Nightmare Fuel / Metal

There's a reason why Heavy Metal is Darker and Edgier than Hard Rock. It explores themes that are seldom used in rock. And not all themes are light, many are actually incredibly dark and grim.

Black Metal, Death Metal, and Doom Metal have their own pages, since they're some of the darkest and most nightmarish subgenres.

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In general:

• If a band is from the Death Metal, Avant-Garde Metal, Industrial Metal, Black Metal, Thrash Metal, Grindcore, Metalcore or Doom Metal genres (or one of their many derivatives), they'll almost certainly have music that qualifies as this trope. There's a reason most of these bands have Names to Run Away from Really Fast.

By artist:

• 10 Years: The entire album Feeding the Wolves. However, "Now is the Time" stands out due to these two parts in particular
  The bullet in the blood,
  Came from those you love,
  The bullet in the blood
  Came from those you trust
• Anacrusis: Most of the band's discography qualifies as this; a sample is here. Perfect music to walk through an abandoned asylum in the dark, no lights, because that's what real men do.
• Anjo Gabriel: The two-part song "Lucifer Rising" (both part 1 and part 2). The main thing that makes the song so scary is its unpredictability and general attempts at making you uncomfortable. You would normally start hearing something that feels pretty generic until it starts distorting itself. Only to switch back to a generic track that did not match the previous track at all. Add to it some very unfitting background sounds (such as pitches, water etc.) and you get something that will make you unsettling during the entire ride, as they seem to repeat this process the entire time.
• Avenged Sevenfold:
  • "Bat Country". The lyrics are based on the bad acid trips experienced by Raoul in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
  • "Little Piece of Heaven". A brief summary: A man loves his girlfriend, so he proposes to her. She rejects him. In a rage, he murders her, preserves her body, cannibalizes parts, and has his way with what is left. She goes back from Hell, and murders him for revenge. They meet up in the afterlife, and they realize the error of their ways, and get married, at which point they go on a killing spree.
• Chimaira:
  • The song "Abeo" sounds pretty unsettling for a Nu Metal band (as they were at the time).
• Cormorant:
  • Most of their lyrics cross the line between this and Tear Jerker, which is made even worse that most of them are about real events.
  • Arthur von Nagel's unsettling shrieking at the end of "Two Brothers".
  • "Hanging Gardens" gives a very bleak and frightening lyrical theme about not being accepted into Heaven. If that wasn't enough, the song ends on a Last Note Nightmare with the song getting heavier, a One-Woman Wail, and string arrangements.
• Cradle of Thorns: "Behave", because of the beautifully creepy way Ty's screams mingle with Tamera's lovely voice. Not to mention the song is about a sophisticated, church-going, college graduated serial killer that murders just to see his work on the news.
• Crimson Glory play rather fanciful progressive metal, but the occasional song (Especially from the first album) manage to sneak through as nightmare fuel. You have Dragon Lady with its loud Evil Laugh in the beginning, Azrael with lyrics like "If you hold the evil, I'll RIP YOU ALL APART" and the somber Lost Reflection which is about a man locked in an attic for eternity having no company but his own reflection in a dusty mirror.
  You're lyin'
  Hey!
  Ha, ha, ha, ha!
  Who's there? No one there
  You're not me!
• Deadsoul Tribe: "Some Things You Can't Return"; while the music is Darkerand Edgier than its lyrics, its lyrics imply that every time someone visits your house, they leave a shadow-image of themselves behind — and that these shadows are malignant.
• Diamond Head: Their most well-known song, "Am I Evil?" The opening riff, by itself is already a sign of things to come: it's as evil as the title indicates. And then the lyrics come: it's about a guy who goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge after witnessing his mother getting burned at the stake.
  On with the action now, I'll strip your pride
  I'll spread your blood around, I'll see you ride
  Your face is scarred with steel, wounds deep and neat
  Like a double dozen before you, smells so sweet
  • And the Metallica cover might be even scarier, if only thanks to the ominous prelude they added to the aforementioned riff.
• Disturbed:
  • "Inside the Fire". Mostly if you know what the lyrics are about and have experienced the pain.
