Nightmare Fuel / Black Metal

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Black metal is known to be a terrifying genre for very good reasons. Some aspects can even make Death Metal, its sister genre, look like children's songs. It's that one genre that can easily give you a healthy dose of Sanity Slippage and Paranoia Fuel. Long story short, there's one word that perfectly describes the genre: hatred. And in an incredibly harsh way.

• The Helvete ^note Norwegian for 'hell', comes from the Norse hels víti, translating to “hell’s punishment.” basement in Oslo, located under Neseblod Records shop, is undeniably creepy, as it feels like you're walking through a dungeon, or an abandoned mad scientist's chamber. With low lighting, posters with dark imagery, general unkempt appearance, and the simple fact of its association with the genre's more extreme aspects add a layer of menace.
• "1349", if you know your history^note 1349 was the year the Black Plague spread to Scandinavia. It came on a ship where the entire crew was dead and the hull was filled with rats, has quite the chilling name. The title-track off Hellfire packs enough nightmare fuel for the album (not counting the other songs). The last minute is filled with nothing but the sounds of something burning and a dark Evil Laugh.
• Much of Abruptum's music is extremely dark and unsettling even by black metal standards thanks to its heavy influence from Harsh Noise and power electronics, making every song they record extremely difficult to sit through. De Profundis Mors Vas Cousumet has vocals that sounds like as if Satan himself recorded them.
• Anaal Nathrakh:
  • "Regression to the Mean" is a great example - it has a heavily distorted air-raid siren blaring in the distance, a choir in the background offsetting that, and Atilla Csihar's ominous growls, which are then distorted even more to create a truly unnerving soundscape.
  • I Am The Wrath Of Gods And The Desolation Of The Earth Music is easily one of the scariest things that you'll ever listen to, even if you're a fan of goregrind, death metal, and extreme music in general. It may not the most brutal song of all time, but it's a good contender for most totally fucking necro song to ever exist in the history of music.
• You think that transposing guitar riffs to bass would make it better? Think again! In fact, playing black metal riffs on a bass guitar only creates an even more grim sound, comparable to early Swedish death metal bands. Arphaxat has showed that you can get an even more nightmarish sound by playing all guitar parts on bass.
• The Axis of Perdition: Everything they made, most notably the entirety of Deleted Scenes and Urfe, due to the hellish landscape of sounds and vocals, but of course the surreal story of Urfe going to Locus Eyre, encountering monsters, implied to have sex with Pylon, become mutilated, and eventually becoming a Humanoid Abomination that Ascends to a Higher Plane of Existence, which then corrupts the world
• "Bathory". Much like 1349, the name alone is spooky if you know your history, alluding to Elizabeth Báthory, known for being a pre-modern Serial Killer, allegedly kidnapping, torturing, and murdering dozens of young peasant girls and drained her victims of their blood so that she could bathe in it.
  • Quorthon's vocals on their black metal albums sound like they were ripped straight from Hell itself.
  • The album cover◊ for their debut shows a demonic goat with red eyes in stark yellow lighting.
  • "Reaper", also from their debut. Quorthon's vocals sound outright deranged, which isn't helpful given some of the lyrics:
    I love the sight of having you down and open wide
    The smell of a dead woman's flesh drives me fucking wild
    I have to got you in my grasp now
    there is no need to escape
    I'll penetrate you, every virgin needs a rape
  • "Necromansy" also has similar vocals with an absolutely evil sounding chorus
    Descend from blackened skies
    On soundless magic wings
    To spread the word of Satan!
    And live in eternal sin!
  • Equimanthorn from Under the Sign of the Black Mark is probably the angriest sounding song in the band's entire discography. It is also noteworthy that this song was featured on the soundtrack of Gummo, a film infamous for its bleak and ugly atmosphere.
  • The outro track on all of their early albums. A low Gregorian chant punctuated by a Heartbeat Soundtrack drum.
• Behemoth: Almost all of their musical output and music videos qualify, with lyrics referencing extreme Satanism and occultism by the boatloads. The worst contenders for videos include “Lucifer” and “Blow Your Trumpets Gabriel”.
• Blut aus Nord's infamous album The Work Which Transforms God. It is just so full of dread-inducing, disturbing riffs and ambient sounds. It almost feels like it was not a human who created it, but instead a extraterrestrial lifeform or just a person who were inspired by a musical culture that doesn't exist on Earth and, by God, is it terrifying.
