Nightmare Fuel / Rock

• AC/DC: "Night Prowler." Even without the "Helter Skelter"-ish notoriety associated with it, the song's pretty creepy in itself with Angus Young's ominous slide guitar and one of the most chilling vocal performances Bon Scott ever put to tape. Then you have the lyrics:
  Too scared to turn the light out, cause there's something on your mind
  Was that a noise outside the window? What's that shadow on the blind?
  As you lie there naked, like a body in a tomb
  Suspended animation, as I slip into your room!
  • Also “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” despite its bouncy, hard-rocking sound, as it is essentially about a hitman who will even kill people who do minor things such as adultery or nagging, all for money. And you can “call him anytime”.
• Alice in Chains: "Angry Chair". Hell, almost every song on their Dirt album falls under this or Tear Jerker.
• Alien Sex Fiend: Despite the title, "Black Rabbit" has nothing to do with Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit." It's much scarier. You got beautiful eyes...you got beautiful dark eyes.... Not that "White Rabbit" is a very lighthearted song itself. The rising beat in the melody and the drug imagery make it unsettling.
• A Perfect Circle:
  • A supergroup with the same singer, Maynard James Keenan, as Tool. There's a few songs that stand out, the bulk of which come from the album Emotive.
  • "Annihilation" starts off the album with a whisper throughout the entire song, with a creepy instrumental playing in the background.
  • "Imagine" (yes, that "Imagine") immediately follows. The instrumental is nowhere near as happy as the original version.
  • "Gimme Gimme Gimme" comes close to the line (if it doesn't barge clear across it), what with it sounding like the rantings of a crazed drug addict. The lyric saying he has problems that can't be solved "with an atom bomb" should illustrate it for those that are still capable of paying attention to the lyrics.
  • "Counting Bodies Like Sheep to the Rhythm of the War Drums" will break anyone still sane after the rest of the album. 5 minutes 36 seconds of Nightmare Fuel-laden Mindscrew comparable to Tool's "L.A.M.C." (Los Angeles Municipal Court), only this time there's an actual rhythm. There's always the strange, moaning, only vaguely human voices in the background, the ragged breathing, the intermittent screaming and gasping, the singer's alternate crooning and shouting, the incessant, harsh beat throughout, and then - "GO TO SLEEP GO TO SLEEP GO TO SLEEP GO TO SLEEP." The subject matter isn't exactly Sweet Dreams Fuel either. And here's the music video.
    • What's worse, this one in particular is a remake of one of their earlier songs, "Pet", which is just as Mind Screwy and disturbing.
  • "Lullaby". Pay NO attention to the title, it is NOT something you want to listen to before you go to bed.
• Asia's depiction of an increasingly dystopian world in "Wildest Dreams".
• Bauhaus: As well as a few of Peter Murphy's solo songs, such as "Low Room", Bauhaus can creep the heck out of a fair few people. Those screechy, nails-on-a-chalk-board guitars and weird drums will get you every time, not to mention Murphy's vocals. The guy sounds like a crazed baptist preacher that constantly has spiders crawling through his shirt. Certain versions of "Bela Lugosi's Dead" also rise from typical goth fair to something a little more...wrong.
• Belfegore: The multinational '80s goth rock band's general ethos was that of trying for music that was at least a little menacing, but perhaps the epitome of their creepy musical output was their semi-instrumental (and self-referencing song) "Belfegore", off their 1985 album of the same name. Totally brings chills up and down your spine!
• The Black Angels
  • For a Psychedelic/Stoner Rock band which usually have chilled/upbeat themes, their epic song "Snake In The Grass" is surprisingly terrifying at points. The random shrieking and reversing of parts of the song simply add to the already creepy droning in the song. Regardless, it's still a pretty cool song.
• Bloodrock: "D.O.A.", which describes a man dying from injuries from a plane crash while his girlfriend dies beside him—and that's just the single edit. In the complete album version, they both go to hell and get chased around by demons. Even before the lyrics start, the song establishes its mood right away with an eerie organ melody meant to imitate the wail of an ambulance siren.