  • The breakdown of "Down With the Sickness," depending on who you ask.
  • "Hell" sounds like a revenge-rock anthem, until the second bridge:
    Save me, from wreaking my vengeance upon you!
    (Translation: Stop me from killing you; I can't control myself!)
• Evergrey: The album In Search of Truth. It tells the story of a man who is (or thinks he is) constantly being abducted by aliens every night. He is tortured, physically and psychologically, often stripped bare and sexually abused. He's further isolated as even those closest to him don't believe his claims about what's happening to him. In the end, it turns out that he was the subject of some sort of an experiment and his tormentors were human all along.
• Faith No More:
  • They and Mike Patton are known for covering some unconventional topics for such a big-name band, but the track "Jizzlobber" from Angel Dust has got to be one of the most horrifying songs ever, for its themes as much as its music. Patton has stated it's about his fears of going to prison (and therefore, a very adult-orientated nightmare fuel), and the song may even be about Prison Rape.
  • Anyone willing to get themselves scared shitless should listen to Mike Patton's Adult Themes for Voice album late at night with the lights off; it features 40 minutes of him making some of the most fucked-up noises you will ever hear. If you make it all the way through you will be a different person.
  • How about "Edge of the World"? Sounds innocuous, but then you consider it's backstory (it's sung from a pedophile's POV, after all).
• Fantômas:
  • Delirium Cordia is a horror concept album. The entire album consists of one track over an hour long entitled "Surgical Specimens From the Museum of Skin". The track contains a myriad of unsettling sounds, from surgical instruments to melancholic, monotonous piano. Further driving the point home: the interior artwork of the album consists of photograph excerpts from The Sacred Heart, a book of surgical photography.
  • Director's Cut is an pretty unsettling album too. Some of the songs can be considered pure paranoia fuel, with the way the theme changes from heavy to light and back to heavy again constantly.
• Forever Slave: Alice's Inferno is about a teenaged girl confined to a mental hospital for killing her parents. What follows is basically a journey through her tortured subconscious, based on Dante's Inferno and Alice in Wonderland. The whole thing is such a perverted blend of beauty, innocence, arcane rituals, drugs, and diabolical evil revealed through death growl vocals, Gregorian chants, and a soaring soprano. "In the Forest" and "Aquelarre" are great examples.
• Gaza: "I Don't Care Where I Go When I Die". Sure, it may sound fairly normal at first for metal, but that quickly fades away to a bombardment of noise with terrifying tortured screams. Have fun sleeping at night.
• Hell: The entirety of their album Human Remains is chock full of this, where you have songs with subject matters ranging from burning in Hell^note On Earth As It Is In Hell, the Black Plague^note Plague And Fyre, insanity^note The Oppressors, dark Shakespeare^note Macbeth and imprisonment^note No Matyrs Cage. The intros to different songs build a chilling atmosphere, and the evilest sounding music plays while the vocalist spews out demented ravings like a psychotic madman. This album was actually made in the 1980's, and didn't get released until 2011. If it's so scary now, imagine how horrifying it would've been (especially to non-metalheads) at a time where metal was already controversial for sounding so evil.
• Helloween: The intros for both The Dark Ride album and its corresponding title track. Horrifying!
• Horse The Band: Their lyrics are really terrifying. Especially with the creepy angry face howling at a little pink bunny and beating it around the ears with a massive jack-hammer, and the creepy lyrics:
  "Roaring with whispers, to the tiny bunnies: SQUISH those fucking bunnies!(x2) Twitching bleeding screaming, bring the hammer down! Screaming bunnies, bleeding bloody bunnies, smeared across the ground"
• Iced Earth: Dante's Inferno, the song. A sixteen minute-long trip through the nine circles of Hell, experiencing all the tortures it had. This time, however, you're Dante.
• James LaBrie: His solo album Elements of Persuasion has one such song: "Drained". It's about a man stalking himself in his home, often returning to the room he just left, and being completely aware of (and somewhat welcoming toward) the fact that he's losing his mind.
• Linkin Park: Some of the lyrics to "Figure.09" are strangely unsettling.
  You've become a part of me
  You'll always be right here
  You've become a part of me
  You'll always be my fear
