I love me some annoying music

“Alyssa always tortures me with her music,” my friend M said one time. I’ll side step the fact that years later, she learned to love the music of the very same band (Sigur Rós) whose music I was “torturing” her with.

The truth is, I enjoy some musical expressions that others would find irritating. The goal of this post is to share some of them with you. Provided you do not currently have a headache, please proceed to listen to each sound clip below, as much as you can tolerate. I love you.

First, I’ll tell you about Natural Snow Buildings’ 22 minute long composition, “Loki’s Trick.” (Available for free download here) One day I was overhauling the litter in the cat boxes and had this on in the kitchen. My husband came and switched it off, probably because any music that sounds like a wall of noise to him is not generally welcome in his aural landscape.

“Hey!” I protested. “I was listening to that!”

“You…were?” He gave me that look which says, “I question your sanity.”

“Yeah, I was waiting for the good part…the part where he screams.”

“O-Okay…”

So since 22 minutes is a lot to listen to, I’ll tell you that the song starts off as noise, then gets all pretty around 1:30. It builds and builds, till the screaming commences at around 20:20 or so. Enjoy!


The first time I heard Björk’s “Pluto” I thought it was pretty much unlistenable. Then I heard it a second time and it clicked for me. Now I think it’s great! Especially the screaming part, which comes it around 1:45.



Holy Fuck’s “Korock.” I adore this song, but it has this funky, discordant beat that prolly annoys those who are used to more standard fare. Then around 1:20 the beat dissembles into a different form and the fun really begins. They start taking the sounds and running them through some kind of fuzz grinder. This one almost doesn’t belong here in my opinion.


Next, a song that even I would call irritating, Drop the Lime’s “Doomsday Device.” It has this repetitive beat going, and that is fine, until you’ve heard it 200 times too many, and they start conveying it with the keyboard equivalent of a police siren on LSD. It creeps in at around 1:15 and intensifies till the guy intones the title of the track. There’s a blessed brief moment of calm…and then the demonic riff comes back! If you want to induce a headache, this is the song for you. Note: Dancing or hula hooping while listening to the track reduces its Irritation Factor considerably.

Now keep in mind this list is irritating songs that I actually like. There are plenty of annoying songs out there that I don’t like, for example, Willow Smith’s “Whip My Hair.” But who cares about them, ah?