  • In addition, their later releases, with their extremely harsh and noisy textures and copious use of Drone of Dread, are quite unnerving, even by Black Metal standards.
  • The Work Which Transforms God as a whole is split between eerie Drone of Dread and incredibly heavy, dissonant, and inhuman industrial metal. Special mention goes to the song "Inner Metal Cage", which has a part where the guitars and drums drop away leaving only a quiet humming sound, which is then interrupted suddenly by a bizarre, croaking shriek, after which the music resumes with a strange, robotic voice chanting over the riff.
  • MoRT as a whole probably counts. The album is even more dissonant and inhuman than anything else the band has done, to the point of abandoning song structures altogether. And then there's the cover art, which looks like something from Silent Hill.
  • Disharmonium - Undreamable Abysses can be seen as the musical incarnation of an Eldritch Abomination within the genre thanks to its haunting, ethereal sound. Not helping is the fact that it draws a much of inspiration from the Cthulhu Mythos, another work that is already quite disturbing in its own right.
  • Disharmonium - Nahab, the follow up to Undreamable Abysses, takes it's dark eldritch atmosphere and ramps it up to 11 while retaining its strong guitar driven core, creating something that can be best described as the soundtrack of the Outer Gods themselves.
• Some consider many of Burzum's black metal melodies (especially Filosofem) to be this with their dark droning and overall distorted character. He himself as a literal convicted murderer and arsonist can qualify for many people. On the other hand, some of his ambient material can almost qualify as Sweet Dreams Fuel ("Tomhet" is a good example), and although he is a bigoted murderer, he comes off as such a bumbling Cloudcuckoolander most of the time that the intimidation factor at least is wholly diffused.
  • As narmy as "War" is, the lyrics are indeed incredibly dark and do fit the harrowing riffs.
• Carach Angren: As over the top and cheesy the music is, it does not dissuade how horrifying the stories the band tells are:
  • Lammendam, focusing on the haunting of the Woman in White in the titular location of Lammendam. It is not a happy story and to the music doesn't help.
  • Where the Corpses Sink Forever arguably paints this, with multiple stories of war being shown to a soldier by seven demons (such as the suicide of a violinist over the horrors of war, a child killing his father and his spirit causing the same events to occur, a cannibal soldier, ect..) and forced to relieve them for all eternity.
• Still believe Christian black metal is tamer and Lighter and Softer? Well, Christageddon's self titled song proved otherwise.
• Cobalt: This will come with the territory of them being a Black Metal band for some people. McSorley's experiences in combat may also lend their music an authenticity some other metal acts may lack, which may make the albums he appeared on more frightening for some listeners. Even the non-metal pieces can be very unsettling, particularly the full-length version of "Ritual Use of Fire", which seems to have been specifically composed to be as unnerving as possible. The Scare Chord where McSorley shouts "You motherfucker!" stands out as a particularly obvious example of this, but the whole piece just sounds slightly wrong.
  • The Hidden Track on Gin could also count. It's a field recording of a prison chain gang singing the traditional song "Berta, Berta", and the whole time you can hear various background noises like the sound of rocks being broken apart with pickaxes, a guard shouting orders, and an Angry Guard Dog barking. Nothing really happens, but the atmosphere created is surprisingly creepy.
  • Additionally, "Ritual Use of Fire", but particularly the second part included on Eater of Birds, which feature some bizarrely distorted and possibly backmasked voices speaking, with added Paranoia Fuel.
• Cormorant: Aside from some of their more grotesque and horrific lyrics, the music itself sometimes invoke (or complement) this. Particularly the ends of "Two Brothers" with von Nagel's screaming and the heavily layered and distorted guitars, choral singing and string accompaniment in the last few minutes of the song "Hanging Gardens" sounding like something straight out of Hell.
• Cradle of Filth:
  • Try having a good night's sleep after listening to "Dinner at Deviant's Palace" or "Venus in Fear". We dare you.
  • Dani Filth's unnaturally shrill screams are just terrifying. He sounds like a female murder victim from a horror movie at times. Other vocal techniques he uses always sounds eerie, too; his deep voice sounds like Satan himself.