  I can't separate
  Myself from what I've done
  Giving up a part of me
  I've let myself become you
• Living Colour: They were always kind of a happy go lucky band during the eighties, but took on a much darker tone on 1993's Stain, which included the nightmarish "Hemp", a spoken word bit about strangling someone with a hemp rope. The same album also contains the song "Go Away" which has some of the most depressing and existentially horrifying lyrics imaginable.
  I don't want anybody to touch me, i think that everybody has AIDS. What's the point in caring for you? You're gonna die anyway.
• Macabre: Every song they do is inspired by and about the serial killers of the world, and often goes into lurid detail about their crimes. It would be Nightmare Retardant if it wasn't for the fact that it all actually happened.
• Malice Mizer:
  • "N.p.s. N.g.s. (No pains no gains)." Any song containing the line "so I ate him" said by a high-pitched female voice is just begging to be listed here. The high voice is Kami, the drummer, talking into a voice distorter. Given that Malice Mizer suffered from Kami Existence Failure not too long after the song was released, that doesn't really help.
  • From the early days: "Baroque" (It's just photos; there's not a music video). If you didn't know what the song meant, you wouldn't get too freaked out right away. Yes, the singer's tone seems rather desperate, but it's not until you realize that he's singing to the corpse of the woman he has just strangled to death that things get truly unnerving.
• Ministry's album The Land of Rape And Honey might not be very creepy or disturbing in itself musically, but try to figure out what the abstract album art really do resemble in the middle of the night. If you see it, it cannot be unseen.^note If you're that curious, it is a digitally processed image depicting the burned corpse of a Holocaust victim.
  • Ministry in general have a lot of creepy music and imagery. The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste has lovely pieces like "Cannibal Song" and "Dream Song;" Psalm 69 has "Grace;" Filth Pig has creepy, surreal samples in most of its songs, most notably "Lava," "Crumbs," and the opening of the impossibly gloomy and hopeless "Game Show" sounding like the inside of a drug-addicted mind, glaring at vapid and meaningless images passing on a TV screen with glazed, jaundiced eyes.
  • Dark Side of the Spoon may be Ministry's darkest (and weirdest) album, featuring jazz-like compositions ranging from manic to slow, grinding noise metal with traces of synth throughout. The track "Nursing Home" is particularly creepy in its bareness, and includes an eerie whistling at about 5:15 in that you may not catch on your first listen... or second... or third...
  • Looking at Ministry in light of frontman Al Jourgensen's drug use and heroin addiction, every Ministry album from Twitch to Animositasomina has much darker implications.
• Mortification: "Livin' Like a Zombie", possibly because it was in BME Pain Olympics.
• Motörhead: The title track from the 1992 album March Ör Die. It features, among other things, a creepy organ that brings Funeral Doom to mind, extra gritty vocals from Lemmy and ultra depressing lyrics describing how the world will be destroyed through militarism, predatory capitalism and social unrest, like "Sword and shield and jackboot heel, we love to kill, we love to kill, we love to taste of our own blood, squirm in our own gore" and "For earth to heal then we must die, no one deserves it more".
• Pageninetynine: Played mostly run-off-the-mill punk/grindcore in their early years but their fascination with the macabre combined with musical experimentation and the effect of living in The Deep South led to some music that had no screaming or thrashing in it but made up for it in sheer creepiness. It's like if Faulkner played punk rock.
• Peccatum: "Desolate Ever After" and "Stillness", both from the same album. The former is better by the fact that its lyrics were meant to be a Tear Jerker, while the latter is pure nightmare fuel incarnate. Here's a passage:
  Sickening, sickening place
  Framed snapshots of buzzing stillness
  Noisy polaroid faces
  With tick, tack, clock, with tick, tack, clock voices
• Saltatio Mortis: This German Folk Metal band gives us "Koma", which is either this or a Tear Jerker. The song is from the perspective of a person who lies in a coma, describing his sufferings, growing insanity and longing for salvation. Unless you understand the lyrics, it is probably not that bad until the end.
• Sentenced: "Excuse Me While I Kill Myself." The name is bad enough, but the fact that the song is so upbeat and catchy when it's about shooting yourself in the head is just evil.
