Nightmare Fuel / Death Metal

And this is only the album's censored cover. The uncensored one, well...

When you have the word "death" as part of a genre's name, you know that you're gonna be in for plenty of terrifying listening experiences.

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• Guitars and bass are often heavily distorted, creating an atmosphere that can be best described as crushingly brutal. Vocals are no better, often employing monstrous growls (and on occasion high-pitched shrieks) that are very good at scaring people with their monstrous tone, especially if they aren't ready for such harshness within music.
• Lyrics within the genre are filled to the brim with grisly depictions of ultraviolence, most often combined with graphic sexual content played in no way for Fanservice and, in some cases, the darker aspects of history and mythology. Cosmic horror and dark questionings of humanity are not off the table either when it comes to certain bands, making them just as terrifying (if not more) than death metal bands dealing in the typical fare of violent lyrics.
  • While not as common compared to Black Metal, Satanism and occultism do show up in death metal too, and lyrics pertaining to those themes can be just as terrifying with their graphic lyrical content and brutal atmosphere.
• The Acacia Strain: "The Impaler". Despite the pretty funny video and having an awesome riff, the Serial Killery and misanthropic lyrics make the song horrifying.
• Amon Amarth has the song "Where Death Seems to Dwell". It's about a dead man mindlessly wandering the freezing void beneath the earth until he reaches the gates of hell, and the even worse fate that waits within. It gets worse if you know the accompanying mythology, which dictates that he will remain, in agony, in this freezing hell until Ragnarok, the Norse apocalypse, when the God of Chaos will conscript him into an army comprised of the rotting remains of the inglorious dead and march on Asgard, leading to a battle which ends the universe. Then, maybe, he will be granted the mercy of fading from existence.
  • There's also "Where Silent Gods Stand Guard" which tells the tale of a vampiristic, serial-killing Viking cannibal.
• Bloodbath's "Eaten". It seems like standard Death Metal fare and nothing exceptionally creepy for the genre, but then you read about the story behind the song. It's about the Armin Meiwes case, which is also the basis for the Rammstein song "Mein Teil". Have fun listening now that you know what it's talking about!
  • They also have The Soulcollector, which is about a torturous and hateful entity that lures his victims to his world in their dreams. Once he claims their souls, he tortures them in as many ways he can think of, reducing their physical bodies to dead husks and going on to find his next victim. Further, he implies himself to be especially cruel to his victims who escape him.
• Cryptopsy:
  • On the album Once Was Not, there are at least four songs worthy of this trope. "Luminum" and "The End" because they're just so damn haunting, and "In The Kingdom Where Everything Dies, the Sky Is Mortal" and "Endless Cemetery" because they're, for lack of a better word, apocalyptic in nature.
  • There is a group for "real metal fans" on last.fm, where one of the criteria for getting in was to "fall asleep listening to Cryptopsy". Needless to say, few people got in.
• Decapitated: Dance Macabre, just Dance Macabre. It sounds so eerie and ominous like something you'd hear in a A Nightmare on Elm Street film.
• Defeated Sanity: The lovely sounds of a girl getting brutally tortured... then seemingly killed via being skinned alive in the beginning of this song.
• Desecration: This Welsh death metal band fits the bill, especially with their debut album Gore and Perversion. It was so bad that authorities arrested band members and destroyed almost all copies of the record's initial release in 1996, including the masters.
  • That album was finally released in a safer way as Gore and Perversion 2 in 2003. They used different artwork and no lyrics, but eventually both the artwork and the lyrics leaked to the internet. The lyrics don't just cross the line; they utterly obliterate the line, have it for dinner, and run miles ahead of where the line once was. The three worst songs are entitled "Penile Dissection," "Fontanelle Fornication," and "I.A.I." That's right, that last one was so horrific they had to abbreviate the title. You can find the original artwork and lyrics on their page.
• Disgorge: For reasons unknown, this Mexican brutal death band decided to put this quite unfitting and haunting melody at the beginning of "Raise the Pestilence". Just check your sound levels before playing it.
