Bob Dylan
Dylan turns a real Mississippi highway into a corridor where biblical myth, seedy commerce, and apocalyptic farce all converge.…
American mythology and violence commodification and exploitation absurdist apocalypse
Johnny Cash
Johnny Cash, in his final recording years, builds an apocalyptic vision almost entirely out of scripture, particularly…
judgment and reckoning mortality apocalypse
Bill Callahan
A closing statement for an album called Apocalypse, this song imagines departure as both a literal ride into open country and a…
mortality departure and retirement personal apocalypse
The Shins
A survivalist's bunker monologue set to an oddly buoyant melody, this song imagines nuclear or environmental apocalypse as a…
apocalypse and isolation denial and coping through routine loss of a loved one
Phoebe Bridgers
A road-trip through American landscapes and personal apocalypse, where the singer's private exhaustion with a relationship and a…
apocalypse (personal and national) homesickness and rootlessness burnout and exhaustion in relationships
Beastie Boys
This is the Beastie Boys doing what they do best: rapid-fire boasting, absurdist non sequiturs, and a chant-along hook, all…
comeback/reassertion braggadocio as comedy collective unity vs individual ego
Pixies
A hallucinatory apocalyptic chant built from disconnected images and a mysterious title figure, 'Mr. Grieves' plays like a…
apocalypse/deluge faith and belief without content death and mortality
Laura Marling
This is a cover of Bob Dylan's 1963 apocalyptic ballad, structured as a call-and-response between a questioning parent and a…
apocalypse and prophecy witness and testimony social collapse
Dylan's version of the polka novelty song plays it almost entirely straight as a call-and-response Christmas romp, building…
holiday tradition Americana kitsch absurdist humor
MF DOOM
A boozy, freewheeling posse-cut of a track built on the pun of "one beer" doubling as "one beer left" and a coded jab at fake…
intoxication as metaphor for scarcity/competition hip-hop authenticity vs. imitation supervillain persona
Patti Smith
This is a cover of the Rolling Stones' 1969 apocalyptic ballad, and Patti Smith treats it less as a rock anthem than as an…
apocalypse and dread the fragility of shelter violence versus tenderness
The Rolling Stones
A song built from apocalyptic weather and violence, treating storm, fire, flood, war, and rape as a single continuous threat…
apocalypse and dread violence and its proximity the search for shelter/refuge
Beck
A hypnotic, blues-inflected chant built around a single image—a lightning strike—that expands from a personal vision into a…
apocalypse/environmental collapse revelation and being struck down spiritual surrender
Television
Television's "Glory" plays a lopsided, almost cartoonish romantic squabble against a chant that sounds like religious…
romantic confusion transcendence vs. absurdity surrender of anxiety
The Band
A traveler arrives in a town called Nazareth looking for simple lodging and instead gets tangled in a chain of odd requests and…
burden and obligation hospitality and its refusal community entanglement
Run the Jewels
A two-verse trade-off between El-P and Killer Mike that functions as pure sonic swagger and threat display, dressed up in…
defiance of authority hypermasculine bravado self-mythologizing
R.E.M.
A torrent of disconnected images—natural disasters, media noise, Cold War figures, cultural detritus—gets fired off at…
information overload apocalyptic anxiety played as comedy media saturation
Aphex Twin
Windowlicker is less a lyric than a vocal texture: a track built around fragmented, pitch-shifted, and heavily processed vocal…
vocal manipulation as instrument absurdism and misdirection sound versus meaning