• Blue October:
  • "The End" is rather freaky, from the descriptive lyrics to how Justin's voice gets more and more angry and frantic as the song goes on.
  • "Dirt Room" is a lively song about executing revenge by burying someone alive "You started screaming through the duct tape. Don't ever think I'm letting you go."
• Boris: The entire album Flood. It starts off with what sounds like two guitars playing the same chords, but at different times. Eventually they become more and more synchronized. Then, while that's happening, you hear this loud sound, almost like the footsteps of a monster. The monster sounds grow louder and more frequent, like it's giving chase. It then occurs to you that the guitars almost sound like a man running away. And that's only the 1st song out of 4.
• Brand New: "Limousine." It describes the events in which a seven-year-old girl was killed in a drunk driving accident, and her mother still carrying her head upon arriving at the hospital. Could also serve as a Tear Jerker, especially with the "seven loves you" refrain.
• The Butthole Surfers:
  • "Who Was In My Room Last Night?" Try listening to it without it invoking a very disturbing mental image of a man trapped in an underwater submarine pod which is slowly breaking and cracking, letting in more and more water with no escape. This, combined with the static and other noises at the end only serve to make this image even more terrifying, as it sounds like someone struggling for air over a radio.
    • "I'm flying away!" *shudder*
    • The lyrics might even be worse, detailing someone knowing there's someone or something in his room, before bursting out and trying to call all authorities to no avail. The worse thing is that "It's still in there."
  • Some of their earlier works, like "22 Going On 23", wherein a slowed down Noise Rock jam accompanies Spoken Word in Music clips from a psychiatric call-in radio talk show where a caller describes night terrors and an abusive relationship.
  • And who could forget "Pepper"? The lyrics are about people dying/escaping a brush with death, after all.
• Biffy Clyro: Whatever the fuck that is at the end of Infinity Land hidden way behind "Pause It and Turn It Up" comes from hell.
• Elvis Costello: I Want You. An Obsession Song that starts off sounding fairly innocuous, if a little creepy, and then descends into full-blown Nightmare Fuel, with the suggestion that the guy in the song is stalking his ex, and someone is going to end up dead. Fittingly, one writer described Costello as sounding as though he were "on the end of a noose". Lines like "I'm afraid I won't know when to stop" and "You've had your fun, you don't get well no more" do not help.
• Coven:
  • The final track of their debut album consists of a 13-minute recording of an "authentic" Satanic mass performed by the band. Even those who consider the idea of Satanism to be plain silly have found it terrifying and uncomfortable to listen to.
  • Jinx Dawson's wordless singing at the end of "Coven In Charing Cross", also from Witchcraft Destroys Minds and Reaps Souls, is another. Doesn't help that the song is about a cult who kills an entire family.
• The Crazy World of Arthur Brown: The first side of their self-titled album. "Nightmare" is about a man having a bad trip and begging to be let into hell, "Time" is an eerie ballad than ends in a fit of madness (especially in the mono version), and the conclusion of "Fire" has Brown shouting "Burn!" over and over at the top of his lungs to the point of laughter.
• The Cure:
  • The scream in "Subway Song". Try travelling alone at night listening to it.
  • "Lullaby" is also really creepy, especially if you've got arachnophobia.
  • "Pornography" is quite unsettling as well.
• Depeche Mode: They aren't typically known for creepy or otherwise sinister music, but the final track on their 1987 album Music for the Masses is this very sinister song called "Pimpf" that will scare the bejesus out of you if you listen to it in the middle of the night with very little light to illuminate the room you're in. Their 2009 album Sounds of the Universe has pretty grim-dark songs, too, most especially "Wrong".
• The Divine Comedy: "Sweden". A bizarre ode to Sweden, with a chorus of demonic voices that won't be used on Swedish holiday ads any time soon.
• Disturbed has a lot of creepy songs.
