13 October Albums🦇

My favorite goth, shoegaze, and horror-inspired music

Sep 23, 2025

Content warning: Self-harm, violence, explicit language

Over the past two years I’ve challenged myself to listen to a new album, start to finish, every single day, and I track them all in an ever-growing spreadsheet.

As a horror enthusiast and closeted goth, I often gravitate toward the eerie, the unsettling, and the Halloween-adjacent. Here are, in no particular order, some of my favorite albums to soundtrack this spooky season.

PERVERTS - ETHEL CAIN (2025)

Genre: Drone / Ambient - United States

In the morning, I will mar myself again…Shame is sharp, and my skin gives so easy. - “Punish”

Hayden Silas Anhedönia, known professionally as Ethel Cain, shocked her audience with the release of this bold album in January of this year. While the minimal lyrical content continued to explore Southern Baptist horror, a recurring motif throughout her discography, the terrifying electronic droning and audio jump scares set Perverts apart from her earlier work. I found “Pulldrone” especially unsettling.

On release day, I insisted my boyfriend listen to “Perverts,” the twelve-minute opener, and “Punish” during our drive home from a museum date, and he was rightfully disturbed. If you were a victim of the Zendaya Hat trend on social media, you’ve likely already heard fragments of the opening song.

This is my favorite of Hayden’s works to date. An album that will continue to haunt me for years to come.

JUJU - SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES (1981)

Genre: Post-punk - United Kingdom

Whilst you conquer more orifices of boys, goats, and things. Ripped out sheep's eyes. No forks or knives. - “Arabian Knights”

London-based Siouxsie and the Banshees were pioneers of the post-punk goth scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s. After stumbling into an unnamed band together, vocalist Siouxsie Sioux and bassist Steven Severin must have pleased the spirits of Samhain, because they quickly exploded in the undead scene. Over time, they would release eleven studio albums, top the charts, and become the unofficial face of goth.

Though I’m still working through their discography, Juju was an immediate favorite. No skips. Each listen transports me to the early 1980s Batcave club in central London, hair dyed black and teased high, a batwing coffin necklace around my neck, and a theatrical darkness growing within me.

The perfect album to soundtrack a Halloween cookie-baking session. Your cookies will likely taste like the dawn of goth, as well.

SHE REACHES OUT TO SHE REACHES OUT TO SHE - CHELSEA WOLFE (2024)

Genre: Gothic rock - United States

And I would go through the fire to get to you. - “Dusk”

Chelsea Wolfe has said she often suffered from sleep paralysis as a child. Though terrifying for a young girl, perhaps it was the patron saints of Hades preparing her for a career as a beautifully macabre, gothic artist. I’m somewhat convinced Wolfe is an actual vampire, as eternal as the circular and serpentine album title.

On my first listen, I found myself replaying the crescendo into the gorgeously guitar-heavy climax at the three-minute mark of “Dusk” at least half a dozen times. Just as the title suggests, the song serves as the perfect audio sunset for the album.

I like to imagine vampires listen to this album before they close their coffin lids, ready to dream of long-lost lovers from centuries past. An ode to the full Hunter’s moon of October. Her earlier works have already been queued for my Halloween 2025 soundtrack, and I’m thrilled to sink my teeth in.

RAINBOW BRIDGE 3 - SEMATARY (2021)

Genre: Horrorcore - United States

D-D-D-D-DJ Sorrow, turn the fuck up!

Picture this: you pull up to a vape shop just outside Chicago. The air inside smells like weed and expired Juul pods. Behind the counter, a twenty-something, recently demoted from manager to cashier, is mid-screaming match on the phone with Satan, who happens to be the shop’s owner and also his stepdad.

“You’re not my real dad!” he screams, slamming his Android onto the counter with the fury of two white Monsters. He storms outside, leaps into a dented red minivan, airbrushed with two bikini-clad demonesses wielding dual katanas, and peels out of the parking lot. As he screeches away, he blasts the stereo loud enough for the entire strip mall to hear. This album is likely what would be playing.

Disorienting and hellish, this album is not an easy listen and doesn’t try to be. Impressive work from twenty-year-old (at the time) Zane Steckler, son of a painter mother and music-producer father who worked on the score for the 1999 film Pokémon: The First Movie.

A stark contrast to Pokémon’s orchestral polish, this album is polarizing, like many on this list. Some critics dismissed it as “SoundCloud bullshit,” but I was immediately hooked by its fabricated demonic soundscape. This is a cut above your average SoundCloud horror trap. It takes skill to make something so intentionally abrasive. Fun as hell, too. I appreciate when artists clearly enjoy themselves.

I recommend this album for a late-night jog.

CRYSTAL CASTLES - CRYSTAL CASTLES (2008)

Genre: Electronic / Synth-pop - Canada

La cocaína no es buena para su salud. - “Untrust Us”

I first discovered this electronic duo in middle school, during the golden age of Tumblr, after stumbling across “Crimewave” in a random YouTube video. For years, I immersed myself in their music, falling in love with song after song, until a classmate told me that Crystal Castles had been “cancelled.” The news broke that Ethan Kath had been accused of sexual, mental, and physical abuse against Alice Glass, who left the duo in 2014.