  • As a bonus for curious tropers, here's Dinner at Deviant's Palace in reverse. Sweet dreams!
• While most bands fantasize about war and glorify violence they have never witnessed, the war metal band Damaar (Arabic: دمار) hail from Lebanon, where war perpetually looms, adding a layer of Realism-Induced Horror that few other bands can even hope to match. "Preaching for Mass Suicide" stands out particularly for its breakdown, which features the frontman of fellow Lebanese Black Metal band Ayat delivering a terrifying chant that ends with him screaming "DO YOU WISH TO DIE?!" with near-fanatical fervor.
• Dimmu Borgir's "Puritania". A song that starts "we'll do away with your kind" and then a robotic voice saying "exterminate the human race." and finishes with "Earth successfully erased". Most of the song is sung by someone impersonating a demonic robot.
  • Their song, Tormentor of Christian Souls. The lyrics are not overly graphic, but still extremely disturbing. The narrator gloats about how he could torture and rape someone but won't because instead he wants to break them mentally by destroying everything they love.
• Dissection:
  • Jon's suicide. While most people who commit suicide is either because of depression or mental health problems, Jon however committed suicide because he felt he had achieved everything he had done with his life and career. The fact he did it voluntarily is chilling enough.
  • Jon himself, especially in the early days. Among other things, he made a list of potential human sacrifices, one being his own girlfriend. He also supposedly had some involvement in a ritual that involved the mass slaughter of black cats.
• Those photos of Euronymous gave us a really creepy feel, with him mastering his twist on Nothing Is Scarier.
• Gnaw Their Tongues. Everything that it has produced sounds closer to an auditory hellscape of pure madness, dread, and nihilistic despair than music in any conventional sense, even by the standards of black metal. Behold.
  • Hell, most of Mories' projects also count. Aderlating basically takes the ambient elements of GTT and takes them to their horrific conclusion, De Magia Verterum twists black metal it into something that's shouldn't even be recognizable, and Black Mouth of Spite can best be described as Gnaw Their Tongues meets bestial black metal. It should say something that Mories himself decided that he needed to focus on more positive material via Seirom due to how utterly terrifying the rest of his discography is.
• Jute Gyte's micro tuned experimental black metal isn't the most pleasant to listen.
• Hellhammer: "Triumph of Death" has some pretty messed up lyrics at top of the already grim-sounding guitars, as shown below.
  "When...you... / Have...been... / Down...in your grave... / ALIVE!!!"
• Unblack metal project Horde's "Thine Hour Hast Come" has very dark lyrics based on Isaiah 14, in which the king of Babylon tries to set himself above Yahweh. One lyric bluntly describes their punishment of being imprisoned in the depths of Hell as a Fate Worse than Death.
• New York-based trio Imperial Triumphant are no slouch either in terms of sheer spookiness. Their music fuses traditional black metal musicianship with freeform and dissonant jazz elements in the vein of tech-death bands like Cynic and Gorguts, mixed with uncannily pristine art for a genre known for its rawness. The end result is chaotic, horrifyingly leftfield black metal that evokes the nauseating glitz and glam of the rich that get richer as the rest of the world crumbles around them.
• Although King Diamond isn't really a black metal act (usually a mixture of Gothic Metal and Speed Metal), it is Nightmare Fuel enough to be considered as a honorary member of the black metal scene for reasons below
  • Albums about living paintings, corpses made into puppets by a deranged magician and are very aware and alive, ground glass in dinner... His album concepts are pure made of nightmares.
  • Same goes for his corpse paint, which started the trend of terrifying makeup for years to come.
  • Thanks to King's vocal skills, he manages to turn an offering of tea into this in the ending of "Them".
    "I bet you're dying for a cup of tea."
  • The ending of Give Me Your Soul...Please: "I'm moving on to THIS house."
• Leviathan: Basically everything about his music, but especially his screams, which are just inhuman. Then there's the hateful, despairing, and disjointed tone of the music itself. It really isn't surprising when you learn about the dude's Creator Breakdown.
  • Again, his album covers. For example, Tentacles of Whorror shows a demon riding a bizarre creature with a skull for a head in a style that is both warped and uncomfortably detailed.
