Nightmare Fuel / Electronic

• Creator Couple ADULT. make a chilling departure from their signature gothic/industrial techno style with "Teeth Out Pt. II", the closer of Becoming Undone, which features atonal chant-like vocals with the reverb cranked up to eleven against an electronic bass drone.
• Anbb:
  • They have a rather notorious version of the folk traditional "I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground." It starts off sounding controlled, with cold, atonal electronics, before Blixa begins invoking Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick. This goes a step further in the extended cut, culminating in Careful with That Axe.
  • "MIMIKRY". Weird lyrics, and then this robotic voice talking about the noise, and this dissonance, and this constant beat.... It's beautiful, though.
• Angelspit: "Sleep Now." What makes it even creepier is Zoog's voice as he says "we are all the same". Emotionless, like he knows and doesn't care, because he's given up already.
• Ark (Featuring Baciotti): "Rock Blue" is an electronic pop rock/new wave song on the dangers of nukes. Near the end is a nuclear blast that halts the song, with winds heard as the band is presumably obliterated. Some copies of the song have a cover and poster of a nuclear explosion.
• Assemblage 23: "30kft", whose lyrics depict the last message of a passenger inside of a plane about to crash, knowing he is going to die. The song ends with the singer's phone call cutting out.
  So I've one last thing to tell you now before I have to go. I- *abrupt static*
• Autechre: Confield is unsettling in a very cold and mechanical way. The songs were produced using generative (computer algorithm rather than human performer-based) sequencing, which... just listen.
• The Berzerker: One notable example would be "Burnt". The scariest part of the song would have to be the midway point, where a man lists a number of torture methods accompanied by incredibly twisted industrial sounds. Not only that, but later in the song, the man's monologue is played again, in case you didn't hear him the first time.
• The Birthday Massacre: "Happy Birthday" and "Blue".
• Brighter Death Now: Overlapping with (and to some extent predicating) the genre of death industrial is this Swedish musician, whose work is basically what happens when a band decides to frame their entire ethos around taking the "Drone of Dread" into the most miserable place possible.
• Chiron: The album "Bleed" has closing track "Nikki," which is seemingly about a gal named Nikki coming back to take revenge on a guy that has wronged her. Hell hath no fury. It's pretty standard, until it hits the 03:58 mark. With the line "They're never gonna get me alive" previously on a rocky tune, it suddenly shifts into a moodier music, and words/expressions begin. Each expression is repeated several times, one in each ear. These include: "Control, control, control!", "You found the answer! YOU found the answer!", "Staring at me, staring at me, STARING at me, STARING AT ME!", "They will see the real me! They will see the real me!", "Touch me! Touch me!", "I can't stop shaking! I can't stop shaking!"
• Robert Christopher: "Haunted Sky" — a nightmarish musical work of art, intensified with a relentless near-infrasound drone and what can only be described as the distant tortured ululations of faceless night-gaunts. Beautiful and/or terrifying!
• Combichrist: Special mention should go to "God Warrior." What makes it especially impressive is that the vocals from that track are taken from this video, which is, at best, a bit weird, but to most people is pretty hilarious. Then Shaun F and Andy La Plegua got their hands on it, and turned it into this.
• William Control: "Razor's Edge". It seems like a normal, gothy, above-average alternative rock song until about halfway through you get a delightful little tirade. Add to this the fact that his voice gets more and more raspy until he's saying the last few words in what can only be described as a demonic snarl, and that about two seconds later the vocals kick in again, and it's him screaming "YOU SLASH MY HEART ON THE RAZOR'S EDGE."
• Covenant: "Modern Ruin Part II", a Hidden Track on their Modern Ruin album, is a dark ambient drone track reminiscent of Quake or Silent Hill. Back in 1994, they did a similar piece called "Cryotank Expansion", which is 26 minutes long.
• The Creatures: The debut titular song (albeit called "The Creature") for this Italo Disco group opens like an ominous minimal song with loud bursts in a presumed spaceship setting, followed with an organ-like piece and somber violin-like arpeggios and synths. Not as cheesy as their forthcoming hits, it is not even an Italo song.
• Jason Crumer: Being a very good noise artist, his album Ottoman Black generally qualifies, but when he drops the harsh static on the track "Where Were You?" and replaces it with abstract noises in the background that could easily be gunshots or other violence, and has the sounds of a man gasping, groaning and gurgling quietly in pain in the foreground, it's chilling.