• Fluids. The lyrics in their songs are plenty disturbing on their own, but the samples used by them (including audio from police footage of Daniel Shaver's death at the hands of the police) are so horrifying that some tried-and-true metalheads have sworn the band off entirely. Put this way: there's a reason they titled and styled a compilation of their music after the infamous Faces of Death series.
• Gojira:
  • "1990 Quadrillions de Tonnes" from Terra Incognita is a 3 and a half minute track consisting of an instrumental section with various screams over it. It is very surreal and unsettling in nature.
  • "Amazonia" from Fortitude is all about the increasingly devastating fires in the Amazon rainforest, and sounds appropriately bleak and menacing.
  • The video for "Another World" shows the band members, in an animated style, attempting to build a spacecraft in order to reach a titular new world, where they may escape our current polluted and dying Earth. They only manage to arrive at Earth itself presumably many years into the future, realizing where they are when they come across a half buried and overgrown Eiffel Tower. The band finds themselves in what Earth could become if its crises, like the changing climate, aren't properly dealt with.
• Gorguts: Obscura, especially the linked song "Sweet Silence". The last minute always catches you off guard.
• Heaven Shall Burn: Their song "Combat" manages to be a bit of a Tear Jerker and this at the exact same time by blending the subject matter, child soldiers, with screaming vocals, an instrumental that can only be described as a wall of borderline noise, and by just being damn loud. Also the song takes on the POV of the child soldiers while going into detail about how war is taking its toll on them. Fun!
• Nile:
  • "Howling of the Jinn". The lyrics combine almost every primal fear: being covered in insects, voices of madness, suffocation, and being devoured by snakes. That's not even getting into the scream near the middle of the song.
  • "Even the Gods Must Die" a song about the death of the Egyptian gods with no explanation of what happened to them.
  • Heck, "Masturbating the War God" and "Cast Down the Heretic" also qualify, not least due to the fact that what the lyrics describe may have actually occurred in history.
• Nuclear Death: "Days of the Weak". Not only is it a particularly unhinged and apocalyptic death metal tune, but the lyrics are some of the sickest ever put to music.
• Opeth:
  • "Deliverance" is a song about murder by drowning, which is creepy in and of itself, but something about this bit is chilling, especially when it leads into the sinister, repetitive outro.
    Deliverance
    Thrown back at me
    Deliverance
    Laughing at me
• As if regular death metal wasn't bad enough, we've got Portal from Australia. Their music sounds nothing like conventional music and everything like an Eldritch Abomination trying its hand at writing a song, complete with vocals that sound closer to whispers from the darkest reaches of the universe, churning instruments that take existing structures and twist them until they're unrecognizable, and lyrics containing no small amount of mind-bending and surreal Cosmic Horror that can make you seriously question your existence. Just listen.
• Torsofuck: "Raped by Elephants". Yeah, it sounds funny at first. Then you'll hear the intro.
• Cenotaph, Turkey's most well-known death metal band, make music that can best be described as the soundtrack to hell itself. Inhumanly low vocals even by brutal/slam death standards to the point of bordering on subsonic, lyrics exclusively about gore in the most excruciating detail imaginable (which you'll be relieved can't be deciphered), and relentless musicianship make them an extremely unsettling listen. Here is a taste of their craft.
• Intestinal Disgorge: Early albums made by the band just barely sound human, with their cacophonic hybrid of brutal death metal, goregrind and harsh noise mixed with screams that make any and all examples of Careful with That Axe sound downright angelic in comparison.
• The Plasmarifle: "Haunted by the ghost of a dead actress". It's an enjoyable song, but it quickly turns unnerving when the whispers start. Listen to it at midnight with no lights on and think it's not terrifying.
• Skinless: Their song "Execution Of Reason" begins with a sample with a man saying, "They say a hanging man hears glorious music. I wonder what it sounds like." And then the man apparently hangs himself.

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