Scott Walker
Written for the Plague Songs compilation, this piece takes the ninth biblical plague of darkness and turns it into a chant of…
divine punishment environmental collapse exhaustion and waiting
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
Black Sabbath
A doom-laden vision of nuclear apocalypse rendered as a kind of blackened hymn, cataloguing the literal physical destruction of…
nuclear annihilation dehumanization/mechanization environmental collapse
Laura Marling
A meditation on ecological dread and personal complicity, built almost entirely from the phrase 'it feels like,' as the narrator…
environmental collapse complicity and denial self-reproach
Modest Mouse
A frantic party anthem doubles as a parable about environmental and cultural exhaustion, tracking a group that burns through one…
environmental collapse consumerism and disposability willful denial
This is Ronnie James Dio's first lyric with Sabbath, and it trades the band's earlier horror-movie imagery for a mythic, almost…
environmental collapse lost innocence fatalism
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
Patti Smith
Patti Smith's 2012 rendering of Neil Young's 1970 song treats it less as a cover than as an act of channeling — she inhabits the…
environmental collapse dreams and prophecy escape and displacement
Thom Yorke
A skittering, glitch-driven closer to The Eraser that piles up images of contamination, flight, and collapse without ever…
environmental/existential dread futility of self-protection paranoia
Ride
Lannoy Point opens Ride's 2017 comeback album with a piece of philosophical pop that treats perception and belief as unstable…
perception vs belief impermanence environmental/civilizational collapse
Animal Collective
A short, quietly unsettling piece that starts as a simple pastoral scene of watching a seal in a half-frozen lake and slides…
environmental collapse tourism and spectacle of nature impermanence
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
Elvis Costello
A deceptively sunny, Beach Boys-styled pop song that uses its bright surf-rock arrangement as a Trojan horse for a scathing…
media and celebrity culture environmental destruction disillusionment with 60s idealism
TV on the Radio
A collapse address delivered with strange tenderness: the singer confronts someone who has burned their own bridges through…
moral collapse denial and self-blindness grief that cannot be felt
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
Johnny Cash
Johnny Cash, in his final recording years, builds an apocalyptic vision almost entirely out of scripture, particularly…
judgment and reckoning mortality apocalypse
James Blake
A stripped-down love song that uses apocalyptic imagery as a backdrop for devotion, insisting that romantic commitment outlasts…
devotion under catastrophe mortality and time faith in another person
James Taylor
A commuter's rant against gridlock turns, almost by accident, into a joke about mortality and then a flicker of environmental…
urban frustration mortality played for laughs environmental unease
Tears for Fears
A song about the collapse of patriarchal control, framed through a female figure who both exposes and dismantles a man's…
patriarchal collapse reckoning and accountability toxic intimacy
The National
A quiet, tense breakup song built almost entirely from repetition, in which the threat of a fight stands in for a relationship's…
relational collapse emotional withholding denial and bargaining
A short, riff-driven warning about crowd panic and the collapse of authority, delivered as a series of urgent commands and grim…
mob mentality loss of control societal collapse
Massive Attack
A slow-burning meditation on decay and dissolution, moving from a compromised birth to an economic wasteland to a final image of…
entropy and decay economic collapse fragile intimacy
Buzzcocks
A short, sneering punk song that uses fast cars as an emblem of empty status-seeking, environmental menace, and mechanized…
consumerism and status environmentalism/safety alienation from modern life
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
King Crimson
A doom-laden meditation on Cold War anxiety and the collapse of moral authority, delivered as a kind of secular apocalyptic…
nuclear anxiety loss of faith/prophecy fear of the future
Joan Baez
Joan Baez's cover of Dylan's song is a sparse, elegiac address to someone being told to abandon a life that has already…
endings and departure transformation through loss dissolution of the familiar world
Big Star
A stark second-person address to someone in the grip of total psychic collapse, delivered by Alex Chilton in one of the bleakest…
depression and self-annihilation abandonment isolation
David Bowie
A hallucinatory street scene fuses American urban unrest with the mythology of revolutionary martyrdom, filtered through a…
revolutionary mythology celebrity worship urban collapse
A hypnotic, half-sung meditation on environmental unease and emotional distance, built from mechanical urban sounds and a flood…
environmental dread urban alienation emotional distance
Randy Newman
A miniature, deadpan ballad built around the 1969 Cuyahoga River fire, in which Newman turns an environmental disaster into a…
industrial pollution irony of civic pride environmental degradation
Joni Mitchell
Joni Mitchell's early environmental protest song works as a series of loosely connected complaints -- about development,…
environmental loss commodification of nature nostalgia and regret
Lorde
Lorde's cover strips Tears for Fears' 1985 synth-pop anthem down to something colder and more brittle, turning a wry commentary…
power and control surveillance complicity
Orbital
Tiny Foldable Cities is an instrumental piece from Orbital's Monsters Exist, its title suggesting miniature, collapsible urban…
urban miniaturism impermanence and portability construction and collapse
A woozy, half-collapsed love song built from disconnected snapshots rather than a story, drifting through washes of noise and…
fractured attention desire as disorientation voyeurism and observation
Warren Zevon
Zevon turns his own house into a stand-in for a body and a country falling apart at once, cataloguing collapse with black comedy…
mortality physical decline national decay
Steely Dan
A supermarket-style PA announcement becomes the herald of an apocalypse, as Steely Dan stages consumer culture's final…
consumerism as religion apocalypse/end times American decline
St. Vincent
A woman narrates a summer of collapse—medication, isolation, avoidance of family and mail—while a chorus repeats a request to be…
depression and isolation medicalization of the self desire for external repair
Talking Heads
A jittery, free-associative track from Talking Heads' late-period vault material, this song stacks disconnected images of…
accumulation and mortality paranoia and self-consciousness loss of control
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
Gorillaz
A track that turns apocalyptic dread into a party anthem, pairing Vince Staples' verses about impending doom and social violence…
apocalypse as spectacle hedonism as coping mechanism police violence and surveillance