• The Deviants: The scariest song they ever did was "Nothing Man". If you're listening to it for the first time, you think it's going to be a sort of creepy song. But it becomes a spoken-word description of a nihilistic, hateful man. There's no real music in the background, either, just lots of frightening sounds. It starts out pretty quiet, but it all culminates in the last part, where Mick Farren lists all the people the nothing man hates. It's pretty scary, especially if you find yourself on the list of people the Nothing Man hates.
• The Diary of Dreams: "The Curse" is told from the perspective of a man who is being tortured; made worse by the chorus implying that the mental part of the torment is considerably worse. ("Plastic needles in my skin/don't ask me what they're for/no clue except for pain and shock/you tied me to the bed to mock/my eyelids kept wide open/so I can see all that you do...")
• "Wax Trip" by DJ Inx presents The Dark House Project lives up to the artist name, especially the "Roofie Side" mix with its heavily distorted female voice samples.
• Brian Eno: The instrumental numbers "The Secret Place", "Matta" and "Under Stars II" from Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks all have a creepy, haunting atmosphere. Also, everything off of Ambient 4. Don't listen to it if you're feeling edgy.
  • "Alternative 3" from Music for Films, originally created for a made-for-television mockumentary of the same name.
• Einstürzende Neubauten: Case in point, "Armenia". They could be described as the soundtrack for Nightmare Fuel.
• Front 242: "Felines" is extremely unsettling to listen to for the first time. The distorted voice clip the song is built around is intended to sound like a cat, but it sounds closer to a legion of brain-damaged children following Nyarlathotep. The calmly sung lyrics and rather danceable beat make it uniquely creepy.
• Front Line Assembly:
  • "Humanity (World War Three)" is pretty damned creepy, as is the song "Mortal", whose only dialogue consists of rather disturbing clips of post-apocalypse from some movie, possibly Through the Eyes of Madness.
  • You thought Madonna's "Justify My Love" was scary? Try Front Line Assembly's remake.
• Funker Vogt: They have more than a few moments, chiefly because most of their songs deal with actual events and the aftermath. "When a Child Dies," which dissects the discovery of a murdered girl and traces it back to sexual abuse by a family member, is right up there, as is "Suspended Animation," which tells the tale of a man who wakes up to discover he's been buried alive:
  I'm crying now, but nobody's there
  The air is scanty, my voice is decreasing
  My mind is confused
  I'm knocking on the coffin
• Garbage: "#1 Crush" is one goddamn freaky song. Basically, it's an Obsession Song which starts off as vaguely OK ("I would die for you" then, a bit later, "I would sell my soul for something pure and true/someone like you") and then gets considerably darker ("I will burn for you/feel pain for you") and then she lists all the stuff she would do for this guy. It's a long list.
• German Shepherds: The obscure industrial band has a song called "Booty Jones". The lyrics are about a guy's fantasy of raising up "a family of clean little boys". Not helping was the singer's decision to claim he was on trial for child molestation and fake his own death.^note He wanted an excuse to work under his real name. And the electronic whining, deep bass, and monotone vocals just add to the effect.
• HARDCORE TANO*C: Not their songs themselves, but in some earlier covers of their albums, their mascot Doro*C looks almost nothing like how she's usually drawn now but more like a bleached, zombified monstrosity drenched in blood. Like these.
• Hafler Trio: The first ten minutes of "The Emasculation of Contempt" would definitely apply: a layered, 15/16 time piano piece that would be more or less okay—were it not for the processed screaming, a growing fog of demonic, unsettling shrieks and howls, getting more and more unnerving until all of a sudden, it cuts out.
• Hybrid: Since their second album, Morning Sci-Fi, they've since made their songs extremely unsettling and scary. "Marrakech," from the previously mentioned album, deserves special mention.
  • However, their music is so fantastic it could become Nightmare Retardant.
• Inhale:
  • "Breathing Water." It's an eight-minute-long track that isn't so much a song as a nightmare being quietly related over creepy ambient sound. The "singer's" voice is mechanically slurred, so the emotion seems detached and disjointed, and it's hard to even tell its gender at parts. It details slow death by drowning, but with parts so surreal as to truly ring true as a nightmare, like there being presents floating everywhere, and the singer trying to hold onto them to keep from sinking. The beginning and the end are slow fades in/out to the sound of buoys clanging rhythmically...heard from underwater. The song is actually based on an actual event, the Point Pleasant, VA bridge collapse of December 15, 1967. Said bridge collapse was pivotal to the serious nightmare fuel The Mothman Prophecies by John Keel, and the spoken word vocals are the sheriff from "Prophecies" telling the leading man about a dream she had which ends up coming true. You can hear it for free, courtesy of the artist, here.
