The Darkest Songs Of All Time, According To Music Experts

Welcome to an uplifting journey through the darkest songs of all time, because who doesn't love a cheerful tune? We have created a playlist that'll make you want to throw a party in a cemetery. With some surprising entries from Tom Jones to The Beatles, let's cheers to the gloom.

Starting us off is a song that you may not know until you hear it, and sadly, you really only hear it on one occasion. Chopin's funeral march has been used to accompany coffins down the aisle for years, and music critics have noted that the depth of the notes adds to it's haunting nature as they echo around the walls of a church.

Pretty much any of the songs of this album, given the same name, are incredibly dark. The Swedish metal group take the heaviness of metal to a new level with their experimental sound. A music critic for Ultimate Guitar noted, " Telling a gloomy story of a time infected by disease and perversions, this is indeed one dark composition."

Gloomy and depressive, Giles Corey is up next. Apparently, this song was written while he was extremely depressed and contemplating suicide. The screams on the title track are him suffocating in a plastic bag with pin pricks in it to limit oxygen to the brain, and a cloth wrapped round it to keep him in the darkness. Talk about method...

This indie pop song might make you tap your foot, but if you read the lyrics, you'll want to think again. "All the other kids with the pumped up kicks / You better run, better run / Outrun my gun." Yeah, it's about a kid who finds his dad's gun and commits a shooting at school. Not so upbeat now...

La Dispute are an angsty teen's dream band. With a mix of heavy metal and spoken word poetry, this band writes some pretty dark stuff - but this song takes the very depressing cake. The lyrics tell the story of a young man who gets caught up in gang violence and ends up shooting a child accidentally. He then flees to a hotel to commit suicide.

Eilish and her producer brother Finneas are music geniuses, and with this song, Eilish's music really rose to fame. However, she has described how this song is actually about something really terrible. "Sleep paralysis, night terrors. It's like the whole night is terrifying and then I wake up." The song is actually written from the point of view of a sleep paralysis demon.

I Don't Like Mondays walked so that Pumped Up Kicks could run. Yup, it's another song about a school shooting. You might think that you can relate to the chorus of this song on your Monday morning commute, but some of the lyrics in the verses are incredibly dark. "And school's out early and soon we'll be learning / And the lesson today is how to die."

The problem with this one is that you probably only know the words to the chorus, which is pretty much just singing the name 'Delilah' over and over again. But the verse goes a little like, "She stood there laughing / I felt the knife in my hand and she laughed no more." Yeah, it's actually about a guy who murders a woman who cheats on him...

If you had a quarter for every 'Delilah' song that had an oddly dark meaning, you'd have two - which isn't a lot, but it's strange that it happened more than once. This may seem like an ode to long distance, but music experts have analyzed this song and some allude to the fact that it's actually about an obsessive stalker.

The whole premise of this song will send a shiver down your spine. It's written as a series of letters from an obsessive fan to Eminem, (a stalker-fan, eg Stan.) When Eminem doesn't reply, Stan locks his pregnant girlfriend in the trunk of his car and drives off a bridge. Eminem does get the letters, but only once the story has already made the news.

Another one from Eminem, written as a lament to his mother. The song documents the fact that his mother had Munchausen syndrome by proxy - wherein parents take their children to the doctors all the time, even though they aren't sick, which is a form of child abuse. Eminem calls out his mom, "I was made to believe I was sick when I wasn't."

This song is full of biblical imagery, and has Hell in the title - so it's no surprise that it's got a darker meaning, but not in the way that you think. Genius analyzed the lyrics, and later confirmed with Eilish that it's actually a kind of warning to humanity about climate change - "Poisoning themselves now /

Begging for our help, wow!"

Good thing Barbie was recently revolutionized by Greta Gerwig and the gang, because this song is pretty problematic. The song basically talks about how men want women to behave like dolls so that they can do whatever they want to them, "Make me walk, make me talk, do whatever you please

I can act like a star, I can beg on my knees." Gross.

