Fugazi
A terse, angry meditation on the failure of language to guarantee anything, 'Promises' treats verbal commitment as a kind of…
distrust of language broken commitment individual autonomy vs. mutual obligation
Pink Floyd
A brief, deceptively gentle interlude on The Wall that frames the trauma of WWII bombing raids through the innocent voice of a…
war trauma lost innocence betrayal of postwar promise
Genesis
A sprawling, impressionistic account of the failed 1715 Jacobite Rising, told through the eyes of a child-like narrator…
failed rebellion and political betrayal childhood disillusionment with authority history repeating itself
Sandy Denny
This is a traditional British/Irish folk ballad given a spare, haunting reading by Sandy Denny, in which a woman recounts…
seduction and betrayal female shame and defiance broken promises
Abbey Lincoln
Abbey Lincoln's 1991 reading of the Depression-era standard strips the song back to its bare, bitter arithmetic: a man who built…
economic betrayal labor and disposability war and its aftermath
Blondie
This early Blondie track (later reworked into "Heart of Glass") strips romantic disillusionment down to a chant-like refrain:…
disillusionment in love self-deception emotional numbness
Fairport Convention
This is the Fairport Convention electric-folk arrangement of the ancient English/Scottish ballad about adultery, betrayal, and…
class inequality adultery and its consequences honor and vengeance
Sade
A quietly devastating account of betrayal, built around the image of returning a letter and everything it contained. Sade's…
betrayal broken trust disillusionment
Hank Williams
A jilted lover addresses an ex-partner who has returned to bars and nightlife, framing her departure as a betrayal of domestic…
betrayal domesticity vs. nightlife wounded pride
Burial
This is a track built almost entirely from a single vocal fragment looped and pitched into a kind of emotional smear, more mood…
betrayal emotional numbness isolation
Joy Division
A bleak meditation on betrayed loyalty, dressed in the language of grand ideals that curdle into disillusionment. The song moves…
betrayal disillusionment failed idealism
Gillian Welch
A traveler recounts a journey to a mythic, menacing place called Scarlet Town, where hospitality curdles into betrayal and…
betrayal mortality folk/ballad inheritance
Wire
A blunt, almost domestic-scale confrontation song built around one sustained image of betrayal-as-stabbing, delivered with a…
betrayal complicity disgust with manipulation
Rush
A narrator recounts a shipwreck deliberately caused by shore-dwellers who lure vessels onto rocks with false lights, then loot…
betrayal false hope/illusion predation and greed
Michael Jackson
A funk-driven complaint about gossip and betrayal, built almost entirely from repetition and chant rather than narrative detail.…
gossip and rumor paranoia and persecution betrayal
Laura Marling
A song addressed partly to a goddess and partly to an absent man, this piece uses classical and religious imagery to explore a…
silencing and voice betrayal religious/mythic guilt
Townes Van Zandt
A ballad about a legendary Mexican bandit and the friend widely suspected of betraying him, told with the flattened affect of a…
betrayal and complicity myth-making versus truth exile and displacement
A weathered ballad about a Mexican bandit and the friend who may have betrayed him, told with the flat, elliptical tone of a…
betrayal and guilt myth-making and unreliable legend exile and diminishment
Burial builds an entire track out of two chopped vocal phrases, repeated and pitch-shifted until they stop functioning as…
betrayal memory and repetition isolation within collective spaces
John Lee Hooker
A stripped-down Delta blues lament built on the image of the drifter, a man cut loose from home and love, cast adrift with no…
isolation betrayal homelessness/wandering
Alison Krauss
A country-soul ballad of quiet devastation, built around a farewell the narrator can barely bring herself to say aloud. Alison…
heartbreak and resignation betrayal the gap between composure and grief
The Beach Boys
A jilted-then-vindicated narrator watches a woman he loves get mistreated by another man, and uses her heartbreak as an opening…
jealousy romantic rivalry self-vindication
Spoon
A cryptic, industry-inflected kiss-off aimed at a music-business figure who's been caught performing sincerity rather than…
authenticity vs. image music industry disillusionment betrayal
Howlin’ Wolf
A blues complaint built on the classic AAB stanza, this song traces the slow ruin of a man exploited financially and emotionally…
exploitation in love aging and abandonment betrayal
The Staple Singers
This is the Staples' take on an old African American spiritual, retelling the biblical Samson story as a folk ballad while a…
betrayal hidden strength divine retribution
Big Star
An opening-track statement of collapse dressed as a rock song, "Feel" uses blunt repetition and a horn-driven arrangement to…
emotional exhaustion betrayal romantic ruin
A touring rock star, isolated and priapic, seeks anonymous sex on the road while his marriage quietly disintegrates in the…
infidelity and its consequences isolation of touring life masculinity as performance
Nas
This is the definitive diss track of the Nas–Jay-Z feud, a single sustained assault built to end an argument rather than…
rap rivalry and hierarchy authenticity vs. fabrication legacy and lineage
Annie Lennox
This is a cover of the Clash song reworked by Annie Lennox into a soul-inflected torch-song confession, trading punk snarl for a…
abandonment financial precarity betrayal
Muddy Waters
A brief, wry blues complaint built around a single pun: a woman leaves her man for a bus driver, and the singer turns the man's…
infidelity sexual innuendo wounded pride
Pixies
A minimal, chant-driven fragment built almost entirely from four repeated phrases, this song trades narrative for atmosphere --…
paranoia violence betrayal
A plainspoken country waltz of heartbreak in which the narrator, abandoned by a lover after sacrificing everything for her,…
betrayal loneliness sacrifice for love
The Fall
This is a plainspoken cautionary tale about romantic self-deception: a man ignores his own instincts, falls hard for a woman who…
self-deception romantic ruin pride and consequence
Van Morrison
A dream-logic ballad in which the narrator revisits scenes of betrayal, cruelty, and violence with a strange, floating calm.…
betrayal and blame dream as psychic space violence and endurance
Bessie Smith
A blues warning delivered as a curse: the narrator threatens a philandering partner with damnation, using the devil as a…
infidelity and betrayal moral reckoning female assertiveness
Gram Parsons
A country heartbreak ballad built on a single sustained metaphor: love as fire, now burning the singer alive from the inside. It…
betrayal and infidelity emotional self-destruction religious/moral desperation
Sam Cooke
A first-person testimony of endurance under racial oppression, built around a single hope that refuses to die even as evidence…
racial injustice endurance faith and doubt
Madvillain
A jealous, wounded rant against a cheating lover and her new partner, delivered as a broken phone call full of accusation, petty…
betrayal and infidelity masculine pride and possessiveness petty revenge
Eurythmics
A song about surviving the end of a relationship by leaning on the smallest, most reliable fact available: the sun keeps coming…
resilience after betrayal renewal and daily ritual solitude
A jealous, wounded narrator catalogs small betrayals -- a new man in town, a broken date, a no-show -- each one triggering the…
jealousy and suspicion romantic betrayal anticipatory dread