Nothing Is Scarier / Music

Examples of Nothing Is Scarier in Music

Wait for it...

• It is common for albums to feature hidden "bonus tracks" after the last listed song with several minutes of silence in between. Some of these can start out startling or even outright alarming. If you've been forewarned and have decided to leave the player on to see for yourself, well... the people who were surprised might have been better off.
  • My Chemical Romance: Well, they encourage your complete cooperation... (Bonus points because Way starts singing in a tinny music hall voice, to the accompaniment of nothing but piano, that sounds so different from earlier tracks that some people refused to believe it was the same singer.)
  • Ladytron's Witching Hour ends with 10 minutes of silence, but no hidden track afterwards.
  • Coheed and Cambria's album "In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3" album has a hidden track, which is a separate track between the aptly titled ten tracks "A Whole Lot of Nothing".
  • One of the most sinister examples is in Four Walls by Staind, as the silence follows the gunshot of the narrator committing suicide, making the silence become the silence of death. The hidden track "Funeral" subverts the last-note nightmare aspect of some hidden tracks as it comes in gently, but as a dark ambient track it served to shape the silence rather than merely break it.
• Aerosmith
  • The final track of the Get A Grip album titled Boogie Man is a 2 minute instrumental of creeping music that keeps building up and eventually just fades out. It contrasts with the rest of the album apart from the last few seconds of the previous track that is a grainy recording of Tyler Perry saying,
  From all of us in Aerosmith to all of you out there, remember. The light at the end of the tunnel... may be you. Goodnight.
• The CD version of Covenant's Modern Ruin has a hidden dark ambient track after a minute or so of silence, but the downloadable release, which for some reason lacks the bonus track, still has the silence at the end of the last track.
  • The final track on Biffy Clyro's Infinity Land is followed by around eight minutes of silence, and our patience is rewarded with... something truly horrible. This example is notable because the bonus track is every bit as scary as the silence, if not scarier.
• Boris has a song called "Absolutego" which is a complete, droning, shrapnel heavy drone doom song that goes on for about 49 minutes. If the genre of drone metal wasn't creepy enough, during the final 16 minutes of this "song" (if you can even call it that), we get an ear piercing, headache-inducing "riff" that sounds like a saw blade trying to cut up metal. But the scariest part about it is that it is just pure, absolute nothingness - it's just that one riff droning for endless minutes, no instruments to back it up, just... THAT. If Cthulhu sounds like anything, it sounds like this.
• Alien Sex Fiend's "Black Rabbit" could be the theme song for the full version of this trope. This throwaway song was the last track on the band's first album, and remains one of the most unsettling pieces of music ever recorded, even by ASF's bizarre standards. It doesn't go anywhere in terms of music, but that's what makes it spooky.
• The Cure's "Subway Song" from their first album is an unsettling little number about a woman being followed home from work late at night. After about a minute and a half, the song starts to fade out. There's about a second of silence, followed by a startlingly LOUD reverb-drenched scream. It manages to have the same effect every time, even when you know it's coming.
• In the Einstürzende Neubauten song "Seele Brennt", there are various moments when you just hear drums playing, and then the other instruments join in. Around three and a half minutes into the song, the drums start playing on their own, and, after only a couple of seconds of silence, Blixa Bargeld lets in with what could only be called an inhuman screech, which is very loud, and ultimately terrifying.
• Madonna's "Gang Bang" is a disturbingly good example of this. It's a minimalistic industrial/techno song that for most of its duration never picks up (aside from a Dubstep break in the middle). Madonna sings most of it in a low tone of voice about killing her lover, and having no regrets about it. At the end of the song, Madonna muses about how she's going "straight to hell, and I've gotta lot of friends there." She talks about how when she sees her ex-lover she'll shoot him in the head so she can "watch him die, over, and over..." before suddenly exploding and yelling "NOW DRIVE, BITCH!!!". The legitimate anger in her voice is just as scary as the sheer calmness that preceded it.
• Hozier's song "In the Woods Somewhere" deals with a man who's running a fever. When it breaks in the middle of the night, he hears a woman's scream and runs terrified into the woods, where he finds a fox with such a badly broken leg that the bone is showing. He kills the fox to end its suffering, wondering what the hell could have injured the poor thing, and then sees a pair of eyes in the dark. Naturally, he takes off running again and doesn't know what kind of creature he almost saw.
  How many years
  I know I'll bear
  I found something in the woods somewhere.
• An ambient album example, there are several points in Everywhere at the End of Time by The Caretaker where the music will abruptly stop or play dense, hellish noise in between long quiet periods. Stage 6 is this to the extreme, where the album is largely static noise until the choir, then simply nothing for the last remaining minute, symbolizing "death". While the albums have a description discussing the different stages of dementia, Stage 6 has a one sentence summary:
  Post-Awareness Stage 6 is without description.
• "What's He Building In There?" by Tom Waits. We never find out.