  • The Animal is a song what seems like a shapeshifter losing control of his ability to transform, and has a really bad transformation into an unspecified form, however most lilely a wolf. The only way it can be less scary is if you watch This video where a cat appears to be dancing to a very loud version of it
• Don Broco's videos, while usually played for laughs, can lean into unsettling territory - especially their Technology trilogy:
  • "Everybody" starts with a woman crying and fleeing from a crazed cowboy in slow motion. She's recaptured and brainwashed by the cowboy's dance, and when two investigators arrive to find her, they're subjected to the same dance from both the cowboy and his new "friend". Just as the male investigator recognizes the missing woman, his partner - already brainwashed - shoots him in the head with a finger gun and joins them in the dance. The video concludes with the dead investigator rising back up and joining in the dance at his own funeral.
  • "Pretty" follows lead singer Rob Damiani cutting the face off another man who's set to be married, then impersonating him at the wedding ceremony. Everyone is fooled (except one of his bandmates), despite the gruesome face clearly not being Rob's own. It all falls apart when the victim arrives wearing a picture of Rob's face - and the bride-to-be? She's the missing woman from "Everybody". The cowboy is also in attendance during the ceremony.
  • "Technology" is all from the perspective of someone staring at their phone while oblivious to the events around them. These include: a Don Broco concert ending when an alien ship accidentally crushes the entire band, an alien abduction, several nuclear explosions, and...a fifty-foot-tall version of the cowboy from "Everybody", doing his dance and then incinerating the protagonist with laser eyes, leaving only a bloody severed arm behind.
  • "Action" features the cowboy once again, only this time he's here to sell some kids action figures of Rob Damiani and featured singers Tilian Pearson, Caleb Shomo, Tyler Carter, and Taka Morikuchi. The nightmare fuel kicks in when the action figures end up having extremely dangerous tools attached to them, horribly maiming the children and then the crew of the music video... before revealing the origin of the figures by having the cowboy graphically regurgitate giant eggs the figures from which the figures hatch.
• The Eels: "Susan's House." Hearing the speaker calmly talk about the corpse of a teen boy being stripped and put in a body bag with somewhat-relaxing music played in the background...you know, it's just a tiny bit unsettling.
• Ghost are only using their openly Satanic themes as a gimmick, but that doesn't change the fact that they're openly Satanic. Their music is surprisingly absent of this most times, given the horror shtick, but they aren't ones to shy away from it every now and then.
  • "Mummy Dust". Much Darker and Edgier than their entire output, uncharacteristically harsh vocals, terrifying lyrics about greed, increasingly threatening atmosphere... proof that this band can be scary when they want to.
  • "Prime Mover" also counts for its rather graphic description of a nun's (likely forced, definitely fatal) pregnancy with The Antichrist.
  • The final performance of Papa III. During the performance of "Monstrance Clock", Papa III was grabbed by two men in black suits and dragged off the stage, much to the shock of the audience and even the Nameless Ghouls. And then, an older, decrepit satanic Papa totters on stage with a cane and an oxygen mask, along with two other black suited men carrying an oxygen tank. This new Papa identifies himself as Papa Zero and declares an ominous message in Italian: "The party is over. The Middle Ages has begun." And this will foreshadow Era IV...
  • Fans wondered what happened to the Papas after they "retired". We got an answer in one of the small video blurbs: They're put "back on the road", but poisoned and to be displayed during the band's tours. Not just that but the entire sequence of them being poisoned and then being preserved for their display features the song "Pro Memoria" off of Prequelle. A song about not fearing death, but with the imagery and the coroner preparing them in a very gleeful way comes across as...unsettling, to say the least.
• Grizzly Bear: "I Live With You". Do not listen to this song late at night when you're home alone.
• Emily Haines and The Soft Skeleton: "Dr. Blind" by The music itself is extremely eerie.
• Heavens: "My knife wants to hide deep inside of you", and, later in the same song, "Want to take you aside, and softly whisper questions at you / As you slowly die, gripping at my shirt". Not the only example, either. About half of the album Patent Pending could classify as rock horror.