Heartbroken, I grieved for Alice’s pain and the shattered image of Crystal Castles I carried in my head. I still find myself watching Alice Glass Tiktok edits, my favorite being a clip of her berating fans who harassed her at a concert: “If you grab my tit, I’ll fucking kick you in the head!” Preach, girl.

Though I continue to wrestle with the ethics of streaming music from artists accused of abuse, this self-titled debut remains a quiet favorite of mine. “Vanished” is likely my most played song of all time.

Perfect for slipping on headphones and conjuring a solo cybergoth club night in your bedroom, sans cocaine.

MYSTIC STYLEZ - THREE 6 MAFIA (1995)

Genre: Horrorcore / Trap - United States

Glock nineteen is tucked nicely down my Fruit of the Looms. - “Break Da Law ‘95’”

The godfathers of trap, DJ Paul and Juicy J, deserve far more recognition for their contribution to the genre. Listening to Mystic Stylez nearly thirty years later, I can’t help but notice the cheap mimicries in “horrorcore,” trap, and phonk.

Memphis-based Triple Six (a not-so-subtle nod to the devil’s number) layered sinister samples, haunting synth melodies, and cheap drum-machine beats under hypnotic, violent lyricism. While the group eventually earned two platinum records, I still haven’t gotten around to those and instead, I’m stuck in the foggy, occult underbelly of their debut.

It’s almost funny, a lot of people my age only recognize Juicy J as the guy who hopped on Katy Perry’s “Dark Horse.” Hardly the same as whispering chants about Satanic sacrifice over 808s but hey, range.

This October, you’re very likely to catch 👍this white girl 👍at a stoplight, green smoothie in cupholder, mouthing along to “shakin' like a mothafucka when I lock you down tight” on my morning commute to the cemetery office. Hard bar.

D.O.A. THE THIRD AND FINAL REPORT OF THROBBING GRISTLE - THROBBING GRISTLE (1978)

Genre: Industrial - United Kingdom

When somebody tells you that there is a level of pain beyond which the human mind, beyond which is the level of pain of the lady on the potty chair…She's burned from the waist down. That's what keeps her alive: the tubes. - “Hamburger Lady”

Throbbing Gristle, boundary-pushing pioneers of industrial music, made sounds that lived up to their name. This album is uniquely disturbing, so much so that I had to pause halfway through my first listen. Still, I found the chopped vocals and tape hiss hauntingly beautiful, especially on “Weeping,” and I inevitably returned to suffer through the album again.

“Hamburger Lady” draws its lyrics from a fictional letter by artist Blaster Al Ackerman, who worked in a U.S. burn unit after returning from Vietnam. I first encountered the track in Gaspar Noe’s surrealist horror Enter the Void (2009), and then again in Rose Glass’ queer western thriller Love Lies Bleeding (2024). Both films explore human frailty, mortality, and extreme violence, and no song embodies that sentiment more grotesquely or effectively.

Recommended for fellow sentient meat bags who recognize, and can stomach, the fact that hamburger life can end relatively easily.

LOVELESS - MY BLOODY VALENTINE (1991)

Genre: Shoegaze - Ireland

Turn my head into sound. I don't know when I lay down on the ground. You will find the way it hurts to love. Never cared…You will see, oh, now, oh, the way I do. - “Sometimes”

I’ve been meaning to include this album on my spooky-season list for a long time, so imagine my horror when I went to relisten this morning and discovered it had vanished from Spotify due to copyright issues. So here I sit, hunched over a grainy YouTube upload like a freak.

Loveless means a lot to me and to countless sadboys over the past thirty-five years. Nothing short of a shoegaze masterpiece, this album drags you through the primordial ooze of depression, anger, and fleeting acceptance. Every listen nearly brings me to tears.

Its genius lies in the layering: unorthodox tunings, guitar glide, and relentless tremolo arm abuse. The vocals don’t float above the music, but sink into it, with Kevin Shields and Bilinda Butcher’s voices half-buried in the noise.

Fun fact: if you tell your doctor this is your favorite album, they’ll prescribe you Lexapro on the spot.

VIRGINS - TIM HECKER (2013)

Genre: Electronic / Ambient - Canada

Despite the title, there is little innocence in this instrumental album. Like Ethel Cain’s Perverts, Tim Hecker’s Virgins is terrifying electronic work, which he once described as “antagonistic to the idea of ambient,” despite often being labeled an ambient record. Impressively, the album was built from live ensemble recordings instead of digital layering.

The cover alludes to the infamous image of Abdou Hussain Saad Faleh (“The Hooded Man”) tortured by the U.S. Army at Abu Ghraib Prison in 2003 during the Iraq War. The track title “Incense at Abu Ghraib” juxtaposes the imagery of a cleansing ritual with the prison’s horrific reputation for cruelty.

