but it's about a man stalking a girl he has a romantic obsession with. It's a pretty jarring contrast to the rest of the band's catalogue, which tends toward very optimistic lyrics.
  • The chorus of "Young London" can make the song sound like a laid-back party anthem about dancing at a night club. But if you pay close attention to the opening verses, it's fairly clear that it's actually a song about death—and the night club is a metaphor for the afterlife.
• "End of the World" by Armor for Sleep is an energetic, fast-paced song... about a guy who decides to lay down and die as the world is destroyed around him.
• Barenaked Ladies have done quite a few of these. They even hung a lampshade on it in "Testing 1, 2, 3":
  She got a new apartment
  It's out on the escarpment
  And in her glove compartment
  Are my songs
  
  She hasn't even heard them
  Since she found out what the words meant
  She decided she preferred them
  All wrong
  
  Kind of like last time
  With a bunch of really fast rhymes
  If we're living in the past I'm
  Soon gone
  • "What A Good Boy" just treads the line between averting the trope and playing it straight, as the tune is almost sad to go along with the lyrics, but ends up sounding more contemplative and affectionate as the singer talks about the pressures of parents' expectations and how you bear them even before you're born.
  • "Jane" mixes a sweet melody and a catchy chorus with some beautiful harmonies, and adds in some wistful lyrics in which the narrator remembers his romance with a free-spirited woman that unfortunately didn't work out. That is, until you pay closer attention to the words and realize that he's actually portraying Jane as a self-absorbed drama queen and he's still really bitter about the whole breakup.
  • "Everything Is New Again" — sounds like a nice song about rebirth and seeing things in a new light, right? Well, no. It's a nice song about a guy whose girlfriend is a self-harming anorexic who commits suicide, and he's losing his memories and going mad as the song ends. Thanks, guys.
  • "I Live With It Every Day" is a relatively upbeat song with a nice little synthesizer melody. Too bad the lyrics deal with accidentally killing his best friend, attempting suicide, moving away to try to forget about these things, and dealing the guilt and depression every day.
  • "The Old Apartment" is a hard, high-energy rock song about a guy breaking into the apartment where he and his girlfriend used to live and trashing the place while speculating on its new owners. The most intense dissonance comes, however, in the bridge, when he claims that he and his girlfriend have settled down and bought a house. He insists that he's happy there, but ends the song desperately pleading for the "fading memories blending into dull tableaux" that the apartment represents.
  • "Alcohol", which is a poppy little ditty about, well, rampant alcoholism and with lyrics like "While I cannot love myself, I'll use something else".
  • "Pinch Me", described in the liner notes for All Their Greatest Hits as "Another one of our happy little songs about chronic depression."
  • On the same album, "Helicopters" is an upbeat song about travelling through a war zone (likely in the former Yugoslavia) and sinking into intense cynicism as a result.
  • "Tonight Is the Night I Fell Asleep at the Wheel" is surprisingly bouncy, considering that it's about exactly what the title implies and the narrator is dead before the last verse. And the narrator? Ed Robertson's late brother Doug, killed in a motorcycle crash in 1993. The song is based on Robertson's curiosity about what his brother was thinking in his last moments.
  • "Have You Seen My Love?" is a sweet ballad about a guy who falls out of love with his childhood sweetheart after realising that she's really not the woman of his dreams.
    There is a dream that we both used to share
    And we swore we would never wake
    Now the dream's a nightmare, and the truth to be fair
    Is that dreaming was the first mistake
  • "Angry People" is a pretty bare-bones version; a catchy, cheerful tune about people being jackasses for no apparent reason.
  • "Fun & Games" has lyrics cynically describing the politics behind the Iraq war ("We knew your sons and daughters would be blown in half") set to a poppy, catchy tune.
  • Zigzagged with "Odds Are". The song is ultimately about appreciating life, which would fit the catchy, upbeat melody, if it didn't do it by morbidly listing all the ways you probably won't die.
• Bastille:
  • "Pompeii" is a very upbeat and danceable song with punchy drums and a catchy synth-line ... that also happens to be a song about the destruction of the titular city by volcanic eruption. Word of God is that the lyrics are a conversation between two victims of the volcano, frozen in place for nearly two thousand years and trying to deny the terrible fate they are trapped in.
    ''And the walls kept tumbling down in the city that we love
    Grey clouds roll over the hills bringing darkness from above
    But if you close your eyes
    Does it almost feel like nothing changed at all?
    And if you close your eyes
    Does it almost feel like you've been here before?
    How am I gonna be an optimist about this?
    How am I gonna be an optimist about this?
  • "Good Grief", which is an upbeat song about a guy mourning a loved one's death.
  • "Million Pieces" is also upbeat but discusses many political problems that the singer just wants to forget about. This is probably to enforce the subject of the song, being an unwanted political discussion in the middle of a party.
• Although The Beautiful South have a rep for this, most of their songs actually have pretty wistful tunes, but there are definitely some which combine bouncy tunes and depressing lyrics:
  • "Song for Whoever" is a Sophisti-Pop ballad written in the viewpoint of a cynical songwriter who writes love songs purely for the money.
  • "You Keep It All In" is about a violent domestic argument.
  • You'd think from the chorus of "Woman in the Wall" that it's a protest song about an oppressed woman who has "no voice at all" only in the figurative sense. But the verses make it clear that it's literal, since her husband killed her and hid the body in the walls of the house.
  • "My Book" is about the singer's entire life being a disaster.
  • "Old Red Eyes Is Back" is quite upbeat, the chorus even being slightly reminiscent of "Her Name Is Rio". However, it is about a man who drinks himself to death.
  • "We Are Each Other" is a particularly nasty example, since on a casual glance the lyrics appear to be about a perfect couple, when it's actually about a couple whose co-dependency is destroying them.
  • On the flip side, "The Table" sounds like a wistful charity single but is in fact about the oppression of a sentient household table.
  • "Your Father And I" has a catchy tune, and is in fact the most upbeat song on its album. Oh, and it's about parents traumatising their child(ren) with stories of their conception/birth, with each verse being squickier than the one that preceded it.
• Beck's "Girl" is a happy tune that sounds like it is about summer love, but is actually probably about a sniper tracking his next victim.
• Be Your Own Pet's poppy song "Becky" is about a girl whose best friend abandoned her, so she murdered the new friend.
  Now I'm going to juvie for teenage homicide
  It would all've been cool if you'd stayed by my side
  Then you know Becky wouldn't have had to die
• Blind Melon:
  • Their hit "No Rain" is so bouncy and mellow that you might not even pick up on the fact that it's about depression; later they'd record a much slower arrangement called "No Rain (Ripped Away Version)" that effectively eliminates the lyrical dissonance aspect.
  • "Skinned" by is an upbeat, bluegrass-influenced number featuring banjo and kazoo. Lyrically, however, it's written from the perspective of Ed Gein, a Real Life serial killer infamous for fashioning furniture out of corpses.
    I'll make a shoehorn out of your shin
    I'll make a lampshade of durable skin
• blink-182's "When You Fucked Grandpa" is an acoustic song that's about exactly what the title says.
