< Hell Is That Noise

Hell Is That Noise/Music

  • Merzbow is the very definition of this trope.
  • Daniel Menche
  • This Troper had been a metal fan for years, even death, black, and other "extreme" genres and still wasn't prepared for the unholy FUCK that is Slipknot's All Hope Is Gone. Then I heard their first album, which was almost creepier due to a tinge of Early Installment Weirdness. And then, oh dear god IOWA
    • YMMV, as All Hope Is Gone is a relatively straightforward metal album by Slipknot standards, and largely free of the samples and sonic manipulation of early releases. The closing minutes of Iowa's title track, however, is almost entirely made up of Hell Is That Noise with a discordant bass riff for good measure.
  • Crystal Castles: Holy fuck do they fit this trope.
    • Xxzcuzx Me (jury is out on whether this should be pronounced "excuse" or "executes" but given the sound of the song, the latter seems likely)
    • I Am Made of Chalk
    • Alice Practice
    • Violent Dreams
  • This is quite possibly the most terrifying song you will ever hear. The very first second will make you jump so high your head hits the ceiling. Even for fans of black metal this is just beyond creepy.
    • More like Crowning Music of Awesome
    • To those of us wearing Anaal Nathrakh hoodies at this very moment, they're far too awesome to be scary.
  • Prepare for the most spine chiling 7 minutes you will ever experience. Prepare yourself for Battle of Mice. The vocals are psychotic and distressing but worse still is the final two minutes of the song (You will be paranoid afterwards, guaranteed.)
  • Khanate. Dear God, KHANATE. Every "song" of theirs is completely demoralizing, specifically on their first album. Notorious examples of these would be the looping riff at the beginning of Under Rotting Sky and the entirety of the depressing monstrosity No Joy. This is as close to Hell as a human being will ever come to.
  • Blind Guardian will make you fear both the song and the mere phrase "Mr. Sandman". In addition, the eerie jingle accompanying the "bung bung bung bung" will no doubt instill some fear into your dreams.
  • Number nine...number nine...number nine... and everything thereafter.
  • The chaotic orchestral buildup that's played twice in "A Day In The Life" from The Beatles Sgt. Pepper" album. You get used to it eventually but tell me the first time you heard it's frightening. Especially through headphones.
    • On the subject of "A Day in the Life", that goddamn 15khz tone near the end of the track. I CAN HEAR IT IN MY SOUL.
  • "And the thing that disturbs you is only the sound of the low spark of high-heeled boys"
  • Some pipe organs can hit notes so low that you feel them rather than hear them. When these go out of tune, they can actually cause people to feel nervous to the point of panic attacks for the very sensitive.
  • Kate Bush's 1982 song "Get Out of My House" contains a sudden processed backmask of Kate's voice shrieking Get Outta My... that remains intensely disturbing even after repeated listenings.
    • The garbled cut-up bits of speech that show up a couple of times over the course of "Waking The Witch" are pretty unnerving too, as is the sudden burst of helicopter sound effects towards the end of the same song.
    • Incidentally, Kate Bush once made a song called "Experiment IV", about a noise so hellish that it can kill. And it escapes.
  • Ozzy Osbourne's voice on the first two Black Sabbath albums, especially on the self-titled album's title track. Before he became a caricature of himself, Ozzy sounded like the lost soul he actually was at the time. This is especially notable on the pre-album demo track of "War Pigs" featured on the Ozzman Cometh collection, which is far creepier than anything Sabbath actually released.
    • Just the first two? Ozzy's vocals on the third album, Master of Reality, are just as creepy, especially on "Lord of This World".
    • First 30 or so seconds of Iron Man.
    • "ALL ABOOOAAAAAAAAAARD, HAHAHAHA!"
  • The Conet Project is a box set of recordings of "numbers stations", radio stations used to transmit coded messages (see also Fun for Some): These stations occasionally broadcast eerie musical snippets, or some pretty unsettling electronic noises. For instance the track "The Backwards Music Station" is a mixture of high pitched feedback, static, and grating metallic chirping.
  • Lotus Eaters.
  • The earth died SCREAMING!
    • For that matter, anything Tom Waits says or sings, ever. The man could ask you to pass the salt and make it sound like a funeral dirge.
      • Well, anything that isn't one of his ballads. It's like he only has two modes, depressing and terrifying.
