50 DARKEST ALBUMS EVER by NME

评语：Lyrically, ‘The Holy Bible’ is another level entirely. If we didn’t know the personalities involved, pro-death penalty and anti-political correctness sentiment (on ‘Archives Of Pain’ and ‘PCP’) might be dealbreakers. Instead, they work as part of a moving

评语：A 90-piece orchestra and a bunch of rhymes about heroin have always gone together like steak & kidney for Jason Pierce. In 2001, he shot his last big injection of major-label cash to make the orchestras sound goliath, even as the lines about burning holes

评语：What else says love like imagining you and your betrothed are conjoined parasites, feeding off one another’s waste? Or imagining her umbilical cord as a ‘noose’? Or writing a song called ‘Rape Me’? Or… oh, you get the picture.

评语：Child abuse, more child abuse, animal death, getting stabbed at a funfair: The Smiths do not yield easy winners in the gloom stakes, but ‘Meat Is Murder’, from its coldly ironic cover down to its sampled bone-saw was Morrissey reining-in the Wildean eleme

评语：The flat drone of the madrigals set against the flat drone of Nico’s voice have never made ‘Desertshore’ an easy listen. A cold stone obelisk to the loneliness that sat so at odds to her extraordinary physical beauty.

评语：Sod ‘Lovecats’, let’s mope! Arguably the album that invented goth, ‘Pornography’ was the first of The Cure’s Trilogy Of Doom that would suck ‘Disintegration’ and ‘Bloodflowers’ into its vampiric cataclysms of sound with the intention of making anguish sou

评语：The stark, pared-down sound of The Keats Of Folk and his acoustic guitar, recorded in the span of just four hours (at midnight, naturally), ‘Pink Moon turned out to be Drake’s swansong. He was dead, at 26, from an overdose of anti-depressants. Irony alert

评语：The theme of ‘I Am A Bird Now’ is of transformation, sung by one who feels trapped in his own skin. Antony Hegarty’s Mercury winner was sung for the outsiders, and if its mood was mournful, it was also hopeful, in love with humanity.

评语：In which Cash set the bar for a generation of swansongs, with a little help from Rick Rubin. A testament to its wounded, regretful power is that Cash’s version of ‘Hurt’ has pretty much become the definitive one.

评语：After his mother died, Kanye West beat himself up with the same magnified solipsism that he had once directed at proclaiming his own majesty. He took Auto-Tune – the garish, oily sound of mindless over-consumption – and reinvented it as a new blues. ‘808s

评语：The Bristol trio’s debut slowed Blue Note jazz and hip-hop breaks to a zombie trudge – but it was Beth Gibbons that brought the emotional heaviness, her torrid cries like a torch singer awakening from cryogenic deep-freeze.

评语：It’s bookended by two chest-bursters, but between ‘Now My Heart Is Full’ and ‘Speedway’, Moz’s most all-round coherent solo record was overwhelmingly drenched in a drizzly, cavernous echo – like it was playing in the flat next door, as you sat, alone, on

评语：An album that has lit many a lonely student the way to dusky death, Mitchell’s 1971 classic details her split from Graham Nash, her youthful divorce and the trauma of giving up a daughter for adoption, all delivered wrapped in inconsolable poetry with a r

评语：Eleven years in the making, a lifetime in the digesting, Walker’s follow-up to 1995’s scree-tastic ‘Tilt’ was even more unrelenting and bleak. The effect was a series of flickering snapshots of the horrors of the modern world – the 21st century being show

评语：Not so much depressing as oppressive – for their final version one outing, Wire ramped up the dark synth undertow, coming across as command-barking tazer-wielding sadists in a future fascist state.

评语：Trent Reznor chose to record this arena-ready industrial metal opus in the Cielo Drive house where Sharon Tate was killed by the acolytes of Charles Manson. He built a studio there which he named Le Pig, after the blood graffiti scrawled on the door by Ta

评语：When the X Factor fucktards removed the ironic apostrophes from “Heroes” for their charity cover version, they committed one of music’s most hilarious acts of cultural vandalism. “Heroes” are thin on the ground in the labyrinth sepia lair of Bowie’s most

评语：Throughout the ’80s, they had been gradually death-ening their disco. And 1990’s ‘Violator’ was the culmination of their enigmatic tech-disco, laying the blueprint for industrial pop for the decade to come. It was hardly the dourest tome of the goth-pop e

评语：No countdown of gloom would be complete without Leonard Cohen. A Canadian poet-turned folkish singer-songwriter who moved to New York in the ’60s and lurked at the edges of Andy Warhol’s Factory scene, such was Cohen’s command of a reserved, regal darknes

评语：On their second, the Furs’ aloof, scratchy gloom summed up an era in moody teenage life so thoroughly that John Hughes named his film after its first single: ‘Pretty In Pink’.

评语：Recorded smack bang in the middle of Cave’s junkie days, The Bad Seeds’ fourth album is a dark paranoid fantasy. That Cave went on from here to stoving Kylie’s head in with a brick on ‘Where The Wild Roses Grow’ is no surprise.

评语：Barely a year elapsed between the band’s two studio albums, but creatively speaking, it might as well be light years. ‘Unknown Pleasures’ is, notionally speaking, a punk record – albeit a cavernous, spectral-sounding one, thanks to the dark hand of Factor

评语：Where once Sunn O))) records were walls of zero-BPM drone-doom guitar and nothing else, on their seventh album, we encountered choirs, string sections and ‘Alice’, a homage to avant-garde jazzer Alice Coltrane. Their expanded palette increased their emoti

评语：The Swans of ‘White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity’ was a more nuanced, orchestrated outfit than the blasted, atavistic line-up of the early ’80s. But the likes of ‘Failure’ are all the more powerful for their mastery of light and shade.

评语：The Fall are often dank, but it took Brix Smith’s sense of songwriting order to make Mark E’s benighted world of non-sequiturs sound massive and marbled in its gloom.