  • All of Scar Sighted is nightmarish, but the closing track, "Aphonos", might be one of the most apocalyptic, crushing things he's ever recorded. Between the brutalizing riff and Jef's tortured screams, it legitimately sounds like a nightmare. The haunting ambient outro doesn't help matters.
    I wanna see it in your face. I wanna see it in your eye. I wanna see it in your tears.
  • The chaotic atmosphere of the first two albums really add a sense of paranoia and sense of The Nothing After Death in The Tenth Sub-Level and the hateful fury of Tentacles of Whorror. Special points with songs such as "The Idiot Sun" and "Vexed and Vomit Hexed".
    • Even non-metal stuff is unnerving'. The hauntingly depressive tone of the Lurker of Chalice debut and A Silhouette in Splinters'' can give a creepy vibe.
• Mayhem
  • The album cover of The Dawn of the Black Hearts, a bootleg live album by the Norwegian black metal band Mayhem, bears a photograph of vocalist Dead (Per Yngve Ohlin), shortly after his suicide on 8 April 1991. The photograph was taken by guitarist Euronymous (Oystein Aarseth), shortly after he entered the house the band shared and discovered the body. There are still people out there who are deeply traumatized by Dead's suicide picture to this day (mainly his family members and childhood friends)—and with good reason. The cover in question is downright disturbing, unsettling, and definitely Nightmare Fuel. For those who have seen the cover, sweet dreams, and for those who haven't, view it at your own risk.
  • The lyrics of Mayhem's De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas are written by Dead, who committed suicide.
    • While any song that Dead wrote counts as this, a special mention goes to "Life Eternal" a song about finding immortality and fulfillment in death. What separates this from the usual Transylvanian horror fare is that the song was most likely autobiographical; Dead was speculated to have Cotard's Delusion, meaning that he felt that he was already dead and trapped in a false life. sliced open his wrists and blew his brains out with a 12-gauge, leading to above. Knowing that makes the song itself sound like Dead's suicide note.
    • Speaking of Dead, Mayhem fans recorded their own Dead impersonation on De Mysteriis dom Satanas and Life Eternal. Not only do the vocals bear creepily close resemblance to Dead's, but with Attila's vocals still in the background, it created an atmosphere that can only be described as grim in all senses of the word.
    • Dead is viewed as an unstable, deranged, and terrifying performer live when it came to the self-harming and the sheer passion he invoked in his performances. His suicide and learning about how much of a Broken Bird he was just makes it terrifying. All this is the reason why he is pictured above. That's not even getting to his performance on Live at Leipzig, where he screams at the beginning before "Pure Fucking Armageddon".
      "COME ON! LEIPZIG! COME ON! JOIN US!!!!"
    • The overall atmosphere of De mysteriis dom santhas, with Attila's demonic vocals, the eerie foreshadowing of Dead's lyrics, and the fact this album features Euronymous and Varg despite the fact Varg murdered Euronymous and it technically being the last album the band made before it's resurrection by Hellhammer afterward is...unnerving to say the least.
    • Euronymous: The fact that his reaction to finding Pelle dead is to snap a picture and use it as cover art, clearly speaks volumes about the dude's mental state.
    • Although Mayhem isn't a RABM band, Euronymous favoured the repressive regimes such as Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin and his reasoning was how cold and brutal they were, as he once said he'd love to see people he hated suffer in concentration camps, which speaks of his mental state even more. He was also an ardent proponent of sodomy, rape, and murder simply because they were evil acts.
    • The dramatic reenactment of the band's most fucked-up side by the film Lords of Chaos truly drives home the point that black metal is not a joke when it comes to messed-up aspects.
• Mgła: The album cover of Groza: A Nightmare Face screaming in horror. Fitting since the album's name is Polish for "The Terror".
• Myrkur: Most, if not all of Mareridt, not helped by the information about Amalie's Creator Breakdown caused by sleep paralysis and the amount of hatred (and death threats) over the project lead to the album's creation.
• The bootleg cover of Nastrond's ''Todeslaut'' features a band member with blood dripping all over his chest.
• 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
• Uninitiated listeners might find Revenge's music to be completely terrifying, and rightly so, given their nature as a bestial black metal band. Just about every song they have made are closer to frenetic, rabid bursts of crazed shrieking and grinding noise than music in any conventional sense, with the breakdown in the middle of "Wolf Slave Protocol (Choose Your Side)" and the beginning guitar solo in "Death Heritage (Built Upon Sorrow)" being two particularly horrifying examples of their musical brutality. In an interview from when he was in Conqueror, James Read warned fans of melodic music to not waste their money on his band's albums.