  • Haunted, an album by Poe, uses this to great effect. The album's first track, "Exploration B", opens with a house receiving a phone call. The call goes unanswered, so the message machine plays the caller out loud. It's a woman. She sings a few lines of a song about a man "dying today" then abruptly stops. "Are you there? Pick up. Pick up, please... Mom? Hello...?" (Oh, by the way, Poe is Mark Z. Danielewski's sister.)
    • Haunted is a companion piece to...that book. Are you surprised?
  • Nurse with Wound, most the time.
    • Oh hell yeah. That dramatic buildup and climax on "I Cannot Hear You..." might be the most hilarious and simultaneously frightening thing in all experimental music. But hey, at least the titular song ends nicely. (unless you fear klezmer music)
    • Good lord, Steven Stapleton knows how to make your skin crawl with his music. This Troper was terrified by his album Thunder Perfect Mind. To give you an idea of a portion of the album, imagine an insanely loud alarm clock beeping nonstop whilst mechanical gears grind and twist, all while a very repetitive xylophone plays cacophonous notes in a seemingly random, yet rhythmic, order. Other terrifying releases by Nurse With Wound include Homotopy to Marie, Gyllensköld, Geijerstam and I At Rydberg's, and...well, pretty much anything by NWW qualifies for this trope.
  • The psychedelic-era album The American Metaphysical Circus by Joe Byrd and the Field Hippies contains a track called "Leisure World," which is essentially a parody radio commercial for a nonexistent retirement community. It ends with an indistinct sound of an old man grunting as though in pain, leaving one to imagine something horrible is happening to him.
  • In some live performances of "Blinding" by Florence and the Machine, the breakdown at the end of the song (already disturbing in its own right) is preluded by a blood-curdling scream courtesy of Florence. Listeners familiar with the song may be startled, those completely unprepared for the segment might need to change their pants by the end.
  • "Copenhagen" by The Knife is rather a collection of creepy sounds than a song. It fits this trope like a glove.
  • The Wanting Comes In Waves (Reprise) from The Decemberists is one at the end.
  • The synthesized "squawking goose" sound at the end of Todd Rundgren's "Golden Goose".
  • The Sneaker Pimps have a track on their Becoming X album called "Spin Spin Sugar." About halfway through, a girl (possibly not the lead singer, although they did still have a female vocalist on that album) starts sobbing in an incredibly eerie manner, followed by demonic-sounding noises that could have been taken right out of a Takashi Shimizu movie. Then somebody starts whispering, which segues into a girlish giggle that is fucking creepy. The fact that the drum track on the song—still playing behind all this—is already pretty ominous by itself doesn't help things much.
  • Pink Floyd's "Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving With a Pict." The whole song is scary as hell, but toward the middle they do this whispering/heavy breathing sound. Also, the guy delivering a long-winded and completely incomprehensible speech in a dramatic tone of voice with an unidentifiable accent that may indeed by from Hell itself at the end of the song.
    • The song is orders of magnitude worse played in reverse. Almost everything is eerier, but the long, shrill animal howl in the background sounds far more like a reedy, human voice in intense distress or pain, rising in pitch and volume instead of fading off.
    • It gets worse: Waters revived the Pict's vocal stylings for the schoolteacher from The Wall ten years later, and that guy sounds even more deranged and hellish.
      • Speaking of The Wall, the noises at the start of Empty Spaces, and the bridge in Hey You (with buzzing, dental-drill like noises) deserve an honourable mention, as does the absolutely batshit-insane megaphone speech at the end of "Waiting for the Worms." It's like a dramatic reading of Time Cube that deteriorates into incoherent garble.
    • "Careful with That Axe, Eugene..."
    • "A Saucerful Of Secrets" is full of this, especially the beginning of the second movement, which sounds like you're being chased through a dark castle by the legions of Hell.
    • Speak to Me
  • Aphex Twin:

"IIIII WANNNNT YOUR SOULLLLL! I WILL EAT YOUR SOULLLLL!"

    • "aaaaahhhhhhhhhhhWWWWWWAAAAAAAAOOOOOOOHHHHHHH!!!"
  • The Intro to the album version of "The Burning Halo" by Psyopus starts with the audio from an exorcism. Yeah.
  • Angelspit's "Black Wine" is fucking creepy. It's an instrumental made up mostly of distortion and noise.
  • The Gorillaz hit "Feel Good Inc" is bookended by psychotic, unhinged laughter. Some feel that the low, sultry bass line actually adds to the creepiness, creating a strange sense of anxiety or dissonance.