If you've watched a creepy online video or a horror movie made in the past decade, chances are that you've heard this creepy song. Not only is it scary to listen to, but Tiny Tim was a creepy dude who actually died on stage whilst performing the song. Talk about something being cursed!

If you've seen American Horror Story: Hotel - the scene where Lady Gaga murders a group of people to this song is probably burned in your mind. The song is pretty scary to listen to anyway, and with lyrics like, "I want to tear you apart," it seems to blur the lines between love and murder - troubling for sure.

On the surface, this song seems like a great throwback club hit, but actually, the meaning of the song is dark and poignant at the same time. Released as a protest to the Vietnam War, it splices statistics with electronic beats. The song is iconic for it's line, "In World War II the average age of the combat soldier was twenty-six / In Vietnam he was nineteen."

A real crowd favorite that is actually pretty dark. The song presents a Vietnam veteran as a tragic figure alienated upon his return from the war. Two scholars writing in the journal American Quarterly explored the song as a lament for embattled American working-class identity. "I been seeing a young guy with shoulder-length hair sittin' in a wheelchair by the pool for several days."

This song is about Charles Starkweather, who was 19 when he went on a murder spree in 1958. Along with his 14-year-old girlfriend Caril Fugate, he killed 11 people in Nebraska and ignited fears that rebellious movies and rock music were creating a new breed of offenders. Springsteen told NME in 1996 that he considered "Starkweather" as the title.

According to Thom Yorke, “Creep” tells the tale of an inebriated man who tries to get the attention of a woman to whom he is attracted by following her around. In the end, he lacks the self-confidence to face her. This song is the anthem of every outcast, and many people relate with lyrics like, "I want a perfect body, I want a perfect soul."

Metallica's One single cemented their status as one of the greatest metal bands in the world. It's common knowledge that One was inspired by the 1939 book Johnny Got His Gun, about a WWI soldier who wakes up to discover that he has become a prisoner in his own body after losing his arms, legs and entire face to an artillery shell.

Rolling Stone describes the album that this song is featured on, Songs Of Love And Hate, as Cohen's most depraved piece of work, and this song tops it all off. It is written from the point of view of a hunchback living at the bottom of a mountain, with creepy lyrics like, “It is your turn, beloved / It is your flesh that I wear.”

Sufjan Stevens' music is beautiful, folksy, and sometimes has a really weird premise - and this song is no exception. As the title suggests, it tells the tale of the literal killer clown who terrorized Illinois in the 70s, the album this song comes off is actually called Illinois, too. Stevens even noted feeling empathetic towards the serial killer, "I felt insurmountable empathy not with his behavior but with his nature."

Clocking in at a crazy 12 minutes, this song starts with the narrator saying goodbye to his only friend, The End, and it only gets darker from there. Morrison ends the song with a narrative retelling of the story of Oedipus - and if you know anything about the classics, you'll know that that guy did some pretty messed up stuff to his parents...

A totally normal name for a song, right? Rolling Stone described live versions of this song as, "a lysergically summoned haunted house, offering up door after door for you to open against your better judgment." The song doesn't so much have a story, as it does leave you with a feeling that something terrible has happened, and we have to figure out what it was.

With lyrics like, "The sheets are red and moist where I'm lying / God in Heaven, teach me how to die," you know it's going to be dark one. This eight minute song tells an account of a man who dies after surviving a plane crash and being treated by an EMT. This song topped the chart but was banned by a lot of radio stations.

Rolling Stone notes that any one of Alice Cooper's songs could be shockingly dark, but this one, an ode to necrophilia, is the cherry on top. Cooper talked to Rolling Stone about how you can't shock audiences anymore in an interview, saying, "If I cut my arm off and ate it, OK, that would be shocking. But you can only do it twice."

This song is so haunting in it's metaphors that so beautifully describe something so tragic. This song may be dark, but it's an important snapshot into one of the more traumatic parts of US history. Holiday described a lynching in this song, singing, "Southern trees bear strange fruit / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root / Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze."