Nothing at all

• The cover art for Orbital's 1996 single 'The Box' is weirdly unsettling, despite the fact that it just shows a house with, well, nothing going on. The tracks on the single (especially track 2) just add to the fear factor of the house...
• Similarly, the cover art◊ for Brian Eno's and David Byrne's album Everything that Happens Will Happen Today. In this case, the artist deliberately added some unsettling details to the pictures inside the liner notes: for example, there's a discarded condom wrapper in the roof gutter, a silhouette of some person looking through binoculars in a upstairs window, and one of the interior rooms has a large, sealed, metal door. The deluxe edition of the album takes this several few steps further by adding a sound chip to the packaging, so that it plays the sound of a door creaking open and footsteps when you open the tin.
• Oddly, yet another example involving an album cover depicting nothing but a nondescript house - Silversun Pickups' Neck Of The Woods◊.
• A similar design appears on the cover◊ of Harvey Danger's album Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone?
• Possibly referenced in "Where Your Eyes Don't Go" by They Might Be Giants.
  Should you worry when the skullhead is in front of you
  Or is it worse because it's always waiting where your eyes don't go?
• The Bad Plus and Wendy's Lewis' cover of Pink Floyd's famous "Comfortably Numb" replaces the "Aaaaaa-aa-aaaahhh!" that follows "there'll be no more" with several beats of complete silence. Considering most TBP fans probably expected the often bombastic trio to exaggerate that moment, it makes the silence all the more unsettling.
• Steve Roden, and moreover the entire lowercase genre, make surprisingly good use out of this. With their songs being so minimal and abstract it gives the feeling of being lost and isolated.
• Iron Maiden:
  • This appears to be what "Fear of the Dark" is getting at: it doesn't matter whether or not something is there, because the mere fact that it could be there is terrifying enough.
  • The cover◊ of Maiden's 16th album, The Book of Souls. All there is is just Eddie... staring at you. Not making a crazy face, nothing in the background. Just Eddie staring right into your soul.
• "Still Grey" by Pendulum makes use of this. The song isn't discordant, but it keeps picking up, being cheerful, but still not giving a drop or building up to anything. Then it just fades as it ends, giving an empty feeling.
• Similarly, "The 2nd Law: Isolated System" by Muse is a song that never picks up completely. Much of the first half is just piano, soft guitar, a creepy voice repeating the phrase, "In an isolated system, the entropy can only increase.", with sound clips from radio broadcasts and a soft, distant trance beat. In the second half, after a short piano and string break, the song resumes the trance beat and Dom comes in with a pounding drumbeat, almost teasing the listener into thinking it's going to explode into something big and epic... and then it just winds down and closes, never taking off, leaving a fade out with said repeated voice repeating over and over. It's very unnerving.
• "Mer Girl" from Madonna's album Ray of Light is a slow, plodding, aimless and quiet tune. It's scary for that very reason. Never mind the gory lyrics, her soft and quiet singing and mixed with the monotonous music leaves you with the most disturbed feeling ever.
• Norwegian satirist Odd Børretzen commented on this in his "musical monologue" called Redd (Scared), explaining why it was necessary to remain in bed, and not, for any reason in the world, to leave it before morning:
  "If I hear a man walking around in the attic with a wooden leg during the night, I will not go up to the attic to turn on the light, assuring myself that there is no man with a wooden leg there. I rather hide under my sheets until morning comes and removes the abomination. Because: If I go to the attic and confirms that there is nothing there, return to my bed, and still hear the man walking around in the attic with a wooden leg, then I know there is an invisible man walking around up there with a wooden leg. And does that actually make things better?"
• The Vocaloid song "Pilom-san"/"Mr. Pilom". The only lyrics of the song are "Pilom-san!" with the occasional droning "aaaaaaah". The accompanying video consists solely of "Pilom-san", a stick figure that appears to have crawled from the deepest depths of the Uncanny Valley, standing there, staring off into space and occasionally acknowledging the lyrics, briefly looking at YOU and smiling the single most horrifying smile imaginable. The song and PV never once explain who or what Pilom-san is. He just seems to be... there.
• David Bowie never revealed why exactly Major Tom's communication cut out at the end of "Space Oddity"...
• Pretty◊ much◊ all◊ of◊ Jandek's album◊ covers◊. Much like the Internet History example below, they're all contextless shots of seemingly mundane scenery such as living rooms and city streets, often in either black and white or extremely dim lighting, with no accompanying artist information or any other text. Even without hearing the often haunting, agonized music contained within, there's just something indefinably eerie about the covers by themselves. This trope could honestly apply to Jandek in general, considering his disturbing music and the fact that almost nothing is known about him.