    • The music video for Clint Eastwood begins with Murdoc delivering a very creepy laugh
      • Not to mention "Every dead body that is not exterminated, gets up and kills. The people it kills get up and kill."
  • Tool loves using this, and quite a few tracks on any of their albums are comprised of dissonant noise and sound effects. Special mention would have to go to "Disgustipated" and "Faaip de Oaid" though. Both are the closing tracks from their respective albums, and both manage to be completely fucking terrifying.
  • The bizarre humming and "pt pt pt" sound at the start of Eraser by Nine Inch Nails. Allegedly the "pt pt pt"'s are Trent Reznor blowing through a plastic straw to a beat.
    • The weird noises at the beginning of Kinda I Want To as well. Or what about everything in the instrumental song Pilgrimage, that just sounds like a procession from hell coming to get you? Or the screeching looped sounds in Ruiner...or the screams in The Becoming. Basically, Nine Inch Nails just LOVE this trope.
  • The ship's bells echoing into nothing at the end of Josh Ritter's "Another New World"
  • Slayer uses this trope a lot in their songs, mostly with their lyrics, but one stands out: At the beginning of Angel of Death, Tom Araya belts out a high-pitched pained scream, probably meant to mirror the screams of the prisoners at Auschwitz who suffered terrible experiments at the hands of Dr. Josef Mengele, A.K.A. The Angel of Death.
  • Krzysztof Penderecki's Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima is a freakish, atonal string piece that attempts to capture the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, with convincingly rendered air raid and emergency sirens, bomber noises, and even screams of the burning bomb victims. The opening note alone is one extended, unidentifiable piercing screech.
    • Actually, the other way around. It was originally untitled, and only after he heard the piece performed did he decide to dedicate it to the victims of Hiroshima. Originally he'd just written it as an experiment and had nothing specific in mind.
    • "Canticum Canticorum Solominis" by the same composer sounds like souls crying out of the depths of hell, and Satan's wretches dragging them down again. Thrilling and terrifying.
  • The intro of Kraftwerk's "Stratovarius", from their eponymous album, and the piercing whistle between "Kometenmelodie 1" and "2" on Autobahn.
  • Autobahn itself is also somewhat creepy for a strange reason, about 5 minutes in, it unexpectedly starts playing various car noises.
  • One of the tracks in Within Temptation's 'Mother Earth' album, entitled simply as 'Intro'. A short minor-key piano line is repeatedly played, while faint, indistinct voices quickly mutter over it. It gradually gets louder as it approaches its end, to lead into 'Dark Wings'.
  • The clock ticking in the background of Dark Forest by Midnight Syndicate.
  • "Toccata" off of ELP's Brain Salad Surgery gives us something complex, pompous, and just plain frightening. While this prog-rock take on a twentieth-century composition is creepy enough, the part that's really hellish occurs nearly two minutes into the piece, when most of the instruments drop out briefly, leaving a light drum pattern and a sudden, intense bass sound to remain. Of course, when compared to the synth effects that lead back into the main theme near the five-minute mark, the bass sound may not seem so hellish.
  • Converge, considered a founding father of the Metalcore genre, released their 2001 album Jane Doe to critical acclaim. The album was based off of songwriter & lead singer Jacob Bannon's horrible draining broken relationship with an ex-girlfriend. The tenth song, Phoenix in Flames, is :42 seconds of Bannon screaming his lungs out over mad drumming. It has to be heard to be believed.
  • Prince's "D.M.S.R.," a rather long dance track, ends abruptly with the sound of a woman screaming for help. I first heard this song late at night, alone in my bedroom, and became convinced that someone was being murdered outside my window.
  • Danielle Dax released an EP (Timber tongue) that has an opening track named "Toygit". Words can not do it justice. I can take about a minute and a half of it before the shakes really set in, and I can handle other disturbing stuff (like Diamanda Galas performing the Litanies of Satan) without a blink. Toygit gets me every time.
  • Most of metal-bashing avant-garde group Einstürzende Neubauten's early output is like this. The one that always gets to this troper, however, is "Negativ Nein", which opens to a creepy beat played on PVC pipes over what sounds like a badly plugged toilet being plunged, topped by Blixa Bargeld's broken-steam-whistle scream and heavily overdubbed and echoing chanting. In German.
