Darker and Edgier/Music

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Green Day's Insomniac is lyrically darker than Dookie (or, for that matter, 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours and Kerplunk!), and the music has sometimes been perceived as heavier and more abrasive.
  • Done famously and successfully by Pantera in the late 80's. After spending most of The Eighties as an unknown glam metal band, Pantera became recognized for the darker and edgier Cowboys from Hell after hiring Phil Anselmo to replace Terry Glaze and trashing their glammy image in favor of a more "street wise" one. They would attempt to make each subsequent album even more darker and edgier throughout The Nineties.
  • Judas Priest went here by releasing Painkiller, an album full of hard-hitting power and speed metal, with none of the happy-go-lucky synthesizers and lyrics of their previous album Turbo (they did keep the synths, but only to evoke dark atmospheres). Subsequent albums (the Ripper Owens period especially) continued the trend, although most fans dismiss these albums (which seems to happen with more Ripper-sung albums; see Iced Earth's albums The Glorious Burden and, less often, Framing Armageddon.)
  • Sonata Arctica's music has been progressing from the standard cheesy excesses endemic to power metal to more grim lyrics and darker sounds. It seems to be working, though one wonders how far they can stretch it...
    • Their music has always been a bit dark thematically, though, even if they did used to sound like an explosion in a Skittles factory.
  • The cover of Imagine by A Perfect Circle is darker, edgier, and downright depressing. With a simple shift to a minor chord, the song switches from hopeful and uplifting to cynical and depressing. "Imagine all the people sharing all the world! ...yeah, like that'll ever happen..." The change has been likened to going from a friendly, smiling hippie offering you peace and love and flowers, to a grim suicide bomber outlining his manifesto to a huddled, frightened crowd.
  • Type O Negative make a Running Gag of doing this to hippie anthems: Seals & Croft's "Summer Breeze", Neil Young's "Cinnamon Girl", several Beatles songs...
  • Any cover by Marilyn Manson. Impressive when he picks already-dark or creepy songs.
    • Manson satirized the trope itself in the song "This is the New Shit".
  • Dope's cover of Dead Or Alive's "You Spin Me Round (Like A Record)".
    • As well as Ten Masked Men's cover of the same song, and others.
  • Progressive metal band Dream Theater has done a little in this direction lyrically and vocally, the only curse words in the band's 16+ year history were in its past three albums (still very few overall), but this change has been mostly for the better, as their softer songs don't really portray the technical brilliance of the instrumentalists, and vocals such as "The smile of dawn/Arrived early May/She carried a gift from her home/The night shed a tear/To tell her of fear and of sorrow and pain, she'll never outgrow" in a track from their 1992 album Images And Words stand in stark contrast to the guitar riffs and drumming, which wouldn't be out of place in a Metallica song. Your Mileage May Vary.
    • Arguably, they were already doing this on Awake. See "The Mirror" and "Voices", as well as "Scarred".
  • Neil Young's Rust Never Sleeps album is an example, as Young responded to the death of Elvis, the rise of Punk Rock, and his own fears of becoming culturally irrelevant by turning his soft-ish folk rock into nihilist hard rock with heavy distorted guitars, in a postmodern stage show with giant amps, roadies dressed like Jawas, and decaying film footage from Woodstock. It worked - the album received widespread popular and critical acclaim, and has been cited as one of the earliest examples of what would become Grunge music.
  • Much, though not all, of John Lennon's songwriting took this direction in the late sixties due to a combination of drug use (especially heroin), the influence of Yoko Ono, and a growing disillusionment with his role as a Beatle. This culminated in his 1970 solo album Plastic Ono Band in which, under the influence of primal scream therapy, he expressed his childhood traumas and adult pain starkly and directly in a way that he couldn't do with the Beatles. While Lennon continued to write hard-edged songs afterward, most of his subsequent work was more pleasant and hopeful in tone.
  • The Beatles as a group went Darker and Edgier gradually, from Rubber Soul up to the White Album, but seemed to be going in the opposite direction at the time of the breakup.
  • Similarly, many other '60s bands, including the The Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones, became Darker and Edgier during the peak of psychedelia.
