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Published Apr 5, 2026, 5:23 PM EDT
Jeremy has more than 2300 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows.
His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He's also very proud of the fact that he's seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He's plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings).
When he's not writing lists - and the occasional feature article - for Collider, he also likes to upload film reviews to his Letterboxd profile (username: Jeremy Urquhart) and Instagram account.
He has achieved his 2025 goal of reading all 13,467 novels written by Stephen King, and plans to spend the next year or two getting through the author's 82,756 short stories and 105,433 novellas.
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Music’s the kind of thing that’s always got your back, and it can be super comforting and cathartic when you need it to be those things. Nowadays, playlists are easily accessible and generated to fit certain moods, and also tailored to fit within the bounds of what you usually like, which can be a blessing and a curse (it’s not always ideal to have the process of searching for stuff taken away), but there’s also something to be said for listening to an album from start to finish.
Albums are what the artist wanted to put out, much of the time. If they weren’t, then albums are also what the producers/record labels wanted to put out. It’s someone’s vision, and the best albums are purposefully put together and paced. Some great pop and rock albums (and maybe some other genres) work as creative pieces that can elevate your mood, while other albums tend to be heavy-going and miserable. Yes, music can have your back, but sometimes, it can also break your back, your heart, your soul, and your spirit. These albums are about breaking things. They are heavy, despairing, and depressing. They're also fantastic, but should only be listened to if you're sufficiently ready to hear something dark.
10 'Nebraska' (1982)
Bruce Springsteen
Most Bruce Springsteen albums released before Nebraska could be defined as bittersweet, because they tended to have a combination of uplifting/inspiring/romantic songs and brutally honest/downbeat ones. Born to Run is probably heavier on uplifting stuff, and the appropriately named Darkness on the Edge of Town has a little more darkness. But then 1982’s Nebraska doubled down on the heaviness, and was an album that offered very little by way of positivity.
If it counts as a spoiler, sorry, but you have to wait for the closing track, “Reason to Believe,” to find something that’s not depressing in an in-your-face kind of way. Nebraska is stripped back in sound, heavy in lyrics, and overall despairing/haunted in its atmosphere. Springsteen sounds like he was going through some stuff at the time, and he puts some serious angst into Nebraska, all the while making it acoustic and folk in sound, rather than in line with his usual heartland rock approach. If you think Springsteen is a one-trick pony, or believe he’s just “that guy who sang about being born in the U.S.A.,” then Nebraska might well be the best album to listen to, to help you see the light, which is ironic, since it’s so darn dark.
9 'Skeleton Tree' (2016)
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Nick Cave has been active since the 1980s, with his band known as Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds being his best and most prolific project. His sound could be termed “rock,” but he’s never really been, like, classic rock in sound, having his fair share of downbeat and emotionally intense albums released before the 21st century… yet none of them are quite as despairing as Skeleton Tree, which is much newer, in the overall scheme of things.
To address the elephant in the room, Skeleton Tree came out at a time when Cave was dealing with an immense personal tragedy, and though work had begun on the album before, some of it was recorded afterward, and it makes all the lyrics about loss, death, and longing hit all the more hard. It’s an album that holds off on giving you an emotional release for a while, because the first half or so is quite eerie and sparse in sound, but then the final three tracks (“I Need You” to “Distant Sky” to the title track) are absolutely devastating, and among the most moving Cave has ever recorded.
8 'Carrie & Lowell' (2015)
Sufjan Stevens
During the 2000s, Sufjan Stevens seemed obsessed with Americana, and famously claimed he wanted to make one album about every single State in the U.S. He only got to two, in the end, but he kept making albums afterward. Maybe a song with a title like “Fourth of July” sounds like it could be a return to that whole Americana thing, but this isn't really a patriotic track, and is instead absolutely devastating, since it’s housed on what might be Sufjan Stevens’ most moving album: Carrie & Lowell.
To be the most emotional Sufjan Stevens album is saying a lot, since 2005’s Illinois was devastating in parts, and then 2023’s Javelin is up there among the most hard-hitting albums of the 2020s so far. But Carrie & Lowell is stripped back and uncomfortably intimate in sound, all the while lyrically unpacking feelings of intense grief, as Stevens wrote the album’s songs after the death of his mother, the titular Carrie, which happened in 2012. The original album is non-stop sorrow, pretty much, but there is a live version of the album (appropriately named Carrie & Lowell Live) that’s a bit more epic in sound, and varied in the sorts of emotions it inspires.
7 'Closer' (1980)
Joy Division
It’s hard to divorce Joy Division from the tragic life of its lead singer, Ian Curtis, and it’s especially hard to divorce the album Closer from what happened to Curtis, since it was released only two months after he took his own life. Joy Division was a band that was more than just Ian Curtis, since its members went on to form the also-great Joy Division after Curtis passed away, but Closer does, for better or worse, feel like Ian Curtis’s album.
Lots of it’s mysterious lyrically, and what you can discern by way of meaning is hardly sunny in nature. It’s also overwhelmingly hazy and harsh in terms of sound, with Closer lacking the sorts of occasionally punchy/immediate tracks that could be found on the first Joy Division album, Unknown Pleasures (like “Disorder” or arguably “She’s Lost Control”). Closer is just all-around heavy and harrowing, but also quite remarkable as an artistic statement for those reasons.
6 'Deathconsciousness' (2008)
Have a Nice Life
The cover of Deathconsciousness is a cropped image of the painting known as The Death of Marat, and it’s a pretty good visual indicator of what you're in for, musically, if you choose to listen to this album. It’s by a band called Have a Nice Life, and it’s perhaps definable as an indie rock album released during a decade when that genre was at its peak, but also, it’s so much bleaker and more despairing than most indie rock albums.