    • Speaking of Einstürzende Neubauten...never listen to "Halber Mensch" if you still want to sleep at night. It's probably one of the scariest songs ever.
  • The hymn "Father, We Thank You" has an alternate melody composed by William Albright. The best way to describe it is "randomly hitting adjacent notes on the organ and holding each note for two beats". It's turned Up to Eleven in some versions, which suggest having several instruments play descending semitone runs at different tempos over top the melody.
  • Similarly, "Serenity" by Charles C. Ives. Listen to it here. A very slow, atonal, difficult and ridiculously syncopated melody that almost never matches up to the piano accompaniment... which itself is mostly the same two high, very disonant chords played over and over again. It's very, very, very unnerving and perhaps one of the biggest cases of Lyrical Dissonance you'll find in any hymnal.
  • And even worse yet is "Silence, Frenzied, Unclean Spirit" (Thomas H. Troeger and Carol Doran), where practically every line has a minor second, major seventh or otherwise very ugly sounding chord in it. At least it ends on a perfectly normal D chord.
  • The end of "Goodnite, Dr. Death", from My Chemical Romance, has a band playing "The Star-Spangled Banner". The very last note of the song is replaced by a loud, static-y noise that comes as a completely hair-raising surprise the first time you listen to the song, especially if the volume's up. And the second. And possibly the third time.
    • It's worse if you watch Marble Hornets. The Eldritch Abomination from that series causes videos to give off loud static. This troper was listening through "Goodnite, Dr. Death" at 2 am and almost fell off his chair in fright.
  • A lot of Scott Walker's later material qualifies. Particularly "Cue". Bam bam bam bam.
    • Honourable Mention: The Cockfighter. Starts off with just over a minute of creepy sounds, distant wailing, and indistinct mumbling before all hell breaks loose. Took this troper a good week to get to the actual main body of the song. Still makes me jump 10 years later.
  • The string/electronic tune at the end of Stupify by Disturbed (which is used to open Down with the Sickness) was probably created with this trope in mind.
  • From the robotic voice reciting the days of the week to "Armenia City In the Sky," the beginning of "The Who Sell Out" is anxiety-making.
  • The entirety of Mike Patton's "Adult Themes For Voice" album.
  • From Led Zeppelin's version of "Dazed And Confused", there's the noises Jimmy Page conjures up from his guitar during the violin bow section of the song.
  • Don't use headphones on this one. In 1977, the New York City Opera Company put on La Traviata with Henry Price and Ashley Putnam (her NYCO debut). In the middle of a very quiet passage, this happened [dead link] . Nobody knows who the woman was or why.
  • In A Perfect Circle's "Annihilation", the low spoken whisper that makes up the lyrical portion set to the glockenspiel/xylophone music is kinda creepy.
  • The Proto-Industrial/Proto-Noise band Cromagnon probably had this intention on songs like Caledonia and Toth, Scribe I.
  • It has been said that one of the female backup vocals for "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Weasel Stomping Day" freaked out the first couple of times they heard the sound effect that Al chose to use for the weasels getting stomped.
  • Space have a B-side called 'I Am Unlike A Lifeform You've Ever Met which is possibly the creepiest song they've ever done. They got the keyboard player to do lead vocals. He has a very thick Scouse accent. You wouldn't think that a Scouser talking about how he's going to eat you, and sounding like he's going to enjoy it, would be so creepy...but oh, it is. The breaks in the music and the sampled speech at the end about an impending zombie invasion do not help.
  • The creepy "Let the dying die, let the lying lie" chant from Captain Beefheart's "Trust Us".
  • The last couple minutes of East Hastings by Godspeed You! Black Emperor are utterly terrifying, beginning with the panning sound of a helicopter increasing and decreasing in volume and a gas being sprayed, before going into an electronic sound resembling a cross between insects and the screams of the damned.
  • Diamanda Galas specializes in this trope.
  • In 1994, Juno Reactor produced a Silent Hill-esque dark ambient album titled Luciana: 61 minutes of low droning synth pads, a mechanical noise loop like an infernal steam engine, random shrieking and other nondescript sounds, scare chords, ominous foreign language chanting, etc. Listen at your own risk, especially if it's at night with the lights off.
  • I've been a big Nick Cave fan for a while, but the first time I heard the song "Loverman" in the car with some friends, when the chorus started we all jumped out of our skins.