  • All of Inhale's songs are like this. "4x10+10+4" is the scariest one, making Longfellow's nostalgic poem "My Lost Youth" sound like the speaker confessing supressed knowledge. "Lotus Wings" takes the greatest speech from A Charlie Brown Christmas and warps it so darkly you're left screaming for someone to turn the bad sounds off. "Crooked Creaking Universe" has... well, whatever the growling creature is, but if it came from a dark hallway, it wouldn't be surprising. Often the lyrics are so mechanically distorted you're left not knowing what exactly what the speakers are singing (or in some cases weeping), and you don't want to.
  • Try listening to "black" just before going to sleep. We dare you.
  • To add a heaping helping of Tear Jerker to this trope, it seems Vance, one of the band members, may have committed suicide.
• Justice: "Stress". Allegedly, the thriller movie sample used in the music is triggering a subconscious zombie association. Also, the video is scary enough by itself. It's a montage of a young gang (all clad in jackets with the group's cross symbol logo on the back) committing senseless acts of destruction and violently attacking innocent citizens, all filmed on a handheld video camera like a found footage film.
• The Knife: Karin Dreijer Andersson, one half of the Knife, has a solo career under the name Fever Ray. Her music, stage persona, and videos are so scary that her husband was concerned about letting their kids listen to her music.
• Lil Texas, for the unprepared. While most uptempo hardcore is abrasive and frightening in its own right, Texas deserves special mention for how much he's crossed over into the mainstream - the terrifying outros of Dorian Electra's "Ram It Down" and the Dawn of Chromatica remix of Lady Gaga's "Sine From Above" are his doing, for example. His 2022 debut album FASTER takes this to a new level, as - true to its name - the songs progressively speed up in tempo over the course of the album until by "What Up Texas" you're being pummeled by machine-gun bursts of the most abrasive and screeching kick drums you've heard in your life. Thankfully it's only a minute long.
• Lustmord:
  • Many people upon first hearing something by them will have to stop after a few seconds, and they'll feel physically odd for several minutes afterwards. Even after getting used to that, some still haven't been able to listen to some other styles, such as the clinical ambient bit at the end of this.
  • Lustmord's "Infinite Domain" is particularly scary upon first listen because at one point the "music" drops out, leaving just an unidentifiable hollow rhythmic noise that sounds a lot like someone beating something against a wall, like a tennis ball. Or someone's head. And if you've seen The Shining, the tennis ball option can be a terrifying sound.
• Manhattan Project: The intro of "That's Impossible" by this Italo Disco project easily sounds silly owing to the snoring. Few seconds after the alarm sets off is a loud wake-up groan that can frighten listeners off-guard.
• Midnight Syndicate: A gothic band that creates some of the creepiest instrumentals. A lot of their music is used to create atmosphere for haunted house rides. It's probably best not to listen to their music at the dead of night. Their use of sound effects is exceptionally frightful.
• OGRE & Dallas Campbell's All Hallows is expectedly creepy, being a horror-themed concept album, but the Drone of Dread piece "Carve" comes out on top, especially the crescendo towards the end. "Of Terror" is another highly unsettling dark ambient track that wouldn't be out of place in a Silent Hill game.
• Mr. Oizo: A French producer who's mostly known for "Flat Beat" and his arthouse movies. That said, some of his lesser known stuff is disturbing as hell.
• Negativland: While mostly humorous, they have some serious Fuel if you're not prepared for it. One of the tracks from the live album It's All In Your Head FM (V1.0) features jarring, repetitive industrial rhythms as a woman talks about killing children. Yeah, it's not a wise choice to listen to going to sleep.
  • A Big 10-8 Place, but especially its same-named song, "A Big 10-8 Place, Part 1".
  • From the final version, released as It's All In Your Head, there's "Push The Button." Part of the track juxtaposes the Langley Schools Music Project cover of "God Only Knows" with an interview of a would-be suicide bomber, over a background of tense dark ambient. This culminates in a sudden loud blast, taken directly from the master recording of "Car Bomb," after which the piece immediately resumes.