• Iggy Pop:
  • "I Felt The Luxury" As if a song about a very physically abusive relationship wasn't nightmarish enough, the extremely casual, chatty sound of Iggy's vocal style somehow makes it worse.
• Jimi Hendrix:
  • "Machine Gun" and, to a lesser extent, his version of "The Star Spangled Banner". One of the few times he channels horror, and does it a tad too well. He plays the guitar to sound like a war zone- complete with gunshots and screams, giving the music a haunting, horrific tone.
  • Similar to the The Beatles' "Run For You Life" from Rubber Soul, (see their Nightmare Fuel page for that one), Hendrix's version of "Hey Joe" from Are You Experienced, about a man telling his friend that he gunned down his wife and the man she was having an affair with. However, where other bands (e.g The Byrds, The Leaves, Love) usually played the song in a brisk, proto-punk style, Hendrix played it as a slow, ominous, blues number, making an already creepy tune even creepier.
• Jack Off Jill: "Witch Hunt" is terrifying to listen to late at night in the dark. It comes complete with creepy carnival music, crackling fire sound effects, a creepy nursery rhyme, a stream-of-consciousness speaking track... all overlaid on one another. It ends with agonized screaming along the lines of "OH MY GOD, I'M BURNING, HELP ME PLEASE, I'M FUCKING BURNING!"
  • For bonus points, the creepy carnival music? Cribbed from Silent Hill. There's also the speaking track, which includes such bizarre Nightmare Fuel as "with clouds that fall with poison, and they fall on my skin, making tiny holes..."
• The Killers have what can be construed as a song cycle about murder: "Leave The Bourbon On The Shelf", "Midnight Show", and "Jenny was a Friend of Mine". The last one mentioned would seem to be the killer's statements while being interrogated by the police. ("There ain't no motive for this crime, Jenny was a friend of mine," but "she couldn't scream while I held her close"...) When the band play the song live, frontman Brandon Flowers replaces the "held her close" line in the second chorus with "she couldn't scream while I held her throat.
  • The Killers also have an unreleased song called "Where Is She?", from the point-of-view of a mother of a murdered girl to her murderer. Inspired by a real murder case in Scotland, which is why it was never properly recorded or released.
• "What Would You Have Me Do?" by Local H is filled with unsettling lyrics that imply murder (such as "Baby's out of town but I see the light on / What are you up to now / Heading for the gun I can see rock bottom" and "All right, we don't need nothing but cyanide / pulled out teeth, won't be identified / what would you have me do?") and ends with a series of guitar chords spaced further and further apart, followed by about ten minutes of vague steel drum music and street noises, then one final chord right when you're certain to be not paying attention. It's everything from creepy to startling.
• Ludo:
  • "The Horror of our Love". It's clear that he's a serial killer. It's not clear whether she's a victim, a vampire, or a corpse: "...the awful edges where you end and I begin."
  • "Lake Pontchartrain". The creepy harmonies and dynamics are bad enough. The story of what happens is bad enough. Its appeal to someone's fear of large waves is bad enough. But those last few lines that imply that the whole story is totally made up as a cover for the fact that this guy murdered his two friends is just...agh.
• Ludus: A politically-minded, avant-garde band of the late '70s/early '80s, released an LP called Danger Came Smiling as a kind of culmination to their experiments in free improvisation and psychological self-analysis. At its most listenable, it's very odd; at its least, it is completely terrifying.
• Lush: "The Childcatcher" is about a child prostitute. Not the happiest of subjects.
• Mana: "El Muelle de San Blas". The song is about a woman who waits for her sailor fiancé and how she becomes old and irreversibly insane in the process. The insanity began with her wearing every day the same dress she wore when he left ("so he didn't get her wrong"), and is implied in the end that she died alone in the dock. The worst part is that the song is Based on a True Story, but very few people knew it until the woman died in 2012.