• Blue October loves this trope.
  • "Into the Ocean" sounds remarkably mellow and even oddly hopeful for a song that's written from the perspective of someone committing suicide out of general depression (based on the lead singer's personal experience) and because his love left him or died. Complete with a seductive siren-song of a violin solo. ^note Ironically, despite this almost positive portrayal of suicide, several fans have credited this song with keeping them from killing themselves.
  • "Congratulations" sounds very light and fluffy, but is about the narrator showing up at an old friend's wedding to tell her that he's been in love with her for years. He botches the conversation big time, and she gets angry.
  • "Overweight" is upbeat and happy sounding, but the lyrics are anything but.
    I want to carry a piece of who I was before
    So when I hit the wall, I really hit the wall
    I want to tear away the death again
    A whiter shade of fucking meth again
  • "Dirt Room" is surprisingly catchy for a song about killing for revenge.
  • "Picking up Pieces" is, again, a very happy and upbeat-sounding song which is apparently about someone dealing with really sucky baggage.
  • "The End"'s chorus is backed by a very cheerful violin tune, but the song is about a double murder-suicide.
• Blur does this a lot, most notably in "Country House", a bright, shiny pop tune about a horribly depressed rich man dealing with the emptiness of his existence. The background lyrics are delivered in an almost dreamy fashion:
  Blow, blow me out, I am so sad, I don't know why
• Bomb the Music Industry! uses this quite frequently. For example, there's "Everybody That You Love", a peppy, energetic song about witnessing a drug deal then being chased down by the dealer.
• David Byrne:
  • The song "Empire". Musically, it's a swelling patriotic tableau, complete with martial horns. But the lyrics exhort artists and writers to "Please hear the call / What's good for business / Is good for us all", and praise elections, held "In democratic fever / For national defense". And it assures us, in comforting tones, "The weak among us perish / The strong alone survive".
  • "Lazy" has lyrics about how darn lazy the narrator is. The music sounds the opposite of lazy: a fast electronic beat, frantic strings, and driving electric guitar.
• "Boozehounds" by Captain Dangerous is an upbeat and insanely catchy song about someone having a traumatic break-up and turning to drink.
• Catherine Wheel:
  • The band has a slow, gentle song... which is titled "Eat My Dust You Insensitive Fuck".
  • Another song by them, "Car", is also slow and gentle, but its chorus lyrics are about stealing a car and driving it off a cliff.
• Nick Cave has done this a few times. "Henry Lee", his duet with PJ Harvey from Murder Ballads, for example, sounds like a soothing, light waltz while they're singing about a woman killing the man who was going to leave her.
• To a degree, all of the songs by Rock, Paper, Cynic's Peter Chiykowski... except "Rock, Paper, Cynic" and "Sansregret", which are instrumental. We've got the awesome:
  • "Raising Cain", a melancholy, saxophone-heavy ditty whose message is basically, "We've got nothing to do, so let's go out and party."
  • "The Black Ship Batrachian", another sad tune with lyrics about the freedom that the people who live on the titular ship have.
  • "One Shell, Two Shell", a war-protest song about Mario Kart.
  • "Zombie Apocalypse Blues" is hilarious, but at the end, the singer gets eaten by zombies, which, in case you hadn't noticed, is creepy.
  • "A Love Song For the Post-Apocalypse", which is a happy song that just happens to be set in a post-apocalyptic world.
• Coheed and Cambria are excellent at this. They've made a career totally out of songs about suicide and murder punctuated by catchy hooks and cries of "Hey! Hey!".
  • The Second Stage Turbine Blade:
    • "Time Consumer", which sounds only kind of sad... until you realize that it's about a couple killing their youngest children (for the good of humanity, though, and it's mostly All There in the Manual).
    • "Devil in Jersey City" is a fairly upbeat song about gang rape.
    • "Junesong Provision", which starts of sounding a bit upbeat, until the lyrics begin:
      Good morning, sunshine, awake when the sun hits the sky
      Look up the sounds that surround the day you died
  • On the second album, In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3, there is "Three Evils (Embodied in Love and Shadow)". It starts with a bouncy guitar hook and a graphic description of torture. It ends with the singer chirping over and over, "Pull the trigger and the nightmare stops!", with choral harmony on the "stops".
  • Good Apollo I'm Burning Star IV, Volume One: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness:
    • "Crossing the Frame": An upbeat pop song with lyrics including:
      You decide to answer when my fist swings hello
    • "The Willing Well II: From Fear Through The Eyes Of Madness" is a light, bouncy riff with Claudio joyfully singing, "You'll burn in hell while they're digging you out".
  • "Goodnight, Fair Lady" has a catchy, upbeat tune. It's about slipping someone a mickey.
  • "Number City" is pretty upbeat... for a song about a car accident.
• Coldplay:
  • "Don't Panic" has a melancholy, longing tone that deliberately contrasts with its "We live in a beautiful world" refrain.
  • "Amsterdam" is a piano piece with an uplifting outro about suicide.
  • "42" alternates between upbeat and gloomy. The upbeat bits have these wonderful lyrics: "You didn't get to Heaven but you made it close!"
  • "Viva la Vida" has a upbeat melody, despite being a somber song about a king that was destroyed by his own people. It sometimes gets used for cute slideshows of happy people due to the wistful, nostalgic air and idealistic-sounding title. Paying attention to the lyrics, though, makes it clear that it's much better-suited to something like the Tear Jerker end of Code Geass R2.
• Counting Crows:
  • "Omaha" is an unusual example. It's a sad-sounding song and the singer's voice sounds like a funeral dirge, but it's about Omaha, as in the place.
  • "American Girls" is a sparkly, upbeat pop song — about realising that your lover is insane yet being unable to leave them.
  • The song "Einstein on the Beach" is similarly upbeat and cheerful-sounding ^note In fact, it was left off the album August And Everything After because it was thought to be too cheerful sounding compared with most of the other songs, but it's about the guilt of being involved in the design of nuclear weapons.
    Einstein's down on the beach, staring into the sand
    As everything he believes in is shattered
    What you fear in the night in the day comes to call anyway
• Count Zero wrote "Man, 27, Dies Sleepwalking". A soft, ethereal song about a man jumping to his death while sleepwalking.
• Crowded House's "She Called Up" is a reasonably upbeat song about hearing about former band member Paul Hester's suicide. Hester apparently liked his music upbeat, so the song was given the tone as a tribute to it.
• Death Cab for Cutie (okay, Ben Gibbard) loves this trope. In between writing TearJerkers and Obsession Songs, he writes songs like, well:
  • "The Sound of Settling", a cheery indie pop crowd song about being unable to say what you really mean to people.
  • Pretty much everything on the album Narrow Stairs. Not one of the tunes on the album sound sad, yet nearly all the songs are about failing relationships, hoping for love that never comes, staying in relationships because you know you can't get anyone else, and stalking people. For example, "No Sunlight" is a beach tune-type song about losing your innocence as you grow up.