• "Holy Roller", an attempt by Spiritbox to depart from their previous merging of melody and aggression and write something purely heavy. Lyrically, it's performed from the perspective of a religious fanatic; sonically, the calmest it gets are lead vocalist Courtney LaPlante's ominous, robotic whispers during the intro and pre-chorus, which only act as mild breaks from a massive guitar part and LaPlante absolutely screaming her lungs out. The imagery of the music video takes this up to 11, as well.
  Curse the holy down
  And when I die you won't pray for me
• Star of Ash: "Drag Them Down" (from the album The Thread) is a very peaceful instrumental song if you disregard the half-heard, oppressive and irregular drum beat in the background, almost like a heart slowing down, and the sound of a car trunk slamming down, followed by the barely-audible jangle of keys. Coupled with the rest of the album, you just know what's in that trunk. It far from the only Star of Ash song to have potential Nightmare Fuel.
• 3 Inches of Blood: The song "Premonition of Pain." "THE TYRANT IS HERE, TO TAKE UP YOUR THRONE, TO TAKE OFF YOUR HEAD, BEFORE TAKING YOUR CROWN!!! THE MYSTIC HE LAUGHS, YOU SHOULD HAVE LISTENED TO ME, BUT NOW YOU BEG FOR YOUR LIFE ON YOUR KNEES!!!" Then it ends with "The price... paid in blood... the price... paid in blood... just pray that the blood is not yours."
• Devin Townsend: The majority of the album Ocean Machine/Biomech is angsty and a bit depressing at its worst. The last song is a peaceful one, something you'd listen to while watching a sunset while out on a boat. And then when the song has ended and you're at the peak of peace and relaxation...
  EYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA EEEEEEEEEEEEEE
  AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!
• Trivium: The songs "Unrepentant" and "Entrance Of The Conflagration" are based on absurdly disturbing events in which parents murdered their own children. Read up on them and watch your hands get sweaty for the rest of the day.
• Twisted Sister: After you go through two cheerful songs on Stay Hungry, the title track and We're Not Gonna Take It, The mood suddenly shifts to a bleak and desolate song called Burn In Hell. Take a guess what it's about...
• Type O Negative: For those interested in cocaine, alcohol, and tobacco, they made "Sinus", "Liver", and "Lung", respectively. This is especially disturbing as they were made to be as accurate as possible. The lead singer couldn't stand listening to "Sinus" in particular due to his cocaine habit- it was like foreshadowing as the habit eventually killed him.
• Vektor: They usually sing about science fiction-themed stuff, but one song on their debut is a notable exception: Hunger For Violence, a gristly tale of a wasteland taken over by a mad scientist who implants mind-control chips in the brains of wasteland survivors to conquer what's left. The lyrics are very ominous, and there's this segment:
  FIGHT!
  FIGHT!
  FIGHT!
  FIGHT!
  DIE!
• Voices. This band made up of members of Akercocke make some of the most suffocating and nightmarish progressive metal mixed with black metal, death metal and postpunk.
• Warbringer: "Living Weapon." At one point in the song (Hiding right behind you/But you won't see me there) the vocals are modified so that, if you are wearing headphones, the voice literally sounds like it's coming from ''right behind you.''
• Wewelsburg: "Fatal Futurism Factory". It begins with some mysterious, atmospheric noises, a dog barks, then a man rants under his breath about there being no escape. It is very unclear what he's trying to escape from. A demonic voice tells him, "Where are you going? It's too late for you. We can see you. You're going to die." And then, a Creepy Child voice laments, "Everything is dark here! Why did you let me die?"
• Zero Hour:
  • A Fragile Mind deals with a man who, after having brain surgery that drives him insane since the anesthetic somehow doesn't take, gains the ability to jump into people's bodies, erasing their personalities in the process. He promptly uses it on the woman he loves.
  • The Towers of Avarice tells the story of a future where gigantic, mechanical towers are all that's left, humans are worked to death in them and their corpses are used to feed the towers; a rebel named Subterrenean is free, and he hatches a plan to destroy the towers. After failing and finding himself inside the towers, Subterrenean finds out that the towers are actually run by men, who are slowly drawing the free people into the towers to be enslaved by the machinery forever.

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