• Silencer's "Death, pierce me" and "Sterile Nails And Thunderbowels" are some of the most disturbing black metal tracks ever recorded. Not only by his voice but also because of the gloomy atmosphere from the guitars. To make it worse, most of the YouTube videos add footage from Begotten (an already fucked-up movie) to their tracks.
• Sodom:
  • In The Sign Of The Evil
    • "Outbreak of Evil". To quote one YouTube commentator:
      "the first 35 seconds sounds like you're taking an elevator down to the rotting pits of hell, Dante's Inferno style"
  • The intro to "Burst Command til War" features the sound of a nuclear siren and Tom Angelripper unleashing some of the most inhuman screams in the band's entire discography. The lyrics of nuclear war aren't exactly cheery either.
  • Expurse of Sodomy
    • "My Atonement" begins as a fine melody only shattered by a riff that gets more aggressive over the song. If it wasn't enough, the way Tom Angelripper announces the song in Mortal Way of Live just makes it worse.
  • "Nuclear Winter", backed by Tom Angelripper's horrifying lyrics about nuclear war, thrash riffs and the nuclear explosions along with guitar feedback — It's certainly a horrifying opener to their first venture to thrash.
  • The title track features lyrics detailing a Vietnam War soldier going paranoid, with a chorus that can easily be interpreted for PTSD.
    Persecution Mania, driven me mad
    Persecution Mania, tremendous dreams
    Persecution Mania, getting mentally ill
    Persecution Mania, alarmed about my life
  • "Bombenhagel" has an extremely ominous sounding bass tab and equally dark lyrics about the bombings of cities by the Nazi Luftwaffe, ending with a foreboding guitar rendition of the German national anthem.
• Sortsind's "Skumring" is pure dissonant noise with And I Must Scream moments on top.
• Stalaggh: This vaguely Black Metal-related noise project consists of the sound of insane people straight out of mental wards locked up together in cathedrals, toppling over each other frantically while shrieking endlessly and inadvertently evoking the sound of the complete chaos, confusion and all-consuming sorrow lurking in the most base end of the human psyche, and is pretty much the most unnerving thing you could ever hope to listen to. The "performers" supposedly consented to take part in these recordings, though it's been called into question whether anyone that far gone into mental instability can really consent to being exploited for art in this way; thus, Stalaggh has always been a very controversial act and is often name-checked among Black Metal acts known for their often exaggerated crimes against humanity. (If you're wondering how this counts as Black Metal, there are trem riffs hidden in the cacophony occasionally, but they don't serve as much more than window dressing for obvious reasons) Listen here.
  • It's successor act Gulaggh is no better despite shifting to a more orchestral sound, as the album Vorkuta can attest to. If you thought the sound of screaming mental patients wasn't bad enough, how about the screams of children and rape survivors? Brrr.
• Tempel's Mountain not only paints a dark and grim landscape, but it also creates a tense atmosphere that only gets more nerve-wracking as the song progresses.
• Utarm: Apocryphal Stories can be best described as a descent into complete insanity, and it's not hard to see why. Not only does the music creates a whole soundscape of emotions ranging from calm, almost circus-like music with spoken word to shredding black metal riffs to completely incomprehensible harsh noise with added screeches and demonic sounds as a bonus, it also has this album cover that looks like it was drawn by a child that has seen things beyond our comprehension.
• Things get even freakier when Hentai ^note Definitely NOT something that first comes to your mind about black metal, considering its Anglo-Swedish-Norwegian origins, but surprise surprise, hentai from Japan has managed to come contact with black metal all the way to here in Europe. gets thrown into the mix (yes, you read that right). A black metal band named Vaginal Ass just did it with their album Black Metal Hentai Wanking and most of the songs are graphic depictions of rape, and even the album cover looks creepy given the tortured naked anime girls. And is it terrifying? Yes, it fucking is! So you have Satanic, Pagan, Christian, communist, Jihadist, and neo-Nazi bands trying to one-up each other in terms of darkness and abrasiveness, then hentai have managed to enter the black metal scene and makes the already fucked-up things even more fucked-up. You know a genre is chaotic if you can fit all this in and make it even partially working. Apparently, something like "H-Black Metal" shouldn't exist, but it does.