    With every year that came to pass
    More clouds appeared, 'til the sky went black
    And there was
    No sunlight, no sunlight
    And there was
    No sunlight, no sunlight anymore

    Ironically, he married his longtime girlfriend Zooey Deschanel less than a year after its release.

  • "My Mirror Speaks" from The Open Door is a cheery-sounding pop tune about someone who doesn't really develop attachments or doesn't remain very committed to anything until they look into the mirror and realize that the way that they have been living hasn't been working.
• "Breakfast at Tiffany's" by Deep Blue Something has an upbeat tune that wouldn't be out of place in a cheesy love ballad. It's actually about a couple whose relationship is on the brink of collapse because they have nothing in common. The singer brings up the titular film, which his girlfriend recalls "[they] both kinda liked". It comes across as the man being so desperate to save his doomed relationship that he's resorted to grasping at straws to find some sort of common ground with this woman he shares nothing with.
• Everclear seems to do this sort of thing quite often:
  • "Santa Monica", a catchy grunge song about the singer's attempted suicide when he was a teenager.
  • "Amphetamine" is an upbeat song about a depressed addict in California.
    Yeah, you just take your pill
    And everything will be alright
  • "Wonderful" is, both by title and music, a funky, happy song — but the words describe the absolutely heartbreaking thought process of a child whose parents are breaking up:
    I don't wanna meet your friends
    And I don't want to start over again
    I just want my life to be the same
    Just like it used to be
    Some days I hate everything
    I hate everything
    Everyone and everything
    Please don't tell me everything is wonderful now
• Fall Out Boy does this a lot:
  • "Dance, Dance" is possibly one of their happiest tunes, bearing the lyric "If they knew how misery loved me..."
  • "Sugar, We're Going Down" is a catchy summer rock anthem — about unrequited love that, if the lyrics are taken literally, turns into stalking.
  • "7 Minutes In Heaven (Atavan Halen)" and "Hum Hallelujah" are both upbeat tunes about bassist/lyricist Pete Wentz's suicide attempt.
• "Just A Day" by Feeder is a true feel-good anthem, until you notice the lyrics.
  Who's gonna be there when I've lost control
  I'm heading to crash land
  All by myself
• The Flaming Lips have an example of this, as the song "Pompeii am Gotterdamerung" is about lovers who commit suicide by leaping into an erupting volcano. The music definitely sounds like something momentous is happening, but the tone is triumphant rather than tragic. Adding to this is the fact that the lyrics can be somewhat hard to understand, as the vocals consist of a small choir's worth of Steven Drozd overdubs.
• Ben Folds is great at this; he's a masterful lyricist:
  • "Fair" is an upbeat song about a wife accidentally killing her husband by hitting him with her car after a vicious argument, when she just wanted to apologize, and a guy who has never been able to get over an ex-girlfriend and ends up committing suicide in public just to show her how hurt he is. But all is fair in love.
  • One of Folds's more famous songs, "Brick", is written in D major, an upbeat key once considered "the key of glory" in Baroque music. Never mind that the entire song is about him taking his high school girlfriend to get an abortion and the fallout he faces afterward.
  • "Regrets" is another fast-paced, upbeat song about a person on his deathbed, thinking about how he wasted his life and never did anything he wanted to, and can't blame people he knows if they don't bother coming to see him before he dies.
  • "Zak and Sara" is a deliriously chirpy little ballad about a puppy love between a drug-addict guitarist and a paranoid schizophrenic.
  • "Carrying Cathy", which sounds like a love song, but is actually about a chronically depressed girl who always latched onto people to help get her through life, until finally breaking down and committing suicide. Sung at her funeral.
  • His mellow, crooning cover of "Bitches Ain't Shit". Enough said.
  • "You Don't Know Me" (with Regina Spektor) is a poppy earworm about waking up one morning and realizing that your lover knows nothing about you and really doesn't care. It starts off sounding like a vaguely upbeat, bittersweet breakup song at first, but on repeated listening, the song turns out to be an almost unhinged, extremely verbally abusive rant (possibly by an Unreliable Narrator) that is cut off by a shaky but defiant "Say it!" from Spektor's character, at which point the startled narrator simply trails off into the fadeout.
  • "Bitch Went Nuts". A cheerful song about psycho exes!
• Franz Ferdinand:
  • The band's bouncy hit "Take Me Out" is based on the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife.
  • "The Fallen" is a rather chaotic song about the second coming of Christ, and how he would be lower middle class.
• The Fratellis: "Look Out Sunshine!" is ridiculously catchy, upbeat, and easy to sing along to. It also appears to be about someone whose friends have turned against him:
  And tell my friends I'll be around
  Getting nowhere
  Sleeping somewhere
  [...]
  Look out, Sunshine
  Here's the punch line
  No one gets you any—
  No one needs you any—
  No one gets you any more
• The Frogs, in general, tend to use really jaunty melodies for their more Black Comedy lyrics:
  • "Raped" is an anthemic major key alt-rock song from the point of view of an unrepentant rapist.
    What's the crime? I had fun
  • "Bad Daddy" sets dark comic lyrics about child abuse ("Bad daddy says your high chair 'accidentally' fell over / Now here comes Rover the pitbull") to a gentle folk melody and almost cloyingly sweet synthesized orchestration.
• Depeche Mode frontman Dave Gahan's solo song "Dirty Sticky Floors" is a catchy, baggy-ish track that openly discusses and satirizes his struggles with heroin addiction.
• Garbage:
  • "Only Happy When It Rains" is something of a subversion: an upbeat, catchy song about being depressed... but enjoying it.
  • "#1 Crush", A smooth rock song about being completely and totally obsessed with another person to the point that you would do anything for them.
  • "Till the Day That I Die". Loud, obnoxious dance tracks typically have shallow, feel-good, Intercourse with You lyrics, but this has deep, bitter, sarcastic, pointed lyrics about the breakup of Shirley Manson's marriage.
  • "Cup of Coffee". By the sound of it, it's a soft song about a couple breaking up, nothing out of the ordinary. Until the lyrics show that the singer is completely obsessed with their ex, and stare in their window at night, have stopped eating, wishes they were never born, etc, etc.
  • The incredibly bouncy song "Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go!)". The first verse is about a pretty but airheaded girl who runs when things get tough and the second verse is about a young male transvestite who's mistaken for an actual girl. Given it was apparently based on two incredibly depressing books about child abuse, prostitution, and rape (Sarah and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things) you can pretty much put a ring around that, despite Shirley Manson (the band's vocalist) describing it as "an adrenaline rush" and "probably the most celebratory song we've ever written". Yeah, right.
  • "Beloved Freak" from Not Your Kind of People is a slow, Tear Jerker-like ballad which contains a message to Follow Your Heart and Be Yourself.
• The Gin Blossoms' 1992 album New Miserable Experience is filled with sunny power-pop singles with dark lyrica. It probably has something to do with the songs' writer, Doug Hopkins, a depressive who was fired from the band not long after writing the album that would propel them to fame due to rampant alcoholism, and who would tragically kill himself with a .38 caliber pistol as their singles were climbing the charts.