Rolling Stone described Nick Cave by saying, "few artists have dedicated themselves to the grim and macabre like the Australian Bad Seeds leader." The whole of the album, Murder Ballads, is a story that claims the lives of several of it's characters, and in this one, a man's wife (Joy) is found, "stabbed repeatedly and stuffed into a sleeping bag." It's like a CSI musical!

Who doesn't love this song? "Every breath you take, every move you make, every single day..." I'll be watching you? Actually, on second thought, is this song about stalking someone? Never mind being called The Police, maybe it's actually time for somebody to call the cops on Sting...

This is a brilliant one-hit-wonder from the 70s that you definitely turn up when it comes on the radio, until you find out that it's actually super dark. Seriously, look: "Never gonna stop, give it up, such a dirty mind / I always get it up for the touch of the younger kind." How old is Sharona...?

British indie rock group The 1975 have taken the world by storm in recent years, and lead singer Matt Healy is not afraid of using the shock-factor to garner fame. This song, is about a young couple who are in such a toxic relationship that they go on a killing spree, Bonnie and Clyde style. With lyrics like, "Now everybody's dead," it gets pretty dark...

The Beatles have songs about everything from love, to loss, to yellow submarines...to murder? There's being a jealous boyfriend, and then there's saying, "You better run for your life if you can, little girl. Hide your head in the sand, little girl." Lennon and McCartney are on the writing for this one, if you're wondering.

Mick Jagger once described “Brown Sugar” as being a “mish-mash” of “nasty subjects in one go.” He might see it as an ambiguous mixed bag, but when you review the lyrics, it’s pretty clearly about assault and slavery. The Rolling Stones might have been heroes in their time, but looking back, this one leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

Carole King wrote this song after hearing from a babysitter about an abusive relationship where her boyfriend hit her nearly every day. The darkest lyrics are, "He hit me / And I knew he loved me." The subject matter of the song made it a commercial failure. It was disliked by the public, and radio stations denied the song airplay.

Let's be fair, it's in German - so no wonder you didn't get the dark meaning the first time. As it turned out, 99 Red Balloons, as it's now called, is a dark protest song. In the lyrics, a boy and girl innocently release a batch of balloons into the air; confused by these flying objects, international governments panic, triggering a nuclear holocaust...

With people constantly parodying the lyrics in exchange for online fame (including the band), it’s easy to forget that the track is pretty graphic with lyrics such as “Would it be wrong? Would it be right? / If I took my life tonight.” As the song goes on, it’s a steady spiral into a creepy madness and dark thoughts.

This is a song about teenagers, loved by teenagers, for its angsty pop-punk reputation. “It’s a topic that’s so important to our culture,” Gerard Way said in an interview with NME. “It’s about a really big problem in America where kids are killing kids.” True that, Gerard.

Hail The Sun’s Disappearing Syndrome takes inspiration from the disappearance of Elisa Lam. She was last seen in a hotel security video where she was exiting and re-entering an elevator, talking to herself. The elevator also seemed to be malfunctioning. She was later found in one of the building’s water tanks. “[It’s a] chilling and eerie case,” guitarist Aric Garcia says.

The Cranberries raw but brilliant hit aims to draw attention to travesties of The Troubles in Northern Ireland. Zombie was written after the IRA detonated two bombs in the English town of Warrington on a Saturday afternoon in March 1993. The bombs were hidden in litter bins near a shopping centre and killed two children: three-year-old Jonathan Ball and Tim Parry, 12. 54 people were injured.

Yeah, it is that old Christmas song - with a not so festive backstory. Songwriters Noël Regney and Gloria Shayne Baker were inspired by the Cuban Missile Crisis to pen this appeal for peace. At the time of writing, they were apparently so emotional about the conflict that they couldn’t perform the song themselves start to finish without breaking down.