• Velvet Cacooon: The album Genevieve is predominantly fairly conventional ambient black metal with hints of shoegaze. But the last track, "Bete Noire", is 17 minutes of the most paranoia- and anxiety-inducing ambient electronica you will ever hear.
  • Genevieve had "Bete Noire", however they put it to high grounds with their final album Atropine, specifically focused on something can be described as "Bete Noire" if mixed with drugs and nightmares. "Funeral Noir" can give you an idea.
• Venom's song, "Buried Alive" from their iconic Black Metal album is exactly what it sounds like. The pained breathing of Cronos' in the intro along with the desperation in his voice at during the first verse of the song add another layer of atmosphere to the song. Definitely not for someone who is claustrophobic.
  I tear at the lid, my fingers they bleed
  Is this happening to me, or is it just a dream?
  • The ending to "In Nomine Satanas". It can only be described as Cronos' maddened ranting punctuated with the screams of Hell's tortured souls.
  • The song "Black Metal", the one responsible for all the Nightmare Fuel the genre would adopt later on, has a gnarly, menacing intro sound that not even your worst nightmares can conjure.
• Watain:
  • Erik has a tendency to advocate violence and terrorism in interviews, all the while rarely ever dropping his polite tone.
    • Watch or read any interview of his. The "wtf?" creeps in when you realize he's not kidding about anything he says.
  • The song, "Satan's Hunger", and the following instrumental track, "Withershins" are just so damn eerie and sinister.
  • Then there's this gem from the title track off of Sworn To The Dark:
    The all-defying pendulum
    Of radiant conviction
    So determined in its pace
    Pounding now through flesh and bone
    Like a hammer through a child
  • "Stellarvore" is a menacing, claustrophobic 8-minute song about a terrible force awakening to devour the cosmos and destroy all life as we know it.
    • The preceding instrumental track, "Dead But Dreaming", (its title, an obvious Shout-Out to The Call of Cthulhu) adds new layers to that sense of claustrophobia.
  • The middle of "Holocaust Dawn" is an unsettling cacophony of violins, coupled with some rather cryptic lyrics. Spoken lyrics. May also double as a Tear Jerker.
    Mind not my burden
    Although it is the weight of all the sins
    Their harvester awaits at the end of my road
    Mind not my disfigurements
    Although they are the pains of all flesh
    For I run with the wolves at night
    And quenchless is their hunger
• Witchaven's album covers are very dark and bone-chilling in nature. Witchaven Terrorstorm has a monstrous creature armed with gigantic Kalashnikovs shooting down people and destroying buildings, Unholy Thrash Attack has Satan creating Armageddon with the army of his and their demonic wolves (with the uncensored version being even worse, depicting Satan himself raping a woman screaming for help while she's being beheaded) with the help of his minions and Blood Sacrifice features Satan taking and impaling on a sword a fully developed baby taken right before birth right from the mother's womb.
• Woods of Infinity: This underground Swedish band stood out in an already consciously transgressive genre by their pro-pedophilia themes. And it wasn't done in a silly or edgy way either. Songs like "A Love Story" doesn't feature any graphic sex, but is still repulsive enough to disturb even hardened metalheads. Then there's songs like "Genevere" where the murder of children is described in an almost sensual way, which makes it obvious that the writer was getting off on it. Lastly they also have some album covers featuring naked children. Since these obviously could be interpreted as child pornography, be very careful when googling this band. According to interviews with the band, the pedophilia themes are meant to be taken as a metaphor for social alienation, and a wish to find pure innocence and corrupt it. They noted that they noted that they've drawn condemnation and indignation from people who usually preach about the destruction of the universe and humanity in their lyrics. All in all, Woods of Infinity was one of the most genuinely disturbing bands in a genre where people were competing for that title.
• Xasthur: This ambient black metal project created what can only be described as the din-hordes of Mordor marching through all nine layers of Hell.
• Zeal & Ardor: At their darkest, they can certainly qualify, between Manuel's insane Careful with That Axe, the oppressive atmosphere their music creates, and the at times incredibly dark lyrics. The title track of Stranger Fruit is a good example of this.