  • The musical history of Pink Floyd seems to have been one long slide from the spacey, exploratory psychedelia of Syd Barrett, down into Roger Waters' descent into dark, cynical Wangst with The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall. Waters' post-Pink Floyd solo work continues the trend.
  • Compare the album "The Cheerful Insanity of Giles, Giles and Fripp" to anything that King Crimson's done, ever. The first King Crimson lineup was Giles, Giles and Fripp, plus Greg Lake.
    • Similarly, compare the album "From Genesis to Revelation" by Genesis to the track "The Knife", which was from the very next album.
    • Also compare "The Aerosol Grey Machine" with any of Van der Graaf Generator's subsequent output.
    • This is a common theme with progressive bands that have their roots in the flower power 60's psychedelia days, as prog as a whole is generally much more Serious Business- The Pink Floyd being the Ur Example.
  • The entire musical genre of Doom Metal is one big exercise in how grim and depressing music can get.
  • The Hip Hop genre known as Horrorcore. Gangsta Rap turned Up to Eleven, with lyrics worthy of Death Metal.
  • Porcupine Tree have been doing this since 2003 or so. While they never made the most upbeat or happy music out there, there's a definite change between psychedelic, Pink Floyd-influenced rock like The Sky Moves Sideways, and the metal Fear of a Blank Planet, which has ends with "Sleep Together", about the album's 'narrator' trying to convince another teenager to commit suicide with him.
  • Crystal Castles' second album is more abrasive and darker compared to their more accessible debut.
  • Van Halen's fourth album, Fair Warning. Most of the band's, silly hard-partying atmosphere (which made them famous) from the previous albums disappears and a heavier, more serious sound is heard. This is mostly attributed to the tensions between lead guitarist Eddie Van Halen and lead singer David Lee Roth at the time. The album features "Mean Street" and a foggy synthesized instrumental "Sunday Afternoon in the Park" that is full of Nightmare Fuel.
    • It would get even darker with 1995's Balance, musically and lyrically.
  • Counting Crows' first album, August and Everything After, was a sweetly melodic, very subdued folk album. Their second, Recovering the Satellites, added distortion guitar, angry lyrics, and several swear words. Eventually they found a middle ground which worked quite well.
  • Eminem's entire discography has basically been a sine-wave of Lighter and Softer and Darker and Edgier. His 1996 debut Infinite was basically the former, though a series of life events caused him to take the darker content to the nth degree with both The Slim Shady LP and The Marshall Mathers LP, both of which were critical and commercial successes. His subsequent two albums were somewhat Lighter and Softer, though the cycle has begun again with the recently-released Relapse, which serves in and out of this trope. It should, of course, be noted that each album always has a parodying track somewhere in it.
  • Massive Attack. While Blue Lines and Protection weren't entirely sunny, Mezzanine had a sonic background so dark, it absorbed light.
    • Trip-Hop as a whole has moved in this direction. It originated as a soothing, acid jazz-inspired blend of hip-hop and dub; in mid 90's, the post-punk influences turned into angry distorted riffs, the trippiness became heavy psychedelia, and the Retraux atmosphere traded nostalgia for old horror movie creepiness.
  • Jazz musicians will occasionally take songs from seemingly light repertoire and turn the intensity up. Sonny Rollins took the corniest of show tunes (such as "There's No Business Like Show Business") and turned them into positively hip (for the time) jazz tunes. John Coltrane famously turned the light-hearted, optimistic My Favorite Things into what one critic described as a "hypnotic eastern devish dance", one that lasted an impressive 13 minutes.
    • Trane himself is a truly a great example of this trope. Starting with light-hearted simplistic albums like Blue Train before becoming gradually more complex with Giant Steps and My Favorite Things and culminating in the madness of Ascension and Meditations.
    • Blue Train is many things, but it is in no way simplistic. Look at the chord progression to "Moment's Notice," for example, and you'll see that it's an early iteration of Coltrane changes - the substitutions that would eventually result in Giant Steps. Although Coltrane hadn't yet gotten to what would later be called his infamous "sheets of sound," Blue Train is still a seminal album in the history of jazz.