  • "Lost Horizons" is about alcoholism mixed with depression.
  • In "Hey Jealousy", a guy washes up at the door of his ex-girlfriend's home, for want of a place to stay the night and a relationship.
  • In "Mrs. Rita", a guy goes to a fortune-teller seeking confirmation that his ex will come back to him.
  • In "29", a 29-year old has a mid-life crisis.
• Hollywood Undead's song "Bullet" is probably one of the cheeriest songs about suicide and depression out there. It sounds like a young children's song complete with young child singing the closing lines about climbing to the roof to see if they can "fly". The incredibly unsubtle lyrics only make the dissonance more noticeable.
• Hüsker Dü's song "Diane" was a great contrast to their previous music. It was poppy, words were clearly sung, and it was over four and a half minutes in length. But then the lyrics kick in...
  Hey, little girl, do you need a ride?
  Well, I've got room in my wagon, why don't you hop inside?
  We could cruise down Robert Street all night long
  But I think I'll just rape you and kill you instead
• Imagine Dragons:
  • "I Need a Minute", the first song from the group's first EP, sounds like a peppy dance song. However, the first verse goes like so:
    Welcome to the land of hire
    I hope you brought the right attire
    The crippled man is waiting at the door
    
    He said, "Your eyes are much too bright
    The things you say are never right
    The sins of all the world lie on your head"
  • "On Top of the World" has a perky instrumental for a song whose lyrics are about saying "I love you" before it's too late.
• So, you have this catchy funk-metal song. What do you do? If you answered "write lyrics about standing in the shower, thinking, and pissing yourself", congratulations, you're Perry Farrell of Jane's Addiction.
• "Gay Pirates" by Cosmo Jarvis is an upbeat, sea-shanty-styled song... about the horrendous abuse that a gay pirate and his lover go through at the hands of their crewmates, and culminates with the pair being drowned when their captain finds out about them.
• Kaizers Orchestra are extremely fond of this trope. Not too weird, considering that Tom Waits is their biggest inspiration and all.
  • The best example in the Kaizers song catalogue is probably "Tokyo Ice Til Clementine". The song is probably their poppiest song (almost veering into bubblegum territory) and has an irresistible sing-along chorus. But the song itself is about a man who kills another guy because he took a look at his girlfriend.
  • "Min Kvite Russer" seems to be a little cheery ditty about a man confessing his love to someone. In this case the "someone" is a bottle of White Russian and he's actually lamenting about taking his own life.
• The Killers write lots of bright-sounding tunes... with lyrics that may or may not match that tone.
  • "Jenny Was a Friend of Mine", where the narrator is going to kill the woman he loves because she has other things to do in her life than be with him constantly. He is then arrested and says that he would never do such a thing because they were friends. Not to mention that words in the song repeat later in the CD and seem to imply that the man is completely out of his mind.
  • "Mr. Brightside" sounds like the name implies... but the lyrics are about a guy watching as the girl he likes is getting ready to sleep with another man.
  • "Midnight Show" doesn't immediately seem like this, because most of the lyrics make it sound like a standard romance song — except that Word of God has stated that it's the second song in the "murder trilogy". "Leave the Bourbon on the Shelf" is about the narrator in a dysfunctional relationship with a girl named Jennifer. "Midnight Show" is about him using sexy promises to lure her to a secluded place to kill her and dump her body in the ocean. Then the above-mentioned "Jenny Was a Friend of Mine" is him being questioned by the police and denying it.
  • "Spaceman" is awful upbeat for a song that uses alien abduction as a metaphor for dealing with the alienation that comes with rising fame.
• Linkin Park's "What I've Done" sounds gloomy but is a happy song about moving on from bad deeds.
• Chicago alt-rockers Local H had a fairly big rock hit in 1998 with "All the Kids Are Right", a happy-sounding song about one bad gig causing fans to turn on them and, in the words of The Simpsons' Comic Book Guy, be "on the Internet within minutes, registering [their] disgust" and spreading the word about the bad gig.
  All the kids, they hold a grudge
  Their minds are logged on to the net and
  All the kids, they hold a grudge
  You fail them and they won't forget it
• Used by Marcy Playground's "Sex and Candy" — the lyrics seem innocuous enough, but the tune is strange, and the singer sounds kind of stoned. The music video is borderline scary, with such images as the singer standing up to his chin in a hole while a huge spider crawls towards him and two men tearing apart a woman's dresser. It ends with the singer being pushed to the ground, uttering the final lyric "Mama, this must be my dream" as green blood oozes out from under him. According to Word of God, the song and music videos were intended to be about someone having a wet dream.
• Marianas Trench:
  • "Pop 101" has a really catchy beat with lyrics mocking the very music it's emulating.
  • "Here's to the Zeros" starts off with the lead singer making fun of himself and continues to be a sarcastic jab at the music industry.
• Pretty much any song by Maroon 5 qualifies:
  • "Makes Me Wonder" takes it to a completely different level. On the surface, it sounds like an upbeat Break-Up Song, with the guy questioning why he'd ever fallen in love with the girl in the first place — and the first verse makes it almost certain that it is, at least partially, exactly that. But look a little harder at some of the later lyrics:
    Feels so good to be bad
    Not worth the aftermath
    After that, after that
    Try to get you back
    
    I still don't have a reason
    And you don't have the time
    And it really makes me wonder
    If I ever gave a fuck about you
    
    Give me something to believe in
    'Cause I don't believe in you anymore, anymore
    I wonder if it even makes a difference to try
    Yeah
    So this is goodbye

    And then later they add in the line "You caught me in a lie/I have no alibi/The words you say don't have a meaning". Yes, it's at least in part a song about George W. Bush and the War in Iraq, metaphorically comparing him to a bad ex.

  • "Wake Up Call" is a happy, upbeat-sounding song about a man catching his girl in bed with another man, then killing the man.
• Matchbox Twenty:
  • The song "3 AM" is rather peppy, but was written about Rob Thomas's mother's battle with cancer when he was a child.
  • "Push" is about relationship abuse ("I wanna push you around, well I will, well I will!"). The singer is the one being abused and he wants to retaliate, but can't.
  • "How Far We've Come", which has a cheerful, summer-pop sound and seemingly upbeat title, while the lyrics actually describe, in detail, the singer and the rest of humanity's despairing reaction to the The End of the World as We Know It.
  • "She's So Mean" is a nice, poppy song about being in love with a girl who is, well, mean (possibly abusive) to the protagonist.
• The song "Just a Little Bit" by Maria Mena is filled with this trope. It's a crazily bouncy number about a woman with serious self esteem and body image issues.
• Alanis Morissette once did a cover of "My Humps" by Black Eyed Peas, an infamous club song about the majesty of T 'n A... and did it in her usual dramatic, emotionally-sung style at its most minimalistic and haunted. It was calculated to cause exactly this effect, and succeeded to a both horrifying and hilarious degree.