As someone born in 2001, I’m still working to self-educate about the atrocities of that era. This album pushed me to research the Iraq War and encounter the Hooded Man image for the first time. Even without the historical context, this album is a gorgeously dark composition from an important voice in music. It takes extreme skill to speak without words.

Recommended for both virgins and sex-havers alike.

OCTOBER RUST - TYPE O NEGATIVE (1996)

Genre: Gothic metal - United States

The 28th day she'll be bleeding again, and in lupine ways we'll alleviate the pain. - “Wolf Moon (Including Zoanthropic Paranoia)”

No Halloween playlist would be complete without October Rust. Nothing literally screams Halloween like Peter Steele (may he rest in peace) crooning about his girlfriend’s girlfriend and the salty sweat dripping down her bosom.

Campy and psychedelic, this is a relatively palatable metal album for anyone dipping their toes into the genre. If there is ever a day when you feel your Halloween spirits are low, throw this bad boy on and I guarantee you’ll be howling at the moon in no time.

I don’t have much else to say about this album, other than note that there is an instrumental track titled “The Glorious Liberation of the People’s Technocratic Republic of Vinnland by the Combined Forces of the United Territories of Europa.”

If you listen to this, you can be my druidess.

UNKNOWN PLEASURES - JOY DIVISION (1979)

Genre: Post-punk - United Kingdom

Oh, I've walked on water, run through fire. Can't seem to feel it anymore. - “New Dawn Fades”

Even if you’ve never listened to Joy Division, you’ve likely seen this album cover before, splashed across a $30 Hot Topic tee or pinned to a dorm room wall. Pre-dating Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Juju, Unknown Pleasures is another cornerstone of post-punk that makes me nostalgic for an era I never lived through.

The band’s story is as haunting as their sound. Joy Division disbanded in 1980 after frontman Ian Curtis died by suicide at just twenty-three. Their two albums remain permanently etched in goth and post-punk history, and the surviving members went on to form New Order, steering toward a more synth-driven, new wave direction.

With guitar lines that glitter in the darkness like dew on a spiderweb, this album will always be an October favorite of mine. Gothic comfort food.

SOUNDTRACKS FOR THE BLIND - SWANS (1996)

Genre: Post-rock / Gothic rock - United States

Why can't I hide inside your malleable, electric face? - “Animus”

The Birthing tour stop at Mohawk in Austin, Texas was easily one of my favorite concerts of the past year. At one point, Michael Gira responded to a fan shouting “I love you!” with a deadpan “I loathe being loved.” Sums up Swans perfectly. A truly magical group whose devotion to their craft is undeniable. Like their namesake, they’re majestic and trumpeting with a sharp bite hidden in their beaks. Though not always labeled goth, their crowds are a sea of black and chains.

Much of their discography is an acquired taste, but after falling in love with “I Am the Sun” from The Great Annihilator, I tore through the rest of their catalog and only sank deeper.

From Soundtracks for the Blind, “I Was a Prisoner In Your Skull” spirals into a crescendo of demonic babble before collapsing into spoken word. There is a ton of variety in the tracks: instrumentals, unsettling vocal pieces, eerie digital editing. Recurring lyrical themes address self-hatred, disability, cannibalism, cruelty.

Swans are not for everyone, but for those willing to take the plunge, they’re unforgettable. Recommended whether you are blind or not.

SAVED! - REVEREND KRISTIN MICHAEL HAYTER (2023)

Genre: Southern gospel - United States

I've shuttered my windows and locked myself in. I won't succumb to this world full of sin. I'm staying put till God tells me His plan, to run for my life and get out while I can. - “I’M GETTING OUT WHILE I CAN”

I never expected a Southern gospel album to creep onto my horror list, but this one unsettled me more than most. Growing up, I attended a Southern Baptist church every Sunday, morning and night, and my home radio cycled only through Christian stations. Gospel was the soundtrack of my upbringing, shaping my early musical tastes with themes of God’s love, sacrifice, and wrath.

Kristin Hayter, once known as Lingua Ignota, adopted the born-again persona of Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter in 2022. Saved! dives into American folk-horror and apocalyptic Christian imagery, evoking the terror of eternal damnation unless sinners are washed in the blood of Christ. A theology of fear harnessed to scare listeners straight.

Recorded on a 4-track and broken cassette player, the audio itself is unnerving. The opener, “I’M GETTING OUT WHILE I CAN,” abruptly cuts off fifteen seconds early, spilling into scrambled static and indecipherable preacher babble, as if caught mid-sermon speaking in tongues. The volume lurches unpredictably from track to track, making the whole record feel like a box of forgotten tapes pulled from a dust-choked church attic.

Like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, Saved! is a horror album disguised as worship. A sinister sermon.

If there are any spooky albums you feel I’ve missed and would like to recommend, please let me know. Still catching up on a lot of great music.

🌿🖤
Cap’n

captain knapton

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?