It feels a bit like a more indie – and also artsier – Joy Division, were Joy Division active in the 2000s, rather than at the end of the 1970s. Listening to Deathconsciousness feels a little like drowning, but also drowning slowly, since this goes for a lengthy 85 minutes. It’s a very rewarding album that’s also immersive in a particularly intense way, but you definitely have to be in a certain mood before tackling it.
5 'F♯ A♯ ∞' (1997)
Godspeed You! Black Emperor
Godspeed You! Black Emperor is a band with an odd name, and their albums often have odd titles. Also, the genre they most neatly fit into is a bit odd, too, since it’s known as post-rock, and post-rock is rock of an experimental and very much not pop nature, de-emphasizing vocals and often going beyond the bounds of progressive rock, in terms of playing around with structure, while having songs that are incredibly long.
F♯ A♯ ∞ is intense enough in its atmosphere and sound that it makes a good many dystopian and/or post-apocalyptic movies feel tame in comparison.
This is what Godspeed You! Black Emperor does, but also in their own way, being distinct among post-rock acts. Their best and most famous album is probably the more emotionally varied Lift Your Skinny Fists like Antennas to Heaven (2000), but F♯ A♯ ∞ is the band’s darkest, and it’s intense enough in its atmosphere and sound that it makes a good many dystopian and/or post-apocalyptic movies feel tame in comparison. It’s an album that feels like it’s about the end of the world, but it’s also as oddly beautiful as it is disturbing. Please do not, under any circumstances, listen to it while walking by yourself in the dead of night.
4 'Songs About Leaving' (2002)
Carissa's Wierd
This might be the hardest album to talk about, of all the ones here, so let’s keep things brief. The band behind it, Carissa's Wierd (the typo is intentional), was also short-lived, with Songs About Leaving being the third and final album. It’s their best, and possibly their very bleakest, too, with it being classified as a slowcore album, and also a sadcore album, which is a genuine sub-genre that’s listed under the Wikipedia page for Songs About Leaving.
Maybe it’s a joke. Maybe “sadcore” isn't really a thing, and someone is just trying to make people who are researching a band as depressing as Carissa’s Wierd feel a little better. It’s a collection of incredibly distressing, introspective, and emotionally raw songs that are filled with self-loathing and despair. “So You Wanna Be a Superhero” gives you a pretty accurate taste of what you're in for, being a highlight in terms of songwriting and also feeling like one of the most moving songs here, even if it’s just one track out of 12.
3 'Berlin' (1973)
Lou Reed
What do you know? An album that concludes with a very depressing song literally called “Sad Song” happens to be one of the heaviest albums of all time. It’s Berlin, by Lou Reed, and it’s the best of his post-Velvet Underground albums, not to mention also being one of the great concept albums of all time, telling a despairing story about two people in love who find their lives falling apart because of past trauma, addiction, and violence within the family.
Nothing here is easy, and the second half of the album in particular just gets more and more despairing with each song. The third last track, “The Kids,” is about the couple’s kids getting taken away, is nearly eight minutes long, and it contains audio of children screaming in distress. The penultimate song, “The Bed,” is even more distressing lyrically, albeit not audibly (it is a song that sounds kind of haunted/possessed, though). And then things conclude with the aforementioned funereal “Sad Song,” which is sweeping, kind of melodramatic, but also apathetic/cynical, borderline-satirical. Berlin will just put you right through the wringer, in other words.
2 'A Crow Looked at Me' (2017)
Mount Eerie
Skeleton Tree and Carrie & Lowell have already been mentioned as albums from the 2010s that have lyrics processing death and grief, but those albums don’t cut quite as deeply as the thematically comparable A Crow Looked at Me. It’s an album that’s technically by Mount Eerie, but Mount Eerie is also a project that’s pretty much just Phil Elverum, and A Crow Looked at Me is Elverum’s most intensely personal album to date.
It’s all about him dealing with the early feelings of grief associated with the passing of a loved one, when she was just 35 years old. It’s more about confusion and despondency over catharsis, and you know you're in for a brutal listen when the first song is called “Real Death,” and yet it’s still not nearly as full-on as the absolutely heartbreaking third track, “Ravens.” It’s an album that never gets easier to listen to or revisit, but nor should it. For that, it’s both incredible and extremely hard to recommend in the traditional sense.
1 'Soundtracks for the Blind' (1996)
Swans
Like the aforementioned F♯ A♯ ∞, Soundtracks for the Blind can more or less be defined as a post-rock album, but it also ventures out into far more genres throughout its lengthy duration. It’s longer than plenty of movies out there, with 141 minutes of music all up, which is, like, almost twice as long as plenty of classic double albums (see Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, which clocks in at about 72 minutes, or The Clash’s London Calling, which is 65 minutes long).
Swans originally planned to end, as a band, with Soundtracks for the Blind, but reformed in 2010 and released a handful of other critically acclaimed albums that were also very long. Still, nothing quite touches Soundtracks for the Blind, in terms of sheer ambition and boldness. There are so many songs here that are tremendously depressing, and a few others that are among the creepiest you might ever hear (see
"I Was a Prisoner in Your Skull," "Yum-Yab Killers," and "Volcano," for starters, all of them placed within the first third of the album). Some songs manage to be sad and scary at the same time. If you're in a bad place, it’s the kind of album that'll either speak to you and your personal hardships, or just make you feel worse. One or the other. Why not go ahead and flip that coin?
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