Nightmare Fuel / black midi

Given that they really love mixing genres with often bizzare lyricism and overall manic performances from all the members, this British experimental rock band is no slouch to some pretty terrifying and at times unpleasant moments.

Schlagenheim

• "Speedway" is an angular Post-Punk track that's surprisingly good at being creepy.
• "Reggae" has a very frantic atmosphere with wild almost mathy drums and Geordie's lunatic vocals, coupled with deranged guitar work and weird lyrics like "And I have no name to the skin folds near who show no face".
• "Near DT, MI" is a very energetic and panic-inducing Post-Hardcore track that focuses on the Flint Water Crisis, which is already unsettling in itself. However, near the end of the song, Picton starts repeating "There's lead in the water" over and over again.
• "Of Schlagenheim" is arguably the scariest track on the album thanks to some really deranged lyrics like "I dream of a woman with the teeth of a raven and the hands of a porcupine" coupled with an almost schizophrenic Noise Rock instrumental and Geordie's nightmarish vocals veering into pure gibberish at times.
  • The drone that transitions into the next track "bmbmbm" is also considered a Last Note Nightmare.
• "bmbmbm" is a very terrifying track that mostly revolves around a repetitive guitar loop with feminine yelling in the background, all the while Geordie slowly goes insane over a woman's "magnificent purpose" coupled with sudden bursts of noise until it eventually explodes into a cacophony of nightmarish noise in the finale all the while Geordie starts outright screaming into the mic. This has not stopped it from becoming a fan favorite, though.

Cavalcade

• Aside from the intro track on the physical release, "John L" shows us how the band can make a grand entrance with a song that is as surreal and unnerving as this.
  • The lyrics to this track are about a nationalist cult leader whose bewildering speech angers the crowd and they eventually start a massacre and murder him.
  • This particular speech is outright horrifying and disturbing at the same time:
  "Children of Bethlehem, come all boys and girls
  Come Listen to these, my eternal words
  Judge not who you see by whatever they may say
  But by their round eyes, lips, ears and curves
  A man is his country, your country is you
  All bad is forewarned, all good will come true"
  • The music itself is just as apocalyptic and chaotic as their other songs are. But what really sells this into nightmare fuel are the warped sudden silences between the verses each getting more panic-inducing than the last, eventually segueing into a psychotic instrumental break that was presumably made in a deliberate attempt to make one feel uncomfortable with the jagged instrumentation and very quiet parts with sinister ambience that wouldn't feel out of place on any song made by the bands of the Rock in Opposition movement in the late '70s and early '80s such as Henry Cow and Univers Zero, given that both of these bands like to assault the senses of the listener as much as possible.
• The ending of "Slow" involves the entire song increasing in intensity until it breaks apart. This wouldn't be too notable if the lyrics that came before implied the narrator shooting themselves in the head.
  • In a somewhat similar vein, the live action segment of the music video shows the protagonist getting cut in half by a meteor and a shot of her exposed intestines.
• "Diamond Stuff" can be considered this for the first 3 minutes due to how quiet it really is but eventually swells into a blissful crescendo that turns this into one of their more calming songs.

Hellfire

• The whole album can be counted as this, not just because of its very carnivalesque nature, but also because of its lyrical content centered around interconnected stories about "scumbags" as they call it, which can be particularly unnerving.
• The title track is an effective First Note Nightmare for the album, in which features Geordie's erratic spoken word backed by a very dramatic yet nightmarish orchestral piece that sounds like a deranged score for a cursed Tom and Jerry cartoon.
• "Eat Men Eat" is about two men who go in search for their friends in a mining town, only to run into an insane captain who feeds them and the mining workers poisoned food so he can harvest their stomach acid for wine production. The two men blow up the town and flee but not before the captain curses them to a lifetime of acid reflux. It's much more frightening than it sounds.
  • Musically, it is just a terrifying flamenco-kissed Noise Rock that really gives the feeling of uncertainty and the overall unforgiving absurdity of the situation.
    • And let's not forget the captain's bone-chilling threat towards these two men when they escape:
  "You fucking faggots ain't seen the last of me yet
  I'll have the last laugh, you cunts, soon you'll see
  Each day you wake, and each night you sleep
  I'll be camped in your chests, burning! BURNING!"
• The Surreal Music Video for "Welcome to Hell", which initially seems to be a Mind Screw but is actually a very disturbing story about a misogynist incel who stalks a woman. His refusal to leave her alone results in the two of them murdering each other, which in turn results in the destruction of their entire world. The video ends with text, presumably spoken by the woman, that reads "YOU RUINED IT FOR EVERYONE".
• "Still", while it is a more calming track compared to rest of the songs on the album, has moments where the song changes into a very noisy piece of carnival music that gives an unsettling vibe to an otherwise peaceful song, but eventually, ends on a meditative drone.
• "The Race is About to Begin" is arguably the most frantic track on the album, mostly consisting of Tristan Bongo, the protagonist of the fourth track, rambling about what happened in "the race" he took part on. But the track gets more panic-inducing when he starts speaking so fast that it takes up a full 3 minutes of the song with really frantic ludicrously fast rapturous instrumental that eventually leads to a calming end with a hint of Lyrical Dissonance:
  The clown can be a martyr
  The whore can be an angel
  The hack becomes a master
  The crass becomes divine
  The infinite, infinitesimal
  All sins irrepressible.
• "Dangerous Liaisons" is a very tragic and at the same time creepy track that tells of a story of a farmer who murders a man in cold blood in order to fulfill the ransom that a mafia leader who later turns out to be the Satan himself has given to him and he succeds in it, but eventually gets shocked when he sees the news on paper: he feels very guilty about this and Satan presumably drags him to hell for this.
  • The final 15 second sting of the track is also a very nightmarish carnival piece that actually serves as a Dark Reprise for "Welcome to Hell".
• "The Defence", though the music does not indicate any hellish activites thanks to its '50s Torch Song vibe, but is really disturbing as it is sung from the perspective of a pimp defending his business as no more immoral than banking and trying to justify himself by saying that his prostitutes wouldn't amount to much anyway.
• "27 Questions", this song is arguably the scariest of the album, both musically and lyrically. The instrumental reprises the unsettling vibe of the title track throughout most of the song. Lyrically, it tells of the events that happened in the final show given by the soon-to-be-dead performer Freddie Frost. Whom the protagonist of the song had no idea that he ever existed until his friend told him that he was "a big star before the war". The show consisted of his life in an opera performance that lasted for 2 hours, his 65 daughters sang about his likes and dislikes, his exploits, his undoubtable worth. All that for Freddie Frost to make a really unnerving, lunatic entrance from a "sarcophagus rose". The song does shift to a very operatic piece that really shows the hopeless situation Freddie Frost is in as he sings the song's titular 27 Questions. While the questions are as ambiguous as the song itself, what really makes this creepy is that he doesn't even manage to ask all of them (21, to be exact) due to his chest feeling awful tight. Not only that, but the sudden return to the unsettling music of the first half shows us really delightful imagery of his death as he rose on a hot air balloon, moaning in utter pain. The protagonist and his friends are so careless to the whole situation that they laughed at the sad old loaf in the way back home.

Other

• "Sweater" is an incredibly eerie song. The contrast between the thunderous, two-note main riff and quiet improv sections, along with the vocals that sound like a chorus of ghosts, come together to create an offkilter, almost apocalyptic atmosphere that can be anxiety inducing.