• Manic Street Preachers: With a few exceptions, their third album, The Holy Bible, is aural Nightmare Fuel. The chorus of "Archives Of Pain" is a list of serial killers, and begins with a sample from a relative of one of the Yorkshire Ripper's victims; "Mausoleum" describes a place where there are "no birds" and the sky is "swollen black", and contains a sample of JG Ballard saying, "I wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit and force it to look into the mirror"; "4st 7lb" graphically details a woman's body going into decline while suffering from anorexia; and the penultimate track, "The Intense Humming Of Evil" - about the Nazi death camps - is possibly the most terrifying thing the Manics have ever recorded. Even the cover, a Jenny Savile painting of a morbidly obese woman, is downright terrifying. It goes without saying that guitarist and songwriter Richey Edwards was in a very bad place at the time. He disappeared a year later and has not been seen since.
• The Mars Volta: Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, guitarist and leader, certainly touches this territory. On his first solo album A Manual Dexterity Soundtrack Volume 1, a song closer to the end titled "Of Blood Blue Blisters" usually causes most people a jump on the first listen.
• The Megas: There isn't a whole lot that's scary about this video game cover band's Get Acoustic, except the album art◊. Please don't let the zombie robots eat me...
• Mew: This band hit this quite a bit. Their lead singer and lyricist, Jonas Bjerre, has commented that he's draws much inspiration from his nightmares, which are allegedly very frequent. Said nightmares are also placed squarely into their music videos and the background visuals in their live show - a common motif is of stiffly, stutteringly animated people with animal heads (either alive or skulls) playing instruments. They have an entire album devoted to fear. Although he's fluent, English isn't his first language despite singing in it, resulting in him crafting some particularly odd and unsettling imagery. The pinnacle of the fuel may not come from an album, but from a b-side - "Succubus".
• Modest Mouse: The Surreal Horror song "Wild Pack of Family Dogs" is both this and Lyrical Dissonance.
• the Mountain Goats: John Darnielle has a gift for light, delicate horror. For example, Marduk T-Shirt Men's Room Incident. Stay weightless, formless, blameless, nameless...
  • Or "Ezekiel 7 And The Permanent Efficacy Of Grace," which is canonically about someone being tortured, possibly to death.
• The Move:
  • They included "Disturbance" on their 1968 debut album.
  • "Walk Upon The Water", also from their debut. It's a happy little tune, until you find out it's about a group of friends who got high and decided to take a swim in the ocean, only to get swept up and drown. If that wasn't creepy enough, it's implied that the group was totally unaware that they were drowning in their intoxicated state.
• Mr. Bungle:
  • "Dead Goon," a ten-minute-long song about a boy accidentally killing himself while performing auto-erotic asphyxiation complete with noose creaking sounds and dying gurgles.
  • "Violenza Domestica," a song about domestic abuse in Italian, sounds like a song that would fit in a David Lynch joint.
  • "The Bends," another ten-minute song, this one about suffering the bends, ends with a bunch of batshit noises.
  • The Last Note Nightmare of "Pink Cigarette", otherwise one of their calmer songs musically. Just when the song starts building up to a climax, the sound of a heart monitor can be heard slowly increasing in volume, and the last line of the song is very jarringly cut off by said heart monitor flat-lining. The song seems to be about a man committing suicide after finding his partner cheated on him, and the section that gets cut off by the flat-lining sound is a countdown of sorts: "There's just five hours left until you find me dead, There's just four hours left until you find me dead", etc.
• Murder By Death: The song "The Devil In Mexico". The devil-screeching (courtesy of Gerard Way) will get to you.
• My Chemical Romance:
  • "Mama" is already a dark enough song about war and self-loathing, but go listen to it in the dark in the middle of a storm.
  • Then there's their song Blood, which is a cheery little ragtime tune that's about the Patient (the main character of the album) undergoing constant blood tests (he's supposed to have something wrong with his heart, after all), and it seems like the tests will never stop. To some, it sounds almost like a song about mass murder.