  • Happened naturally to Michael Jackson in the mid-Nineties. His 1991 album Dangerous was, like his previous albums, a mix of standard pop and uplifting songs. His next album, HIStory (1995), came out following his 1993 child molestation allegations and it shows. The album is filled with dark songs that exude paranoia and anger, dealing with topics like betrayal, media scrutiny, loneliness, and even a song entirely about a child dying from neglect. It also has more swearing than any other Michael Jackson album, including the only instance of the word "fuck." Even the sole love song on the album, the R. Kelly-penned "You Are Not Alone", is a little bit of a downer because it is about separated lovers. Jackson's 2001 album Invincible would retain some of the darker influences from this period though it would also be a bit of a return to form, with more upbeat, love/life-affirming songs compared to HIStory.
  • Depeche Mode. First album: pure synth-pop, mostly Silly Love Songs, marketed as a Boy Band for some reason. Fourth album: Industrial-pop/DarkWave, subject matter including BDSM, a girl dying in a car accident and Obsession Songs. And then two albums after that, the songs started being about drugs.
  • Hanson, in a sense, though more with their image than the actual music. I think they've used swear words in a few interviews or stuff they had, and the lead singer had sex before he got married. As for their music, they're not as light and innocent as they were as children, but still a very upbeat group. It's more that they've switched their style.
  • The Protomen do this to Mega Man, turning the video game setting into an urban police state dystopia where Dr. Wily is Big Brother, and the Blue Bomber himself is an angst-ridden Replacement Goldfish.
  • Miley Cyrus is going this way with her music, though the success of it is debatable.
  • Disturbed's discography, over time: the first album was mainly about anger and the world being a horrible, horrible place, all inspired by lead singer David Draiman's past experiences (which later evolved into retrospective navel gazing then to themes of empowerment and victory). Then he started getting some new experiences to work off of, creating Indestructible, then Asylum after that (that band's darkest, most serious records yet). Time will tell if the lyrics ever get back to the "a bit of humor through pain" theme.
  • Blue Oyster Cult was called a satanic band for good reasons. These include suicide pacts, possession, the dead rising, people dying in the dessert, and the last person on earth.
  • A lot of Dubstep remixes tend to go down this path while still using the same lyrics as the original song. This is easily accomplished with the thunderous basslines associated with the genre. For comparison: Example - Kickstarts versus the Bar 9 remix, the former sounding much more hopeful and cheery than the latter, made even more evident with the corresponding official videos.
  • Manic Street Preachers started off with a double album Generation Terrorists, which had a political glam-punk sound inspired by Guns N' Roses. Their second album, Gold Against the Soul, was more introspective compared to the first, while retaining the glam of their debut. Richey James Edwards, one of the band's songwriters, began to lose control and go on a downward spiral, resulting in the increasingly dark nature of his lyrics. This culminated with the grim, pessimistic atmosphere in the band's third album, The Holy Bible. Just as the band was about to tour stateside to promote their third album, Richey disappeared (he would later be presumed dead). The band, reforming as a trio, recorded music that was Lighter and Softer, even though the band would occasionally release darker albums such as Know Your Enemy and Journal For Plague Lovers (which contained the last of Richey's lyrics).
  • David Bowie albums, or stretches of such, tend to alternate between this and Lighter and Softer (owing to his penchant for the New Sound Album trope), but an even clearer example of this can be seen with his stage personas in The Seventies. After the flamboyant tragic rock messiah of Ziggy Stardust and the variants of Aladdin Sane, et.al., with 1976's Station to Station came The Thin White Duke -- a heartless Fascist. This persona owed a lot to a Creator Breakdown and his heavy drug abuse at the time (including cocaine addiction), and Bowie's decision to pull himself up from it all was accompanied by a choice to not only dump the persona, but to only be himself on stage from that point on.
  • Lady Gaga: In 2008, after performing as indie blues rock artist Stefani, she released The Fame, her first label-sponsored LP. The album had a very upbeat, joyful theme, centered mainly around party life, along with love, along with the idealist's view of fame. Her follow-up EP, The Fame Monster, is its "hangover". The cover, monochrome with the Queen Monster veiled up to the nose by a cape; combined with music centered around love evoking a bad, sexy romance novel; romantic anxiety ("Dance in the Dark"); and sex; the music took a more outré, avant-garde and edgy sound.