• Morrissey:
  • "The More You Ignore Me, The Closer You Get" sounds romantic in a vaguely melancholic way, but even the title of the song alludes to the stalkerish nature of it. It is rather jarring if you've only heard the tune before in the vastly less sinister Bill Nye the Science Guy version.
  • "Jack the Ripper" a sweet, romantic-sounding tune about serial killer Jack the Ripper.
  • His "First of the Gang to Die" has an upbeat melody, while the lyrics are about the squalid lives of violent petty criminals.
• Mother Mother's default style seems to be this. While most of their songs qualify, a few that jump out are:
  • "Ghosting", a calm, comforting acoustic song that is, on the literal level, about a ghost who's in love with the person whose house it's haunting and has decided to leave to make them happy. The more symbolic meaning of letting go of your feelings for an ex and accepting that they need to keep living their life without you isn't much happier.
  • "Arms Tonite". It's a bouncy, cute, easygoing tune, and like "Ghosting", it can be easily interpreted on two levels. The less-literal take is that it's about getting a little too excited during an intimate encounter with a love interest, which isn't terribly weird for its tone, but taking it at face value, it's about dying in your lover's arms.
  • "Let's Fall in Love", an energetic, confident-sounding rock song that has a, uh... rather cynical approach towards making its title declaration:
    Mommy did it, daddy did it
    Even though I bet they wish they really didn't
  • "The Stand" is a colorful and fun electronic rock tune that wouldn't be remotely out of place as a party jam in terms of sound, and in it, a man casually tells the woman he's talking to that he's afraid of everyone around them, that he's on the verge of a sensory overload, and that "Everyone's fucked, and they don't even know".
• "L.G. Fuad" by Motion City Soundtrack is a mellow-sounding song, even though from the first line you can tell it's gonna be much less than cheery.
  Let's get fucked up and die
• The Muffs:
  • "Lucky Guy" is a really upbeat punk song about a break-up.
  • "Outer Space" is an upbeat song about someone who is well out of it.
• Muse:
  • "Thoughts of a Dying Atheist" is about an atheist questioning his existence and the afterlife. It's set to a cheesy, mellow Surf Rock tune.
  • "Soldier's Poem" is a slow acoustic song in a major scale... about soldiers lamenting their distance from home and their dangerous situation. Notable lines include "How could you send us so far away from home", "And do you think you deserve your freedom? / No, I don't think you do", and the coup de grace, "There's no justice in the world / And there never was".
  • Equally, "Guiding Light" from The Resistance — another major-key song, with the chorus:
    But I'm lost, crushed, cold, and confused
    With no guiding light left inside
• My Chemical Romance could dominate this section if we let them:
  • "Headfirst for Halos" is a really peppy song about suicide. Pretty graphic suicide, at that.
  • The Black Parade:
    • On its own, "Dead!" is a spiteful song telling someone that they deserve the painful death they're experiencing, and in the context of the album's story, it's the main character spitefully telling himself that he deserves the painful death he's experiencing. And it's easily the most upbeat and catchy melody they've ever done, aside from maybe "Teenagers", though it's more upbeat in a punkish way that fits the lyrics.
    • "Cancer", specifically its happy-hardcore remix. A more peppy song about cancer has never been heard!
    • "Mama" is a relatively upbeat song about how the singer is going to hell for all the bad things he's done.
    • "Teenagers" is a cheery-sounding song about how Teens Are Monsters and how that leads the POV character to implicitly shoot up the school.
    • "Blood" is a rather dark and gory song about hospital staff and the constant blood tests people with cancer and other serious diseases need to undergo, combined with the sort of vicious self-deprecation that was central to "Dead!"... set to an upbeat, cheerful, and lovely tune.
  • "S/C/A/R/E/C/R/O/W" from Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys is a psychedelic, mellow tune about struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic California.
• "Little Talks" by Of Monsters and Men is a very peppy duet between a ghost and the person grieving them. The only sign in the music of its subject matter is near the end, where the creaky house starts to fall apart.
• Steven Page's solo work after leaving Barenaked Ladies, mentioned above, amplified his tendency towards this trope:
  • "Indecision" makes the singer sound very content about the fact that he's trapped in an unhappy relationship because he's too indecisive to end it.
  • "Marry Me" is a hyperactive, upbeat song whose lyrics can be summed up as "let's get hitched even though we both know we're going to hate each other afterward".
  • "Over Joy", with its bright instrumentation and uptempo pace, might have been a singalong if it didn't contain some of Page's baldest lyrics about experiencing depression and its effects on relationships.
  • "If You Love Me" is one of his most accomplished examples. It is a danceable synthpop song about a lover who is clearly emotionally dependent; Page encourages her to stay by playing off her insecurities.
  • "Leave Her Alone" is a jazzy number about a young woman very begrudgingly moving back in with her parents after her dreams have all been crushed. Only the melody of the bridge matches the darkness and biting sarcasm of the lyrics.
  • "A Different Sort of Solitude" is surely one of the cheeriest songs about a funeral ever written.
• Amanda Palmer does this nonstop.
  • Perhaps her finest achievement in this line came in live concerts where she told some extremely personal and honest stories about her life, culminating in... a performance of "Let It Go", from Frozen (2013), played absolutely straight and suitably triumphantly. However, the preceding speech turned this, with no change in the lyrics, into a song about her feelings on suffering a miscarriage.
  • The most notable example is "Oasis", a song about a brutal rape and subsequent abortion played to one of the most upbeat tunes on the album, complete with "Hey Micky" style hand-claps. Apparently she attempted to play the song like the critics wanted her to in a concert once, slower and with minor chords opposed to the upbeat major cords of the original. She got through the first verse before saying "Fuck it" and finishing the song as she wrote it.
  • From her Dresden Dolls days, "Bad Habit" is a catchy, upbeat earworm about self-harm.
• "Lifeline" by Papa Roach is a very upbeat and powerful rock track which tells of "the tough economic times America is facing", as band member Jacoby Shaddix put it (in particular, the Financial crisis of 2007-2008).
• The Pixies' Black Francis and Kim Deal have this down to a science. Whether the song is about mutilation ("Broken Face", "Break My Body" from Surfer Rosa), violent Biblical stuff ("River Euphrates", "Dead", "Gouge Away"), voyeurism ("Gigantic"), psycho gay roommates ("Crackity Jones"), committing suicide by driving in the sea ("Wave of Mutilation"), earthquakes ("Here Comes Your Man"), aliens (refer to most of Bossanova), or surrealism ("Debaser"), the music will almost invariably be aggressive, catchy, twisted, pop-influenced grunge/alt-rock.
• Placebo's "Commercial for Levi" has a rather upbeat melody and naive percussions in the background while the singer is pleading for the life of a self-destructive friend.
• Radiohead:
  • "Let Down" has ethereal background music but depressing lyrics about being "crushed like a bug on the ground".
  • "No Surprises" has lullaby-ish melodies, but lyrics about suicide.