• Okkervil River: "Westfall". "and when I killed her/it was so easy/that I wanted to kill her again".
• Joan Osborne: Turns out that "One of Us" really isn't all that typical of the work she does; plenty of her songs are spooky. Her song "Spider Web" opens with her saying "I dreamed about Ray Charles last night, and he could see just fine" in a soft, intimate voice. In the dream, she sings, at one point "Ray took his glasses off and I could look inside his head./Flashing like a thunderstorm, I saw a shining spider web."
• The Paper Chase:
  • The fact that they name their songs things like "the kids will grow up to be assholes" and "This May Be The Last Song You Ever Hear" doesn't really help. Their lyrics aren't much better. And then you see them live.
  • If it helps, lead singer John Congleton doesn't actually mean what he says - he started the band as an outlet for his frequent panic attacks, and is by all indication a pretty nice guy. There are those who love them and can even sleep through a lot of their noise-rock stuff... their ambient pieces, however? Fucking terrifying. Go to last.fm and listen to a sample of "I Tried So Hard To Be Good". Go on.
  • Any of the ambient songs on "Now You Are One of Us". Anything from the ever-so-lovely titled "Delivered In A Firm Unyielding Way Lingering For Just A Bit Too Long To Communicate The Message 'I Own You'" to "We Will Make You One of Us" (which, by the way, utilizes that radio show clip in Tool's "Faaip De Oiad") is pants-shittingly disturbing, especially to those first introduced to the band.
  • "I Did A Terrible Thing", a song about killing, has an extremely creepy-sounding ending in which it fades off to a distorted voice rattling off a list of directions. Random map made up by the band? Nope. Recorded phone call by murderer Larry Gene Bell, in which he was directing the family of his first victim to the body of his second. Holy shit.
  • "What's So Amazing About Grace?" was picked by Investigation Discovery to be the theme song for the show Evil Lives Here, and with good reason.
• Pavement: "Hit the Plane Down". The first two lines? "I'm up on a hilltop where I/Keep you in sight my little toys," sung in a voice more deranged than you could imagine possible.
• Pearl Jam: "Hey Foxymophandlemama, That's Me" has vocals entirely consisting of sampled clips from mental patients talking about things such as their mental state and suicide. The instrumentals aren't any less creepy, starting mostly with long, dreary electric guitar chords and later developing an actual melody, albeit with the instruments mostly disconnected. This goes on for nearly eight minutes.
• Primus:
  • Pork Soda could be nominated for this. It's a combination of the twangy, horror-movie basslines, the layers of guitar distortion, the cymbal timing, and the singer's campfire-story lyrics. Any song on this album, most especially "My Name Is Mud", will make you feel dreadful.
  • Their album Antipop, in addition to the freaky cover◊, has the song "Lacquer Head," about huffing dangerous chemicals. Keep on sniffin' till your brain goes pop!
• Project 86: The song "Me Against Me" describes a nightmare in which the speaker is fighting someone, then strangles him, only to realize the enemy is identical to himself. He then wakes up dead, having literally strangled himself to death while dreaming.
• Poe: The unanswered phone call and resulting voicemail message that open the album Haunted "Exploration B"). The album has other instances that are more just'unsettling that outright scary, like the audio samples of Poe's late father Ted Danielewski talking about something or other.
• Procol Harum: "The Dead Man's Dream". It's about a Dying Dream which is also a nightmare, and includes this part:
  The graves were disturbed, and the coffins wide open
  And the corpses were rotten, yet each one was living
  Their eyes were alive with maggots crawling
• Pulp:
  • Songs "Freaks" and "Aborigine". With regards to "Aborigine": the slow decay of a relationship into murder to the point where he sits and smokes a cigarette while watching his family burn in a car wreck is extremely unsettling.
  • There's an equally Squickworthy line in "The Night That Minnie Timperline Died" (detailing the last night of a murdered girl). Out of nowhere Jarvis hits you with the lines: "And he only did what he did / 'cos you looked like one of his kids..."
