The Emptiness is a concept album by American Post-hardcore act Alesana. It concerns an artist (The drawing kind) who wakes up to find he's murdered his lover.
Provides examples of:
- Album Title Drop: In Curse of the Virgin Canvas and Hymn For the Shameless the line "The Emptiness will haunt you"
- Ax-Crazy: The artist goes this way in The Murderer
- Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": Aside from Annabel, the only other three named characters are "The Artist", "The Thespian" and "The Lover"
- Gaslighting: By the Thespian to the Artist.
- Karma Houdini: The Thespian kills the Artist wife, tricks him into thinking he did it, and triggers a murderous rampage, and ends up winning the fight with the Artist If he wasn't a hallucination that is.
- Mad Artist: The Artist. Complete nutter butter. See Sanity Slippage on this page.
- Sanity Slippage: The whole thing is kinda a Sanity Slippage Album Subverted in that the protagonist was already off his flipping rocker, and is Hallucinating about going insane
- My God, What Have I Done?: The Artist when he first lays eyes on his dead Annabel.
- Mercy Kill: Annabel kills The Artist during the climax of the story, to relieve him of his insanity spawned hallucinations.
- What Have I Become??: "Lord forgive me.../...I'm a monster!" Subverted he doesn't become a monster. Just a psycho-killer.
- Enemy Within: Subverted The Thespian leads The Artist to think that he killed Annabel, in turn causing The Artist to think he has an enemy within, but it turns out that The Thespian is a different person, but then in the ending it ultimately turns out that the whole thing is in his head, anyway.