  • "Time Zones" from the Escape from Noise album freaked out many a late night listener when it was released.
• Nero's Day at Disneyland's "No Money Down Low Monthly Payments" starts just creepily, sounding like a twisted, demented circus for the first minute of the song until it rapidly turns into Aphex Twin on crack. Even scarier are the sounds that vaguely sound like children throughout the song.
  • Just as creepy is “Sprawling Idiot Effigy” with the metal scratching sounds, the oppressive industrial sound and lyrics sampled from Comus’s “Diana.”
• Gary Numan: "Down in the Park" is a chilling ballad about a futuristic park in which Machmen (androids with human skin) and machines rape and kill human beings to entertain spectators who, along with their numerically-named robotic "friends", view the carnage from a nearby club. The narrator seems to be either one of the spectators themselves or just someone who's been Conditioned to Accept Horror, and the detached way he describes the scene is chilling in itself.
• Oneohtrix Point Never: "Demerol". A creepy, warped, distorted loop of Michael Jackson's "Morphine". The repetition of the lyrics, "Demerol... Demerol, oh God, he's taking demerol!", combined with the constant speed-changing and other effects, make the whole thing very disturbing.
• The Orb track "Occidental" is very creepy somehow. Despite having no lyrics, it has a lot of weird ambient noises and samples, along with a Subdued Section at about 9:00 which is somehow more creepy than the part with a beat to it,
• Orbital: The Box (28 minute version), especially the second movement.
• John Oswald, known for creating and naming the genre of Plunderphonics, is not known for being frightening. Most of the time, his work is just weird. However, his song "Dab," a chopped and screwed version of Michael Jackson's "Bad," is surprisingly scary. Michael's vocals are altered to be a lot more droney and eerie, and the ending segues into dark ambient.
• Propergol: He's no stranger to scary music. His album Ground Proximity Warning System, for example, contains sound clips of distress calls from air crafts played over a droning background.
• Prurient: The alias of Dominic Fernow, whose musical output is at once incredibly diverse (these are all the same guy) and almost uniformly disturbing.
• Radioactive Hi 5/放射性Hi5: Their entire album Underwater Megathrust/9​.​0水面下Megathrust tries to recreate the feeling of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, Japan's most powerful earthquake and tsunami. The album starts off relatively calm, but gets far darker and more apocalyptic after the track "NHK-Tsunami Warning," which itself is a very nerve wracking track. It gets really bad in the track "Response Spectrum" which actually has the screams and crying of people facing the tsunami. This album just truly captures the feeling of facing such a disaster all too well.
• Renard Queenston:
  • Their creations under the Lapfox Trax label can oftentimes be creepy without even meaning to be, but their ambient horror album ''Silence'', made in the style of Silent Hill, can be difficult to listen to, given the occasional spots of things getting "close" to you. See how much you can bear to listen to, preferably with headphones and in a dark room.
  • "I will make room, I'll empty out / I'll make sure you can move about..."
  • Renard's character in general. He didn't even look like that originally, which is also pretty scary.
  • The cover arts for the rerelease of Trauma and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder are worth mentioning.
• Roisin Murphy: "Ramalama (Bang Bang)". Do. Not. Listen. To. It. At. Night. And for all of your sakes, do not listen to it at night with the lights off.
• Severed Heads: "Dead Eyes Opened" has been permanently traumatizing for some. The short, spoken narrative is taken from Edgar Lustgarten's recounting of a real murder case, and is also the subject of a blood-chilling tale titled "Accusing Eyes of Vengeance" by Geoffrey Williamson, which can be found in the collection "50 Great Horror Stories".
• Snuff: This Finnish noise artist already is known for his nightmarish soundscapes of music, but nothing tops his work than his untitled (later on retitled as Kristiina when reissued on CD) sophomore album. For starters, the Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition is nightmare fuel, having a condom filled with blood and semen and the cassette booklet containing smears of what looks like menstrual blood, with a booklet containing writing of what seems to be a mad man repeating the phrase "THE WHORE GOT WHAT SHE DESERVED". The music itself is nightmare fuel incarnate, being a concept album about the murder of Lithuanian prostitute Olga Piscuginan in Helsinki. Listen to "Metro" if you wish so...
• Sopor Aeturnus and The Ensemble of Shadows, despite its elaborate name, is made up of a grand total of one person. She has a few disturbing tracks - this one, for instance. Even the ones that are just calm melodies are spine-chillingly haunting.