• Lou Reed: "The Kids" from Berlin It's about the authorities taking the children from a woman who, we're told, really has no business raising children. For several verses, he goes into detail about everything that makes her an unfit mother - the drugs, the promiscuity, the violence, and by the time he's done, you're pretty much happy for the children to be leaving the "miserable, rotten slut." Then the instrumental bit comes in and is quite gentle, acoustic guitars and flute, along with two young children crying and screaming "MOMMY! MOMMY! MOOOOOOMMMMMYYYYYYY!!!" in absolute agony for several minutes. The unofficial story goes that producer Bob Ezrin locked his own kids in the studio, told them their mother was dead, and taped the results.
  • Ezrin says he told them that it was time for bed.
  • Another nightmare is Reed's album Metal Machine Music: imagine nothing but continous droning guitar feedback noise, spread over four LP sides.
• Rhoda and the Special AKA: "The Boiler" is Rhoda Dakar’s deadpan observation of a homely woman being picked up by a handsome hunk and sharing a night on the town. Then it takes a very dark turn as she re-enacts the man dragging her into an alley, and then beating and raping her. The whole last minute is filled with Rhoda’s loud and deeply unsettling screams. It doesn’t help that the song is driven by Jerry Dammers’ relentlessly evil organ and a trumpet that comes across as a disturbingly indifferent observer to the entire proceedings.
• "The Reaper's Crown" by Roseland (a collaboration between Tyler Bates and Azam Ali). Minimalistic background, creepy distorted sounds, Azam's vocals that bring to memory "The Host of Seraphim" and above everything, the lyrics - metaphoric enough to be vague, yet understandable enough to be scary. Probably one of the most beautiful songs about assisted suicide you'll even hear.
• The whole conceptual album "Poesie: Friedrichs Geschichte" by the German band Samsas Traum. It touches a really gruesome historical theme, doing that both masterfully and horrifyingly. Especially Sauber, the very first song of the album, can easily render you sleepless.
  Jag sie alle, jag sie alle durch den Schornstein *shudders*
• Sebadoh's "As The World Dies, The Eyes Of God Grow Bigger", which is a seven minute epic about being raised by a neglectful, drug addicted family, then vowing to go on a murdering spree. By the end of the song, there's multiple overdubs of Eric Gaffney screaming "BLOOD ON THE WALLS! BLOOD ON THE WALLS!". It's reported to be based on Gaffney's actual childhood.
  • A lot of Eric's songs fit this trope quite nicely.
• The Smiths: "Meat is Murder." Morrisey, who is a hardcore vegetarian, sings about how killing innocent animals for food is really no different from killing other people. Throughout the song, there is a very creepy riff from Johnny Marr, and depressing piano. Also, at the beginning and ending of the song, the are the noises of what sound like power saws and screaming animals.
• Bruce Springsteen: "Nebraska". Sounds innocuous at first, until you realize it's a true story about Charles Starkweather, who went on a violent interstate murder spree for no other reason than "there's just a mean-ness in this world." Seriously disturbing. Double-creeps for the fact that the singer's girlfriend, who he wishes were sitting on his knee during his execution, was fourteen years old.
  • "State Trooper", also from Nebraska, has a very eerie mood to it, due to a menacing, repetitive acoustic guitar riff and hushed, reverb-drenched vocals, and a couple of instances of unexpected screaming. The lyrics are much more vague, but it seems to be another song about a murderer: At very least there are hints that the narrator did something horrible, and that he's begging the state trooper not to pull him over not because he doesn't want to be caught, but because he doesn't want to have to kill him.
• Stabbing Westward: "Sleep". The creaky, clanking rhythm backing up the singer's mournful recitation of the lyrics is a little unsettling. It rapidly becomes apparent what the song is about - a little girl subjected to near-nightly rape by her father - and the song becomes outright disturbing. The sense of dread and desperation conveyed is nightmarish, and the chorus includes the raspily-whispered line, "Wishing one of them were dead/So this hell can finally end."