  • The music of "Optimistic" is dark, tense, and gloomy, and indeed some of the lyrics are unsettling ("Flies are buzzing around my head / Vultures circling the dead"), but most of the lyrics are optimistic. "You can try the best you can, you can try the best you can, the best you can is good enough".
  • The song "Morning Bell" was considered even by Thom Yorke himself to be extremely violent. The song is very calm, beautiful, and peaceful, but it has lyrics such as "Couldn't find the killer" and "Cut the kids in half".
  • The lyrics of "You And Whose Army" mostly consist of the narrator taunting someone else, with phrases like "Come on, come on. Come on if you think, come on if you think, you can take us on, you can take us on" and "You and whose army? You and your cronies?" However, the song is very mellow and gentle, with the melody played by quiet acoustic guitar, and sung in a downcast, defeated tone of voice. Hmmm.
  • The B side "4 Minute Warning" is a beautiful gentle lullaby of a song. Until you realise the lyrics are about an impending nuclear bomb.
• "Dani California" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers is so upbeat that you'd never guess that it was talking about a dead girl.
• "Face Down" by The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus is a bright, cheery song about relationship violence.
• R.E.M. does this in several of their songs:
  • "Seven Chinese Brothers" feels rather upbeat. Then you find out that it is about an affair Michael Stipe had, in which he split up a man and a woman and he went out with both of them behind each other's back. It's wrapped in the guise of a Chinese folk tale called the "Five Chinese Brothers", which is also pretty dark and is basically a metaphor for selfishness. So the song essentially is about Michael's guilt at having being part of said affair, despite having a jolly tune.
  • "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" is an insanely upbeat and cheery song about, well, the end of the world.
  • Fanon says that "Shiny Happy People" is about the Tiananmen Square massacre, that it's really from the point of view of the Chinese Government with a Stepford Smiler tone, that Michael Stipe has repeatedly stated this to be the case, and that the song's name came from Chinese propaganda that called the Tiananmen Square massacre "Shiny happy people holding hands". None of which is true (in fact, Stipe has always said that they just wrote a meaningless happy song for the hell of it) but it's become such a pervasive and eerily plausible explanation that it still creates completely unplanned lyrical dissonance anyway. Michael Moore used this to his advantage in Fahrenheit 9/11 when the song was played to scenes of Bush shaking hands with the Saudis.
  • "Try Not To Breathe" sounds like a relatively upbeat song. Some suggested meaning behind the lyrics are suicide or euthanasia.
  • "The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite" is another upbeat, possible death song.
  • "Hollow Man", with a cheery, upbeat melody and the chorus:
    Believe in me, believe in nothing
    Corner me and make me something
    I've become the hollow man
    Have I become the hollow man I see?
• Schoolyard Heroes:
  • In "Kill 'Em All", Jonah sounds freaking ecstatic as he sings of his desire to go on a shooting rampage at his school.
  • Even more cheerful sounding is "Blood-Spattered Sundress", though you probably wouldn't be able to tell if you had only read the lyrics, in which the singer chews out a former friend for being a stuck-up, boring know-it-all.
• Scissor Sisters:
  • "I Don't Feel Like Dancin'", an upbeat song about staying at home and being miserable.
  • "I Can't Decide", made famous to geeks everywhere by its use in Doctor Who, is an excellent example. The bouncy, upbeat song's chorus actually starts, "I can't decide whether you should live or die..." and the middle eight describes various methods of murder.
  • "Intermission" (with Elton John) is a vaudevillesque tune cautioning the listener to make something of themself as soon as possible, since "not everyone has lambs to slaughter" and "we were born to die".
• Pretty much every song ever written by The Shins, but especially the songs on their album Wincing the Night Away. Perhaps the greatest example is "Australia". Perhaps the most upbeat and cheery-sounding son on the album belies lyrics that befit a Despair Event Horizon.
• Sister Hazel's song "Champagne High". The title and the upbeat music would imply some degree of happiness. Then the lyrics are about a guy who broke up with his girlfriend... but doesn't realize that it was a mistake until he's watching her marry someone else.
• Sixx:A.M.:
  • The Heroin Diaries Soundtrack:
    • The album starts out with a track called "X-Mas in Hell", which is basically some cheerful, Xmas-carol-like chanting, with a voice-over talking about how all his friends have left him and that not long ago, he "could easily have killed someone... or better yet, myself". And that just sets the scene for the album.
    • "Life Is Beautiful" sounds fairly happy too, and has a positive message and all. Except the lyrics include, well, the entire second verse:
      I know some things that you don't
      I've done things that you won't
      There's nothing like a trail of blood to find your way back home
      
      I was waiting for my hearse
      What came next was so much worse
      It took a funeral to make me feel alive
    • "Accidents Can Happen" also sounds pretty cheerful, except it's about someone who was clean but started doing heroin again.
    • "Heart Failure" sounds slightly less dark that some of the other songs on the album. Its lyrics talk about how the narrator's heart has already failed more than once and that it's bound to fail again.
    • "Girl With Golden Eyes" is another brilliant example of this. Right off the bat, it sounds like a love song. Nothing wrong with that. Then the monologue kicks in and starts reading up from the diary, about his first ten days without the drug, and you realize that the "Girl With Golden Eyes" mentioned is actually a metaphor for heroin.
  • "Oh My God" from This is Gonna Hurt is pretty dark too. It sounds pretty upbeat, but it talks about how people just live their lives without caring for others and practically just wait to die while trying to gather as many things as they possibly can.
  • In the same category, the guitarist, DJ Ashba, has also composed two solos for his concerts with Guns N' Roses, one of which is called "Ballad Of Death". It sounds both happy and unsettling at the same time.
• The Smashing Pumpkins:
  • "Today" is a cheerful-sounding song about suicide.
  • "Tarantula" is a dark song about being in love.
• The Smiths were naturally inclined towards this, with Johnny Marr's jaunty guitar melodies juxtaposed with Morrissey's droning, brooding vocals:
  • "How Soon Is Now?" has an irresistible rhythm under lyrics in which the Coolest Club Ever is anything but for the singer, who's too painfully shy to do anything more than stand at the side and watch everybody else dance and socialize, until "You go home and you cry and you want to die".
  • "Barbarism Begins at Home" is a song about parental abuse set to a funky guitar beat.
  • "Frankly, Mr. Shankly" is a bouncy and catchy song about how much the singer hates his boss.
  • "Bigmouth Strikes Again", a driving, upbeat song in which the singer excoriates himself for the vicious and violent things he says jokingly(?), a trait he fears that he may never get over.
  • "There is a Light that Never Goes Out", is a nice, upbeat, cute-ish, romantic song that's about someone hoping their love can help them escape an abusive home, even if it's only for the night, and it has a really morbid chorus:
    And if a double-decker bus
    Crashes into us
    To die by your side
    Is such a heavenly way to die
    And if a ten-tonne truck
    Kills the both of us
    To die by your side
    Well, the pleasure - the privilege is mine
  • The incredibly jaunty "Unhappy Birthday", which features the immortal lines:
    I've come to wish you an unhappy birthday
    'Cause you're evil
    And you lie
    And if you should die
    I may feel slightly sad
    But I won't cry
• "You're All I Have" by Snow Patrol is pretty upbeat, but the lyrics are exactly as desperate as the title suggests.
