Lyrics are meant to be understood – or so you’d think.
And yet some of rock and pop’s most beloved acts thrive on the opposite principle: the more opaque, surreal, or just plain untranslatable their words, the greater the fascination. There are the Cocteau Twins, whose glossolalia makes Liz Fraser’s voice feel like an instrument rather than a conveyor of meaning; or Magma, whose Kobaïan language transforms prog-rock mythmaking into an immersive, alien universe.
And what about The Fall, where Mark E. Smith’s cryptic ramblings could sound like drunken gibberish, yet somehow convey a unique, uncompromising truth. Across genres and decades, from surreal post-punk to ethereal dream-pop, from prog to avant-garde, these artists prove that decipherable lyrics aren’t necessary for emotional impact. Sometimes, not knowing exactly what’s being said is precisely what makes the music unforgettable. In these cases, incomprehensibility isn’t a flaw – it’s a feature, a hallmark of singular artistry.
1. Cocteau Twins
Liz Fraser’s voice seems less sung than dreamt. Across albums like Treasure and Heaven or Las Vegas, her vocals hover between English, Gaelic, and a made-up language of emotion known as glossolalia – fluid, vowel-rich and achingly expressive. The words rarely matter; they melt into Robin Guthrie’s chiming guitars and Simon Raymonde’s bass like another instrument.
Fraser herself has admitted that meaning was secondary to sound, using syllables as texture and tone. The result is music that feels both intimate and unknowable, as though you’re overhearing a private prayer in a language that doesn’t exist. You may not understand what she’s singing, but you’ll feel it completely.
Try and decipher: Frou Frou Foxes in Midsummer Fires
2. The Associates
The Associates' gorgeous-voiced, much-lamented lyricist and singer Billy Mackenzie treated language as paint rather than blueprint. His surreal, impressionistic lyrics (Lisp your way through Zurich / Walk on eggs in Munich, anyone?) veer from cryptic to operatic in a single breath. What’s clear isn’t what he says, but how he says it: with delirious drama and fearless emotion, wrapped in that soaring, elastic voice.
Try and decipher: White Car in Germany
3. Simple Minds (early)
Before graduating to stadium anthems around the time of 1984's Sparkle in the Rain, Simple Minds were mysterious and abstract. Albums like Empires and Dance and Sons and Fascination paired oblique, fragmented imagery with motorik rhythms and icy synths. Jim Kerr’s lyrics read like half-remembered dreams or coded messages – all atmosphere, little explanation. You don’t decode them; you drift inside them.
Try and decipher: Thirty Frames a Second
4. Magma
France’s most gloriously baffling export, Magma, invented an entire language – Kobaïan – to tell their sprawling sci-fi mythos about a future utopian planet. Christian Vander’s vision fused Carl Orff-style choral chanting with jazz fusion and prog complexity, sung with such conviction that it feels biblical. You don’t need to understand a word of Kobaïan to be swept up in its operatic power.
The music itself – thunderous drums, massed voices, spiralling rhythms – is the language. Magma’s universe has its own gods, heroes, and even grammar, making them less a band than a self-contained culture. To listen is to enter another world.
Try and decipher: Hortz Fur Dëhn Štekëhn Ẁešt
5. Yes
Jon Anderson’s lyrics sound like they were channelled from a mountaintop. “Mountains come out of the sky and they stand there” – who can argue with that? His words mix cosmic mysticism, sci-fi spirituality and pure sound symbolism. Meaning feels less important than the euphoric syllables riding atop the band’s kaleidoscopic prog soundscapes.
Try and decipher: The Revealing Science of God
6. Sigur Rós
Even Icelanders struggle to understand Jónsi’s lyrics. Some songs are in Icelandic; others are in “Hopelandic,” an invented phonetic language meant to express feeling rather than literal sense. His falsetto soars above glacial guitars and bowed bass like an angel half-remembering words – a kind of emotional Esperanto that transcends translation.
Try and decipher: Svefn-g-englar
7. Genesis (Peter Gabriel era)
In their early-’70s pomp, Genesis made rock that read like Victorian fantasy fiction. Peter Gabriel’s lyrics on Foxtrot and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway teemed with surreal characters – fox-headed women, lizard kings, street urchins wandering through allegorical dreamscapes. His storytelling combined mythology, satire, and absurd theatre, with layers of meaning that defied neat interpretation.