• Steve Roden, a guy you've probably never heard of, is the almighty creator of the lowercase genre, and while his music is typically calming, quite, or barely there, some of his stuff can be kind of creepy.
  • "Stars of Ice" having creepy tone played over and over then slowly builds on itself adding more creepy noises until a looping indecipherable vocal track comes in.
  • "Arria (hanging garden) second version," has a looping bass tone, creepy electronic sounds, and very quiet and deranged sounding vocal lasting for over 10 minutes.
  • "A Quiet Flexible Background for a Harmonious Life." Creepy electronic noises play as a quiet tone slowly builds up in the background.
• Suicide: "Frankie Teardrop." It's just a primitive lawn-sprinkler drum machine, two obsessive notes on a cheap keyboard, and an increasingly-neurotic guy telling you a nasty story, yet it gets so tensed-up and uncomfortably creepy that the genuinely shocking, bloodcurdling screams almost come as a relief.
  • Some say the Lydia Lunch version is even more terrifying.
• Think Tree: "Doh" tells the heart-rending story of a girl who was forced to watch her whole family be massacred by soldiers, then ends with a frantic woman running in fear, getting calls from a person who wants to kill her.
  My baby sister, Nguyen,
  Fresh from her mother's womb,
  Her face was left a garden
  for bullets' bulbs to bloom
  Right before my eyes.
• Tobacco: "Streaker" (like many other tracks of his) simultaneously combines Mind Screw, Sensory Abuse, and at times even auditory Squick. However, at the end of the song, it begins to fade out like it's over. Then it starts fading back in.
• Vangelis:
  • "Suffocation", a nine minute long Kraftwerk-esque piece from the album See You Later inspired by the Seveso disaster. With the frantic synth brass and megaphone announcements in the first half and eerie low notes in the second half, it perfectly captures the feeling of being witness to a horrific industrial accident. Even the name of the piece is terrifying!
  • The title track from Invisible Connections is a dark and spooky piece, full of ominous, echo-laden, heavily treated percussion sounds. It has an extremely unsettling aura even though it could be classified as being essentially ambient in nature. The rest of the album is pretty much more of the same, mixing acoustics with electronics in order to produce a dreary, almost purely ambient soundscape.
  • Many of the artist's more experimental tracks qualify, including parts of Hypothesis and Beaubourg, due to all the weird and unnerving sounds they contain.
• Velvet Eden: Some of this Visual Kei/Darkwave band instrumental pieces, such as And Schism and Confession, can be pretty terrifying. The videos make it about 10x worse.
• わたしのココ "コンプレックス," A straight-up callback to the early years of Industrial. Its instrumentation is overdriven and minimal, backed with electronics that alternate between looming and in-your face. The lyrics border on hateful, and the Voice of the Legion treatment pretty much strips away all of LaLaVoice's moe aspects.
• Whitehouse: Their music was more or less designed to be difficult to listen to, with strong transgressive themes and atonal, sometimes outright painful instrumentation. Lyrical themes included murder, prostitution, sexual sadism, and extreme misogyny, delivered with remarkable sincerity. Memorable works include "Just Like A Cunt" (A.K.A. "A Cunt Like You"), "Rapeday," and "Baby," a piece of tape music which sounds remarkably like a small child being drowned in a bathtub.
• White Noise: "Black Mass: An Electric Storm In Hell" - the first minute or so is an attempt at Ominous Latin Chanting that induces a bit of narm, but then it explodes into six minutes of chaotic phased drum soloing, strange electronic noises, and tormented screams of agony.
• World's End Girlfriend: "We are the Massacre". Just ignore that video, and listen to the nice pretty classical music, and the gradually fading in screams of horror, crying, and disturbing whispers. It all stays below the volume of the music, making it even creepier somehow.
• :wumpscut:: "Autophagy Day", which involves a man eating his own body; "Bloodbathing Tub", which speaks for itself; "Siamese" which involves one of the Siamese twins killing the other; "The Boo" where the main character's father does untold things to him and he takes revenge years after, much in the same fashion.
• ZZT: Both the song and music video for it entitled "Lower State of Consciousness". One word: Ants. Full Stop.
• A Winter Night's Nightmare by Eduardo C. The entirety of it is creepy, but Sleep Paralysis is the one that will definitely not let you sleep tonight, especially if you know what Sleep Paralysis is.

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