• The Stone Roses:
  • "Bye Bye Badman", an upbeat pop-rock song about overthrowing an abusive government (inspired by the 1968 Paris riots) with the chorus:
    I'm throwing stones at you, man
    I want you black and blue and
    I'm gonna make you bleed
    Gonna bring you down to your knees
    Bye bye badman
  • "Elizabeth My Dear" is a Simon & Garfunkel-style ballad (with the melody even borrowed from the old English folk tune "Scarborough Fair", which is most famous from Simon & Garfunkel's recording) about wanting to dethrone Elizabeth II.
  • "Made of Stone" is another anthemic, catchy tune whose lyrics reference the 1968 riots again, especially using imagery of burning cars.
  • "Shoot You Down" is a laid-back funk-rock song about shooting someone down, also mentioning how said victim always had it coming.
• The Stone Temple Pilots song "Sour Girl" has a happy-sounding, upbeat tune, but the lyrics are about a man whose wife took off because she's always hated him.
• Stroke 9's catchy "Little Black Backpack".
  I think I'm gonna bash his head in
• The Strokes' pop-tastic "Barely Legal" is about an older man seducing a younger woman and then forcing her to hide what they've done.
• Sublime:
  • The fast-paced ska song, "Date Rape".
  • "Wrong Way" is about a teenage prostitute. Although it's pretty blatant what the song is about, the cheery beat contrasts with the dark lyrics.
  • "Santeria" sounds like a lovely romantic reggae ballad. The lyrics tell of a jealous ex-boyfriend who is planning to take revenge on the man who stole his girlfriend, gangsta style.
• "A Good Idea" by Sugar is an uptempo pop-rock song about a man drowning his girlfriend in a river, seemingly at her own request. Made even creepier when the lyrics jump from third person to first person for the last verse, and the narrator, who claims to have witnessed it all, cryptically confesses that "sometimes I'm best left alone, and sometimes I see you in the water at night". It's performed in a similar style to The Pixies' "Debaser", and might even be an homage to that band's fondness for the trope.
• Superdrag's 1996 single "Sucked Out" is a happy, bouncy, almost early-Beatles-esque song about being depressed and jaded with rock stardom.
• They Might Be Giants have countless songs like this, including:
  • "Sketchy Galore" could be mistaken for a sad love song. It's about a creepy neighbor.
  • They Might Be Giants:
    • The lyrics to the energetic "Everything Right is Wrong Again" describe, among other things, one's life being turned upside-down.
    • Their breakout hit "Don't Let's Start" has the words "No one in the world ever get what they want, and that is beautiful. Everybody dies frustrated and sad, and that is beautiful," sung to one of the most cheery tunes ever composed.
    • "I Hope That I Get Old Before I Die" is a song that pairs darkly humorous lyrics about facing one's mortality ("I think about the dirt that I'll be wearing for a shirt / And I hope that I get old before I die") with an upbeat melody full of silly percussion sounds.
  • Lincoln:
    • "Piece of Dirt" can be interpreted as a song about alienation and painful introversion, which contradicts its upbeat, calming tone.
    • "Mr. Me", a very upbeat pop ditty with Word Salad Lyrics in the verses, while the chorus, consisting of the line "He ended up really, really sad!", is sung quite gleefully, climaxing at the very end.
    • "They'll Need a Crane", a bright rock song about a tragic breakup, related largely in Buffy Speak.
    • "Kiss Me, Son of God", a perky little number that sounds like it belongs at the Happy Ending of a musical — about a totalitarian, theocratic regime.
      I built a little empire out of some crazy garbage
      Called the blood of the exploited working class
  • Flood:
    • Even songs that aren't about depressing subjects have moments of this. Any performance of "Birdhouse in Your Soul" will have concertgoers hopping gleefully while John Linnell sings about the possible death of "countless screaming Argonauts".
    • The song "Your Racist Friend" is exactly what it sounds like; it's about the end of a friendship due to a mutual friend's casual bigotry. In the middle of the song, it temporary diverts into a happy little tuba riff.
    • "Lucky Ball & Chain", an up-tempo song about a guy whose fiancee walked out on him at the altar.
    • "Dead" is a song about being dead, and not enjoying life at the fullest. It's very much like a song someone would play on the piano in a restaurant, using only the piano and vocals.
    • "Twisting", a catchy pop tune about a guy's desperate attempts to get back with his ex, even though she threw out his goldfish, blew out his pilot light, and doesn't care that he never returned the records he borrowed.
      She's not your satellite, she doesn't miss you
      So turn off your smoke machine and Marshall stacks
  • Apollo 18:
    • "I Palindrome I", a bright, cheery rock song about matricide. Even creepier, in the final verse it's implied that the narrator's own offspring are plotting his demise ("See the spring on the grandfather clock unwinding / See the hands of my offspring making windmills").
    • "Turn Around", a song in the style of a 1950s crooner, but about zombies, ghosts, and a haunted train.
    • "Fingertips", a montage of short (many around 15 seconds or so) "songs", contains one segment where the vocalist sings the line "I'm having a heart attack" in a mellow tone while soothing synthesizer music plays.
  • John Henry:
    • "Subliminal" is a bouncy, jaunty song backed with an accordion about a guy who starts seeing subliminal messages everywhere he goes after getting hit by a car.
    • "Why Must I Be Sad?" starts out somberly, but during the chorus it gets peppier, complete with the choir shouting happily, "Sad! Sad! Sad!" It's a song about using the music of Alice Cooper to cope with depression.
    • "No One Knows My Plan", a vibrant Latin Jazz piece about a murderous convict plotting his escape from prison and revenge.
    • "The End of the Tour", an upbeat pop-rock song about a terrible car crash.
      I was bent metal, you were a flaming wreck
  • Factory Showroom:
    • "Spiraling Shape" is a rather cheery tune about the pointlessness of chasing the latest Flash In The Pan Fad, which was used further for Soundtrack Dissonance in the movie Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy.
    • "The Bells Are Ringing" at first hearing sounds like a positive, jolly, Christmas song but is actually about mind control:
      The bells are ringing and everyone's walking
      With arms extended in a trance
      Forgetting their washing
      Neglecting the children
      They're dropping all businesses at hand
      A voice is telling them to act a different way
      They tilt their heads so they won't miss what it will say
  • Mink Car:
    • "My Man", a song full of peppy synthesizers about a man coping with the fact that he's become paraplegic.
      My man
      Won't walk again
    • "Mink Car", a mellow pop-rock tune about being run over and killed by the eponymous "mink car".
  • No!:
    • "Four of Two" is a delightful polka song written for children, about a man who wastes his entire life waiting for a girl who stood him up. The unrecorded version actually ended with the guy committing suicide in order to help pass the time.
    • "Bed Bed Bed" is slightly more comedic than the other TMBG examples: It's a noisy, rocking song with irritating sound effects thrown in about going to sleep.