Were they social commentaries, spiritual parables, or psychedelic nonsense? Probably all three. Gabriel’s brilliance lay in how he inhabited these stories – part actor, part prophet, part trickster. The result was prog rock as mythic pageant: confusing, captivating, and utterly unlike anything before or since.
Try and decipher: Supper's Ready
8. Sonic Youth
Sonic Youth's lyrics read like cut-up poetry – street signs, subconscious mutterings, and art-school fragments jumbled into something ferociously alive. Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon’s words often resist logic, but they conjure feeling: menace, longing, disconnection. It’s not about sense – it’s about sound colliding with distortion and feedback in one glorious racket.
Try and decipher: Dirty Boots
9. Kate Bush
Kate Bush writes as though she’s living several lives at once – ghosts, lovers, soldiers, and spirits all find their way into her songs. Her lyrics can be dizzyingly literary ('Wuthering Heights'), deeply surreal ('Get Out of My House'), or startlingly intimate ('The Infant Kiss'). Bush doesn’t just tell stories; she inhabits them, blurring dream and reality. Her words shimmer with metaphor, myth and mystery, leaving listeners unsure whether to analyse or simply surrender. Like the characters she creates, her songs live halfway between theatre and confession – beautiful puzzles whose power lies in their strangeness.
Try and decipher: Get Out of My House
10. Frank Zappa
No one skewered modern life with more bizarre precision. Zappa’s lyrics dart between satire, absurdity, and high art, full of private jokes and grotesque wordplay. He could be vulgar one moment and philosophical the next, mocking everything from consumer culture to rock itself. Songs like 'Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow' or 'Billy the Mountain' sound like dadaist stand-up routines – brilliant, ridiculous, and impossible to pin down. Zappa wrote like an alien anthropologist chronicling Earth’s absurdities, using nonsense as a weapon of truth. The result: lyrics that seem meaningless until you realise they mean everything.
Try and decipher: Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow
11. Jethro Tull
Ian Anderson’s lyrics blend folklore, social satire, and poetic riddle. On Thick as a Brick, he wrote a mock-epic 'concept album' supposedly penned by an eight-year-old prodigy – a send-up so clever it became a prog masterpiece. His words are witty, wordy, and wilfully weird, but never without purpose.
Try and decipher: Thick as a Brick Part 1
12. Talking Heads
David Byrne’s lyrics are those of a man both fascinated and bewildered by modern life. His words tumble out in fragments, non-sequiturs, and surreal observations that mirror the disjointed rhythms of the modern world. In Talking Heads songs, he captures the strange mix of anxiety and wonder that comes with technology, suburbia, and identity in the information age. “This is not my beautiful house!” he cries – a line that’s funny, tragic, and instantly relatable to anyone who’s ever felt out of place.
Try and decipher: I Zimbra
13. The Velvet Underground
Lou Reed’s lyrics walk the line between reportage and poetry, turning street-level realism into something strangely mythic. On the surface, they’re stark dispatches from New York’s underbelly – drugs, art, sex, desire – but beneath the grit lies a web of irony, tenderness, and ambiguity. Reed’s deadpan delivery makes it impossible to tell where honesty ends and performance begins: is he confessing, observing, or playing a role? Probably all three – and that tension is what keeps his songs endlessly fascinating.
Try and decipher: The Black Angel’s Death Song
14. The Fall
Mark E. Smith was rock’s last great word sorcerer. His lyrics – a torrent of slang, surrealism, and social fury – could sound like drunken rambling or prophetic vision. Smith treated language as an instrument, bending syntax and rhythm until meaning splintered. You don’t analyse a Fall lyric; you absorb it. His songs teemed with ghosts, political jabs, and absurd humour – like overhearing a pub argument between Nietzsche and a football hooligan.
Even at his most incomprehensible, Smith’s voice felt truthful. He once said, “If it’s me and your granny on bongos, it’s The Fall.” Likewise, if it’s Smith on the mic, it’s poetry – however indecipherable.
Try and decipher: Jawbone and the Air-Rifle
15. Muse
Muse’s lyrics often teeter between the profound and the preposterous — full of apocalyptic warnings, cosmic paranoia, and dystopian grandeur. Matt Bellamy’s fascination with conspiracy, technology, and transcendence gives their songs a wild, feverish intensity, even when the meaning slips through your fingers. Lines about mind control and revolution might sound overwrought, but paired with the band’s colossal sound, they feel utterly convincing. Muse’s genius lies in making the absurd sound urgent, heroic — and impossible to ignore.
Try and decipher: Micro Cuts
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