  • 'Frankie Teardrop', the track everyone remembers from Suicide's self-titled debut. Nothing but a repetitive beat, some droning keyboards and a vocalist alternating between an anxious croon and ungodly shrieking, all of which qualify for the trope. It makes for...uncomfortable listening.
    • Nick Hornby (who, bear in mind, started off as a professional music critic) called this the most terrifying song he had ever heard.
    • Most songs by Suicide and fellow proto-industrial band Throbbing Gristle qualify.
    • Hamburger Lady by Throbbing Gristle deserves an extra special mention though, largely as it's a strong contender for creepiest song ever. The music is horrifying enough on it's own, but it's the lyrics that really clinch it. A supposedly real life, first person account of a woman in a burns unit whose injuries are so horrific that even hardened medical professionals lost their lunch in her presence.
  • Lustmord's 'At Three Mountains of Madness' is by far one his most terrifying pieces of work (and that's saying A LOT). Why? It sounds almost nothing like a lot of his other work. It is simply 38 seconds of happy sounding, lullaby-ish singing, vaguely distorted. Oh, and it's by Charles Manson and his 'family'. You will never sleep again.
  • The screeching viola at the end of The Velvet Underground's "Heroin".
  • The last song on Innerpartysystem's self titled album, "Home", is made entirely of strange creaking along with various other eerie and unnerving noises—no music or vocals to be heard.
  • Anything by Blut Aus Nord. The first time I heard their music, I was literally frozen with fear. I did not move for the entirety of the clip that played.
  • The song "London Town" by William Control. After the song there's 3+ minutes of silence. Then at 7:24, a car alarm and a distorted call to emergency services. Finishes with a loop that sounds a cross between squeaky windshield wipers and "Can someone help me?"
  • Naked City's Bonehead is this trope invoked for 55 seconds.
  • Pump Up the Volume by British group M/A/R/R/S/ is a landmark in dance music history. It introduced house and the idea of sampled dance music to the general public, even starting a craze of "sample-montage" dance songs. All this, however, does not excuse the absolutely horrifying hellish screeching noise that comes in about a minute and thirty seconds into the song. The sweeping video of the satellite and the planet in the music video doesn't help matters.
  • Keith Urban blows a whistle right before the first chorus of "You Gonna Fly". It really sticks out.
  • The Pop Group have a handful. Their first album, Y, contains Blood Money, which mostly consists of singer Mark Stewarts heavily effected voice shouting lines like "spiders I can trust", "what does feel like to kill a man?" and "an order is an order" over feedback and pitch shifted drums. It's weird now, I can't imagine what it did to people in 1979.
    • Another example is Amnesty Report On British Army Torture In Northern Ireland, the B-Side to the already quite weird We Are All Prostitutes single. In one version Mark Stewart literally just reads from the report, over trouser soilingly strange music. The other is an inappropriately dancey number which manages to turn "they had their teeth knocked out" into a surprisingly catchy chorus.
  • Off the Sunshine soundtrack, aside from the Psycho Strings of the slasher aspects of the movie, features Distortions. 3:16 in, out of the ambiance, comes a noise that sounds like someone screaming at the top of their lungs. It's implied that it's the spaceship that's in the movie falling into the hellish nuclear furnace of the Sun.
  • The first riff of Diabolus Absconditus by Deathspell Omega. The tone slowly gets creepier and creepier as the riff keeps repeating.
  • Traineater from Book of Knots. All the creepiness of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and Tin Hat Trio combined into a mournful dirge that would do any Ghost Train proud.
  • Broken Iris have a loud scream that comes out of nowhere and continues for several seconds, at the end of the song "Broken Inside." This troper heard it for the first time while chilling in the bathtub and was stuck in there for several seconds, just hearing a terrifying scream. Then the next song (Reptilia) came on.
  • Scott Walker loves this Trope. Special mention must go to "The Cockfighter", which starts out sedate and low-key with eerie scratches throughout for about a minute and a half to lull the audience...then the percussion violently kicks in and he starts singing in an operatic baritone. Midway through, he throws in a long, sustained, high-pitch EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.
  • There are some instances of this trope in the Two Steps From Hell album called Ashes, in songs such as Darkxis and Madnophpone.
  • 22 Going On 23 by the Butthole Surfers. The song is a sloshy bass and high-pitched electric guitar broken up by a woman describing her trauma since being sexually assaulted. It's become a staple of this troper's halloween mix.
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