Fugazi
Repeater sketches a first-person portrait of someone reduced by drug dependency and social judgment to a statistic, then widens…
addiction and criminalization dehumanization media detachment
Laura Marling
This is Laura Marling's recording of Neil Young's 1972 song about heroin addiction, written after Young watched a bandmate…
addiction loss complicity of the witness
Steely Dan
A portrait of a man consumed by amphetamine addiction, told at a cool remove through a narrator warning a woman close to him to…
addiction denial warning/escape
Elliott Smith
A stark, minimally strummed song that follows a young addict on a bus and on foot toward a dealer, narrated with a flat,…
addiction dissociation self-erasure
Depeche Mode
A blues-electro stalker's chant built almost entirely around a single fixation: sexual compulsion framed as addiction and…
obsession addiction desire as compulsion
Uncle Tupelo
A breakup song built around a simple exchange-of-belongings conceit, where the speaker asks for his possessions back while…
heartbreak addiction blame and self-justification
Amy Winehouse
A defiant, retro-soul kiss-off to the people urging the narrator into treatment, delivered with a swagger that keeps curdling…
denial and self-mythology addiction autonomy vs. paternalism
George Jones
A late-career George Jones confession set as a plainspoken moral ledger: a man looking back on a life of drink and lost…
regret addiction free will versus fate
Thin Lizzy
A gambler's monologue delivered as tense, driving hard rock, built around the physical sensation of nervous sweat rather than…
risk and compulsion masculine bravado poverty and escape fantasy
New Order
A euphoric-sounding synth-pop anthem that turns out to be about addiction and the erosion of innocence, dressed in language so…
addiction and dependency loss of childhood innocence denial and self-deception
Jason Isbell
A recovering man takes stock of a life spent moving through places without anyone to share them with, and asks someone directly…
recovery from addiction loneliness and isolation vulnerability and asking for help
Florence + the Machine
An opening confession about adolescent anorexia expands into a wider meditation on addiction, performance, and the human need to…
eating disorders and body control addiction and substitution performance versus intimacy
Warren Zevon
A junkie in a rundown corner of Los Angeles narrates his own decline in a strangely tender, almost comic voice, addressing an…
addiction and withdrawal romantic longing as survival strategy poverty and bureaucracy
Danny Brown
Danny Brown turns his own addiction into dark comedy, stacking dense, cartoonish wordplay over a queasy hook that keeps asking…
addiction and dependency irony and dark humor wealth versus self-destruction
Mott the Hoople
This is Mott the Hoople's own epitaph and origin story rolled into one, a self-mythologizing autobiography written at the exact…
rock stardom as self-destruction nostalgia and regret band identity and mythology
A hushed, seductive address that turns out to be spoken in the voice of addiction itself, offering comfort, oblivion, and…
addiction as intimate voice self-destruction disguised as tenderness loss of potential
A breakup song built around one stark image: black as the color of mourning, addiction, and emotional shutdown all at once. Amy…
heartbreak and abandonment addiction as emotional metaphor self-destruction
A confessional first-person account of addiction, framed as a series of messages sent to family members from someone who knows…
addiction and substance abuse shame and family self-destruction
A relentless portrait of Detroit street violence set to a hyper-fast, footwork-inspired beat, where the manic tempo and…
urban poverty and survival violence and fatalism addiction as coping mechanism
Steve Earle
A defiant survivor's anthem in which the narrator refuses to be pitied or contained, casting himself as a storyteller-outlaw…
survival and defiance inherited identity addiction and recovery
Massive Attack
A slow-burning meditation on desire as self-inflicted damage, built from a handful of repeated images—storms, sin, flame,…
desire and self-destruction moral ambivalence addiction to feeling
Guided by Voices
A short, deceptively simple lo-fi anthem in which the narrator cycles through professional identities—scientist, journalist,…
self-examination addiction and escape art as self-medication
Gillian Welch
Gillian Welch strings together a series of small-town obituaries and rumors — an overdose, a runaway, a breakdown, a possible…
mortality and fatalism small-town gossip and rumor addiction and ruin
Chris Stapleton
A recovery narrative dressed as a love song, where the singer trades one intoxication for another. The verses sketch a history…
addiction and recovery redemptive love substitution of vices
Alice in Chains
A short, stark meditation on isolation and self-erasure, built from two spare verses and a wordless, keening refrain. The song…
isolation loss of autonomy despair
Nirvana
A hazy invitation dissolves into contradiction as soon as it's offered: the singer welcomes you exactly as you are, then…
contradiction and self-cancellation false reassurance identity as unstable
Big Thief
A tense, sensual account of a relationship that runs on contradiction — intimacy that drains as much as it nourishes. The song…
toxic intimacy dependency and addiction desire vs. self-erasure
A recovery ballad disguised as a love song, in which the narrator counts the cost of his old chaotic life and credits a specific…
addiction and sobriety redemption through love domesticity as safety
Run the Jewels
A boastful, mythmaking duo track in which El-P and Killer Mike cast themselves as outlaw legends -- part supervillain, part folk…
self-mythologizing violence as performance drug use and excess
Gram Parsons
A honky-tonk lament about a gambler caught in the loop of losing, drinking, and going back for more, with Las Vegas cast as a…
addiction and compulsion poverty vs. glamour self-destruction
The Rolling Stones
A brief, almost slight set of lyrics serves as launchpad for one of the Stones' longest and most instrumentally ambitious…
desperation and pursuit addiction and decadence desire as siege
Curtis Mayfield
A eulogy and a warning delivered in the same breath, this song uses the death of a minor drug-trade casualty from the Superfly…
addiction and exploitation systemic racism/economic entrapment urban despair
Madvillain
A pure showcase of technical rap virtuosity built almost entirely on internal rhyme chains and boastful non-sequiturs, "All…
braggadocio persona/mythmaking criminal alter-ego
St. Vincent
A breakup song built almost entirely out of blunt, escalating metaphors, each one recasting the addressee as some kind of prop…
toxic attachment self-deception performance vs. authenticity
This is Laura Marling's rendition of a 1965 folk standard originally written by Jackson C. Frank, a song about restless flight…
itinerancy and escape addiction as coping mechanism inescapability of sorrow
Sarah Vaughan
A torch song built entirely around one confined domestic scene: a woman drinking coffee alone through the small hours, waiting…
romantic waiting and vigilance gendered domestic roles insomnia and time distortion
Kris Kristofferson
A hungover drifter walks through a quiet Sunday city, and every ordinary domestic sound he passes -- frying chicken, children…
loneliness addiction and self-medication nostalgia for domestic normalcy
Sturgill Simpson
This is a father's list of hard-won advice to a young son, delivered as a string of practical warnings and folksy aphorisms…
fatherhood and inheritance cautionary wisdom addiction and self-destruction
A stripped-down acoustic confession from a narrator who insists on leaving while quietly begging to be brought back. The song…
addiction and self-destruction isolation vs. longing for home guilt and self-recrimination
Johnny Cash
A cover written originally as a young man's meditation on self-harm and numbness becomes, in Johnny Cash's version, an old man's…
mortality regret addiction and self-destruction