    • Born This Way got eclectic, with dance-pop ("The Edge of Glory"), House Music ("Marry the Night"), Techno ("Judas"), New Wave ("Government Hooker"), and rock ("You and I"). It's no Station to Station or Ray of Light but it's a shift. Could be more upbeat at times than The Fame Monster, though.
    • Many hold that if you compare her to other teen pop stars shes dark and edgy. Other contend that, in comparison to many other genres and groups, she's not that much different from any other popstar despite a different packaging.
  • Gorillaz pulls a not-so subtle variation in their story canon, which started out as a zany and darkly humorous setup but got noticeably darker in the second and third phases. Party animal Murdoc shifted sharply into a violent psychopath with the Plastic Beach arc, (though this may be justified as an already twisted man being driven to desperate measures by greed.) In accordance, his relationship with 2D has changed in portrayal from comedic bullying to pretty damn abusive, though it could always have come off this way if you thought about it.
  • Weezer's release after their self titled debut, Pinkerton, contained a more abrasive and darker sound that their previous album
    • But can you blame them? Rivers was pretty beat up after having multiple surgeries to correct a minor bone deformity that he wrote the entire album with a bitter disposition. The entire album is themed around breaking up, it's hard to write upbeat songs about breakups.
  • The first album by Skid Row was a pretty typical Hair Metal album, containing popular rock anthems such as "18 And Life" and "Youth Gone Wild" as well as the Power Ballad "I Remember You". The band's second album, Slave To The Grind, was darker, edgier, and less mainstream than the first with many songs adopting a Thrash Metal sound and lyrics about drugs, politics, and criticism of religion.
  • All of the Strapping Young Lad albums are this to Devin Townsend's solo work. Although some of Devin's solo albums can be considered dark based on their lyrical content and heaviness. Physicist and Deconstruction are heavier compared to others and their lyrics are darker. Ocean Machine's lyrical themes revolve around Life, Death, Isolation, etc. Ki for it's moody atmosphere. And Ghost 2 will appear to have more in common with Ki in terms of atmosphere rather than the original Ghost, which was Devin's attempt at Lighter and Softer.
  • Within Temptation is fairly dark itself, but eventually parodied the trend in "Gothic Christmas" -- complete with The Evil Reindeer Overlord, because everything should be Grim and Nordic.
    • And for a less meta example in the Within Temptation camp, 2011 opus The Unforgiving is far-and-away the most intense and darkest album they've put out, lyrically and musically. Depending on who you talk to, it worked.
  • The 80's albums from British band Madness progressively got more serious as time went on. Their first album, "One Step Beyond", featured reggae covers and songs about singing and dancing, any potentially serious subject matters (such as the chorus in "Mommy's Girl" that reveals the song's main character to be a paedophile) sung purely tongue-in-cheek. By their sixth album (the tellingly titled "Mad Not Mad"), they were singing critiques of the modern song industry itself, cynical parodies of Americanism and a surprising number of completely serious songs about child abuse. Their post-90's comeback albums have largely subverted this trend though.
  • While Metallica certainly went in a Lighter and Softer direction with their music during the 90's, Re Load was decidedly darker and more sinister-sounding than the comparably upbeat Black Album and Load.
    • Similarly, Ride The Lightning shed most of the youthfulness and camp of Kill'em All in favor of songs centering around death and fate.
  • Anthrax played this trope completely straight with Persistence Of Time. They continued with Sound Of White Noise, then gradually declined with the remaining three John Bush albums. Their newest album, Worship Music, is an almost complete return to the campiness of the band's eighties albums.
  • Iced Earth played this trope straight with Burnt Offerings, which band leader Jon Schaffer admits was due in no small part to his growing frustration with label Century Media.
  • Alanis Morissette was a bubblegum-pop singer in the early 1990s. Then she moved to LA and wrote Jagged Little Pill...
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