    • "Sleepwalkers", a cute-sounding children's song backed by a synthesized music box about... children sleepwalking across the country like mindless zombies.
  • The Spine:
    • "Experimental Film" has a real cheerful guitar solo and vocals. One lyric says that watching said film will make your face implode.
    • "Bastard Wants To Hit Me" is deceptively mellow for a song about a guy randomly threatened by a total stranger for no reason (or, depending on how you interpret the song, running in blind paranoid terror from someone they don't recognize).
  • "Skullivan" from The Spine Surfs Alone combines creepy distorted music and vocals and an ominous chorus repeating the line "When the Skullivan walks in the moonlit night" with banal lyrics about making tea and going to the video store to rent Tootsie.
  • The Else:
    • "Upside Down Frown" is a very happy-sounding song about how the protagonist's girlfriend gets mad at him because he smiles all the time.
    • "The Shadow Government", a bright rock song about a meth dealer having a bad day and then getting killed by a corrupt government official.
    • "I'm Your Boyfriend Now", a soft rock ballad from the perspective of a stalker. It helps that the song title was originally a Freddy Krueger quote.
  • Join Us:
    • "When Will You Die" is an upbeat pop song that involves the two Johns giving an unnamed Jerkass a dressing-down and sardonically wondering when he's going to die.
    • "Protagonist" is a bouncy show tune about a struggling actor/writer whose wife leaves him for another man, with the backing vocals delivering tongue-in-cheek stage directions as if mocking his plight:
      She stole my daydreams
      She stole my air guitar
      [Exterior, man on lawn, alone at dawn]
      Packed the typewriter
      And drove off in her car
      [A battered automobile drives past state line sign]
    • "Spoiler Alert" is a happy little tune about a truck crash.
    • "2082" is a calming, cheerful song about a man who travels further and further into the extremely distant future to find that he's somehow inexplicably still alive in that time, and eventually grows so disgusted by his aged and withered appearance that he murders his future self, before returning to his own time with the knowledge that eventually he'll have to live through all that in real time.
  • Glean:
    • "Erase" is an upbeat rocker about murder, or possibly pulling the plug on a loved one.
    • "Let Me Tell You About My Operation" is an upbeat swing-jazz song about a guy trying to forget his ex after she throws him out:
      Ground floor, screen door, yelling inside
      I think you know the scene
      Front lawn, break of dawn, clothes on the ground
      How could you be so mean?
  • "Trouble Awful Devil Evil" from Phone Power is a mellow tune about a man who sleeps too much as an escape from all the overwhelming problems in his life.
  • "When The Lights Come On" from I Like Fun is an energetic rock song about hoping one survives a catastrophic natural disaster.
  • "Chip the CHiP" from The Escape Team is a peppy-sounding song about a mutant highway patrolman who tends to kill people and eat their faces at the slightest provocation.
  • "Call You Mom" from Nanobots is a bombastic and cheerful rock and roll song about a guy and his massive Oedipus complex.
• Third Eye Blind is practically built on this trope:
  • "Semi-Charmed Life" has a nice, upbeat pop-rocky tune, yet it's about a guy struggling with crystal meth addiction. Even more disturbing is the original (not recorded) version, wherein the chorus went, "I want nothing else", rather than "I want something else", implying that the protagonist doesn't even want out of his addiction.
  • "Slow Motion" is a perfect example of this trope. With the soft music you'd expect of a love song, its lyrics are about drugs, sex, and murder. And it's not subtle either, with the lyrics being very clear, very enunciated, and pretty much saying exactly what he means.
    Miss Jones taught me English
    But I think I just shot her son
    'Cause he owed me money
    With a bullet in the chest you cannot run
• Rob Thomas (of Matchbox 20) seems to be a master of this. For example, his single "Her Diamonds" is very energetic and upbeat, as is his usual style. The lyrics are also in his usual style, in that they describe the subject's girlfriend breaking down and crying in her room, and he doesn't know how to make her feel better so he starts crying, too. The song's actually about Thomas's wife trying to deal with her (real-life) auto-immune disease.
  And she says, "Ooh
  I can't take no more"
  Her tears like diamonds on the floor
  And her diamonds bring me down
  'Cause I can't help her now
• The first few verses of "Sort of Haunted House" by Too Much Joy seems like a wistful love song, with an upbeat, albeit slightly creepy, tempo. Then we find out that it's about a man who killed his girlfriend and her lover, and then hangs himself. Puts a whole new spin on the chorus.
• Ween, anyone?
  • One of the funnier examples is "Up on th' Hill" from GodWeenSatan: The Oneness, which is essentially a Satanist gospel song — complete with Cream-esque reprise.
  • A little less funny is "Even If You Don't" from White Pepper, a bouncy pop-rock tune... about a man talking someone (possibly himself) through a bout of severe depression.
    I love you — even if you don't
    You've got your knife up to my throat
    Why do you wanna see me bleed?
• Weezer did this quite a bit back in the 90s.
  • One example is "No One Else", a catchy pop song about an obsessive, controlling boyfriend.
  • "The Good Life" is a pretty good example of this too. Starts off as one of the most upbeat songs on a pretty dark album, but you soon realise it's a song all about how unhappy Rivers is with his life.
    Excuse the bitching, I shouldn't complain
    I should have no feeling, 'cause feeling is pain
    
    As everything I need is denied me
    And everything I want is taken away from me
    But who do I got to blame? Nobody but me
  • Another is "Devotion", a lovely Beach Boys-esque love song about a girl the guy doesn't really love — he's just falling back on her because he can't have the girl he wants.
    You never gave up
    Devotion, waiting for me
    You'll always be my girlfriend
    I, too, am waiting for you
    I'll always be your friend
  • "Beverly Hills" is a snazzy tune with a heavy amount of synth for a pop song, but the lyrics seem to be about a guy who feels out of place in Beverly Hills and sarcastically comments on his situation.
    No I don't, I'm just a no class, beat down fool
    And I will always be that way
    I might as well enjoy my life
    And watch the stars play
  • Rivers Cuomo's original demo of "Can't Stop Partying" has enough of this to feel like a case of The Cover Changes the Meaning, when in fact it isn't a cover (although it was co-written with Jermaine Dupri). The lyrics seem typical of an uptempo modern R&B/rap song that glorifies, well, partying ("I gotta have Patrón, I gotta have the beat, I gotta have a lot of pretty girls around me"). However, these lyrics are set to a downcast acoustic ballad, and as a result the narrator sounds remorseful about his indulgent lifestyle.
• The Wonder Stuff:
  • "Don't Let Me Down Gently" has cheerful, happy-sounding music about someone who's desperate for his girlfriend to stay with him even though she doesn't love him (probably) and sadomasochistic relationships.
  • Their song "Unbearable" is a ridiculously catchy ear worm with lyrics about an acrimonious breakup, complete with this chorus:
    I didn't like you very much when I met you
    And now I like you even less
    I don't know what to do
    For the best

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