• The concept photos (pictures found inside the album) of the "E" version of BTS' LOVE YOURSELF: Answer have each one of the members sitting inside (what seems to be) a small bubble or crystal ball with nothing else with them except flowers and plants, with the outside being a big, empty interior of what appears to be a house. The sheer surreality and emptiness of the scenery, plus the poses of the members (which suggest that this is a Gilded Cage) and a close look revealing that the flowers in Jungkook's bubble are dead, gives the pictures an unsettling effect the more you look at them despite the bright, pastel colors.
  • Similarly, the concept photos for version 1 of MAP OF THE SOUL : 7 feature the members in what looks like an old, abandoned house (to the point the walls are deteriorating), sitting or standing very close to a huge hole in the wooden floorboards. In the hole, you can't see anything except pure black.
• Siivagunner:
  • "Game Over - Spider-Man: Friend or Foe" is a 20 second video of a nondescript bedroom with a bright lamp, dark corners, and no visible windows. That's it: there's no music, no apparent joke, not even any Jump Scares; just the video itself and the accompanying Drone Of The Dead. Several commenters mentioned feeling unnerved by the video.
  • Downplayed in "Reservation Lost! - Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center": while the background music takes out much of the scare factor, it does serve to highlight how empty the convention center becomes after an event like MAGFest. As with the previous example, no Jump Scares occur, even as the very end - where the cameraperson suddenly starts walking - is set up for one.
• In "The Visitors" by ABBA, we never find out who or what the eponymous intruders are, other than that the narrator has feared their arrival even before they entered the house. Word of God claims that it's a Protest Song about Soviet treatment of political prisoners.
• In Lord Huron's "Meet Me in the Woods", the singer mentions having met something on their journey into the woods, only calling it a "darkness", an "endless night", and claiming that there is no words to describe it, but it is worse than your worst dreams.
• News at 11 is a vaporwave Concept Album by 猫 シ Corp. that creates collages and soundscapes from the sounds of TV broadcasts... from the morning of September 11, 2001, mere hours before you-know-what changed America forever. It has a very unsettling atmosphere, for a few key reasons:
  • Rather glaringly, despite some minor accidental hints that only seem prophetic in hindsight, there are no mentions of the actual attacks on the Twin Towers, and it's a conspicuous-enough absence that in light of the audio itself (largely calm, almost innocent pleasantries of news anchors and smooth jazz from The Weather Channel), it creates a very eerie dissonance where you realize something terrible is about to happen, but in the album itself, it never actually comes.
  • Another detail is that while the first half of the album focuses mostly on banter from new channels and commercials, and each with distinctive song titles, the second half is almost entirely instrumental and based on stock jazz music from The Weather Channel, with all titles being "THE WEATHER CHANNEL" 1 through 11. The Weather Channel is somewhat famously one of the only American live TV networks that stuck with its regularly-scheduled programming on the day of the attacks, creating a narrative implication that the attacks are happening, but the album — having spent its time delaying the inevitable — is resorting to the only available means of ignoring an otherwise unavoidable, inescapable tragedy.
• Aerosmith: The music video for "Janie's Got a Gun" employs this to disturbing effect. The song is about a teenage girl who gets revenge on the father who's molesting her in some way, with the only description being "He jacked a little bitty baby" (the original line was more explicit, but executives insisted on a rewrite, which somehow makes it worse). In the video, we see Janie's father ogling her, and at one point, he's staring into her bedroom watching her sleep. But we never actually witness what he does beyond two brief shots of Janie's tear-stricken, screaming face in her bed. Not knowing the details only paints a more horrific picture of what's happening.
• Jimin's "Like Crazy" video is a "nothing at all" variant set mainly in a dimly lit club, featuring a mysterious black tar and some creepy flickering lights. The bathroom walls open up to reveal a black void surrounding Jimin. There is nothing resembling an antagonist, just Jimin feeling a sense of emptiness when he is alone and possibly undergoing a Sanity Slippage.

There all along!

• The Misfits track 1,000,000 Years B.C. describes the point of view of an ancient mysterious creature that has been observing humanity since the very beginning.
• Porcupine Tree's song "Blackest Eyes" is a pretty upbeat alternative rock song about a serial killer. However, if one listens to the song at a lower volume than they usually do, they'll notice a sinister voice "speaking the lyrics" with Steven Wilson's singing them. This is only detectable at lower volumes, which makes the lyrics creepier than they already are.