• The Stone Roses: The idea of selling one's soul to the devil is terrifying enough as it is, but the protagonist of "I Wanna Be Adored" already has that base covered. He'd apparently be willing to do it, though, if it meant getting the attention he so desperately craves. The fact that the lyrics consist of nothing beyond "I don't have/need to sell my soul, he's already in me. I wanna be adored. You adore me. I gotta be adored." makes it even creepier. Plus, the desolate atmosphere given off by the guitar at 2:04 feels downright sinister.
• The Strokes: Not a Nightmare Fuel-y band by any stretch of the imagination, but after the last note of their song "Slow Animals" fades out, listeners are treated to some eerie Studio Chatter of a few people that sound nothing like any members of the band whispering and laughing, almost as if the band recorded the song on an already-used tape. The voices may just be the band's managers, but it's definitely out of place.
• Sublime: The first two lines of "Wrong Way," which states that the prostitute the narrator spends the night with was fourteen. fucking. years. old.
• Tears for Fears: From The Hurting, we have the dark, angry, "The Prisoner", which sounds like it's screaming.
• Ten Years After: "As The Sun Still Burns Away". Creepy existentialist lyrics crossed with an repeating, ominous blues riff. The entire second half of the piece is gobbled up by washes of electronic howls and screams, ending with guitarist/vocalist Alvin Lee shrieking like a madman.
• Theory of a Deadman's single "Drown" is a song about, well, drowning as told from the perspective of the victim, as it is happening to him. Plus it is implied that he is not alone under the water. This is especially jarring in comparison to the party rock the band is famous for.
  "Waves roll in and clean my sins, Now everything is clear, I'm having fun, under the sun, Wishing you were here."
• This Heat: An experimental post-punk band with strong progressive leanings and a penchant for using bizarre sounds and recording methods, usually to put across some kind of political point or just scare the crap out of their audience. Quite often, they succeeded on both points, as wonderfully demonstrated with the anti-war dirge "The Fall Of Saigon".
• This Mortal Coil: Fyt starts out with ominous, heavily distorted industrial sounds. Then the actual music begins to creep in over the noise very slowly. Then a ways into the song unexpectedly comes the loud, distorted wails of a woman. This song's only saving grace is the actually rather heavenly and optimistic synths that appear halfway into the song.
• The Used: "The Bird and the Worm" is pretty fucking creepy, Even without the even more terrifying music video to help it along. The vocals-only version is really unnerving.
• Ween: "Happy Colored Marbles" is often cited. But even that one is downright...well, happy when compared to "Spinal Meningitis (Got Me Down)", which takes place from the perspective of a small child suffering from the titular disease, undergoing a horrifically painful lumbar puncture. It's not the first one, either, and s/he's pleading with his/her mother to not let him/her die. If the distorted child-voice backed by the deep synth mimic doesn't get you, the agonized screaming over the guitar solo will.
• White Magic: The song "Poor Harold" sounds like a mix between a circus show and a panic attack. The iTunes review describes it as "an acid-damaged parlor song, written for the sitting area of a circus performer's trailer. It features vibraslap, a crinkly snare drum by Shaw, a nightmare piano, and melodica with whooping, off-the-rail singing and tempo changes that will make the listener dizzy."
• Wolf Parade: "Yulia." It's about a cosmanaut shot into space with no means of returning home.
  "There's nothing out here nothing out here nothing out here nothing out here nothing out�"
• There's a River in the Valley made of Melting Snow, by A Silver Mt. Zion, is a slow song with surreal lyrics and Background Music that wouldn't sound out of place in Silent Hill. The effect is at once oddly calming and deeply, profoundly unsettling.
• XTC:
  • "Garden of Earthly Delights" is Andy Patridge's creepy song with an Arabic feel and strange noises.
  • "Complicated Game" is a terrorizing 5-minute experience that's so intense it makes the entirety of Spiderland sound like a nursery rhyme.

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