15 Songs That Make You Feel Like You're Having a Nightmare

Witch house is spooky music for people that like to dance, or at least wild out. Salem pushed witch house as far as it could go, and nowhere is this more evident than on "King Night." The absolutely monolithic opener to their debut studio album turned their already overdriven sound into even more of a cacophony, like some sort of hyper-charged occult banger. The apocalyptic sounds are nightmarish enough, but the manipulated and otherworldly "O Holy Night" sample finishes it off brutally, and beautifully.

Outside of a co-production credit from one third of the group on Kanye West's Yeezus, it's been almost 4 years since we've heard from Salem. Perhaps there's a possibility of them returning if we hold a séance; our nightmares just haven't been the same since they've been gone.

Tim Hecker's Virgins is one long beautiful nightmare, but the "Virginal" tracks are easily the most haunting parts of the album. The second of them, "Virginal II," begins with muted piano stabs that slowly build from a skittering gallop of notes into a throbbing mess of sonic decay. It's a broken melody that chooses to linger, frightening in one moment and then piquing morbid curiosity the next.

Daughn Gibson's bizarre All Hell sounds like a dusty combination of James Blake and Johnny Cash. An old vinyl that never made it past production, as if it's a lost relic from a strange era that never really existed. It's a dreamy, yet earthy sound that shifts between different levels of intensity and tone throughout, without ever abandoning the singular sound it's formed. "All Hell," the closer and title track of the album, opens with hellish dialogue capable of raising hairs, like the opening of a gloomy and depressing book. The hefty sounds and dingy lyrics create a vivid backwoods landscape with no escape in sight.

The remix of "Icy Lake" by Fade To Mind's Total Freedom is a brilliant aural representation of a twisted nightmare full of sudden, abstract terrors. Screams! A disembodied voice talking about throwing themselves into an icy lake! Crashes! Bangs!

AHHHHHHH!

And you wake up in a cold sweat.

The bleak tone that Death Grips bring to the table on the majority of their tracks is pretty tough to chew, but the uneasy shuffling of "Up My Sleeves" is a step above. It creates a nauseous, disorienting atmosphere, shifting constantly. Stefan Burnett's lyrics take a darker, more personal turn, forming yet another menacing layer atop the already hellish production. It's one of the more unsettling songs they've released, and that's really saying something.

Ryland Bouchard's debut album as The Robot Ate Me is a tricky one. They Ate Themselves is full of curving roads, confusing lyrics, and genre-bending sounds. In brings to mind a second reality of sorts, one that only exists in Bouchard's wildly inventive mind. "What We Thought Was Fog" represents the darkest corners of his mind, bringing forth imagery resembling that of John Carpenter's foreboding The Fog. 

It's like some sort of demented car journey through an apocalyptic world quite unlike ours, showcasing the breadth of Bouchard's talent.

If Black Moth Super Rainbow is Tom Fec's dreamy output, then Tobacco is his cheese dream output. "Creaming for Beginners" isn't quite evil, but it's at the very least sinister. It contains one of the prettiest melodies Fec's ever crafted, but it's damaged and distorted so much that it becomes a type of beauty that's harder to appreciate. It's just like the VHS that gave you bad dreams as a kid, albeit a little more broken.

Lots of the music on the Tri Angle Records roster would fit on this list, and Bristol-based producer Vessel, whose new album is out in September, is yet another artist from the camp making blackened, menacing music. The slow and deliberate pace of the drum beat makes you feel as if it's building up to something bad, but it's that see-sawing, whining sound that careens in and out of the song that turns this from moody and ominous to straight up hellish. It's like a nightmare where you went to see your favorite band play with a girl you liked, but when you got there, the whole audience turned into maggot ridden corpses.

Or something.

Going from Sigur Rós' Valtari to Kveikur can be pretty rough. The icelandic group made some pretty big changes for their seventh studio album, and the most noticeable came with their sound. The whole album represented a shift towards aggression, dark atmospheres, and a more fractured brand of beauty. It's almost like they've been possessed, and their fight against this possession is what birthed opening track "Brennisteinn." It's the most outward expression of tension in their entire discography, and it's awesome even if it is kind of scary.

Crystal Castle's third full-length is easily their darkest record. It's tar-black at points, with some of the moodiest and strangest output they've ever made. "Insulin" is one of the record's deprived sounding highlights, distorting their overdriven sound into a flaming ball of vitriol. It's frighteningly disorienting, and it makes for a captivating listen. The dream pop tag has been applied to Crystal Castles a few times, but nightmare pop seems more appropriate here.

Arca's whole &&&&& mixtape is a fluctuating soundscape of dreams and nightmares, 3o minutes of uniquely potent, menacing electronic magic. And if you want some figures that will haunt your nightmares for weeks, check the video too, made in collaboration with visual artist Jesse Kanda.

Besides being one of the only essential remix albums ever made, Further Down the Spiral also (seemingly randomly) features two original compositions from Aphex Twin. The first of which, "At the Heart of it All," is one of Aphex's most intense compositions. It's not exactly intense in the way his music usually is though, as it opts for a slower clunk as opposed to his usual outright bombast. Filled with industrial clatter and forlorn horns that serve as its looming bassline, it embodies that demonic space in the mind that infernal visions tend to stem from.

His name may sound like some dude pretending to be a spooky ghost, but oOoOO is still capable of making some pretty damn foreboding music. "Mouchette" is a chunky, frothing mess of a track. Instead of taking the witch house template to its logical extreme like Salem, oOoOO attempts to dial it back and turns it into something actually haunting with "Mouchette." It's the soundtrack to exploring a haunted house, evoking the feeling when you knowing that something is watching you even if you're not quite sure what or where it is.

Bones works within an incredibly strange lo-fi aesthetic, and the grimy "WeDontBelieveYou" sounds like the audio manifestation of his gritty imagery. From the otherworldly Boards of Canada sample that oscillates in the background, to the ferocious rapping alarmingly upfront in the foreground, "WeDontBelieveYou" is anything but warm and fuzzy. It's harsh, surreal, and hard as hell.

Covering a certified classic (Robert Johnson's "Me and the Devil Blues"), a song that has been covered by legends like The Doors and Gil Scott-Heron, is always a risky move, but Soap&Skin make it work by creating something totally new and in their own image, rather than trying to mimic what has already been done. The way the words are enunciated make it feel as if the singer is trying to force some evil out of her body, while the ominous strings persist in the background like the lingering memory of a bad dream.