Rock music has always thrived on pushing boundaries.
And few themes have been as potent – or as controversial – as darkness and the occult. From the 1960s onward, bands tapped into the imagery of witchcraft, mysticism, and apocalypse to shock, provoke, and create atmosphere. Sometimes it was tongue-in-cheek – psychedelic whimsy dressed up as sorcery. Other times it was deadly serious, with artists embracing ritual, Satanic references, or sheer sonic menace.
The late 1960s and early ’70s proved especially fertile: Black Sabbath emerged as the very sound of doom, Coven performed full-on ‘Satanic Masses’, and Led Zeppelin’s runes and Crowley associations fuelled endless speculation. By the mid-’70s, Alice Cooper and Blue Öyster Cult were turning nightmares and esoterica into theatre, while prog rock bands like King Crimson conjured apocalyptic soundscapes.
And this fascination with the darker side didn’t end with the era of flares and denim jackets, either. In the 1980s, metal band Slayer made darkness brutal and unrelenting, while across the following decade Marilyn Manson flirted with occult themes, blending shock-rock theatrics, dark symbolism, and satanic imagery to provoke, unsettle, and challenge mainstream morality. More recently, Swedish doom rockers Ghost have revived the entire tradition with camp flair and catchy riffs.
These 11 albums show how rock’s shadowy side has evolved across decades – sometimes scary, sometimes playful, always tapping into humanity’s enduring appetite for the forbidden.
1. Black Sabbath – Black Sabbath (1970)
The rain, the thunder, and that infamous three-note riff – this was the sound of a new kind of darkness in rock. Released, appropriately enough, on Friday, 13 February 1970, the eponymous debut album from Birmingham’s Black Sabbath ushered in the whole heavy metal genre, with its songs steeped in imagery of witches, black masses, and fear itself.
Ozzy Osbourne’s tortured wails, Tony Iommi’s down-tuned guitar, and Geezer Butler’s fascination with the occult created an atmosphere of dread few had ever heard in popular music. While the band later distanced themselves from Satanist associations, their debut’s aura of diabolical menace was undeniable, cementing their reputation as pioneers of dark rock.
2. Coven – Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls (1969)
If Sabbath hinted at the occult, Chicago’s Coven dove in headfirst. Their debut album featured songs like, er, ‘Black Sabbath’ – in fact released months before Ozzy and company used the same song title – and ‘Pact with Lucifer’.
But Coven went further. Witchcraft… closes with a full-length ‘Satanic Mass’, reportedly the first on a rock album. Lead singer Jinx Dawson styled herself as a high priestess, and the group openly used occult hand gestures decades before they became part of rock iconography.
Critics were horrified, the record was withdrawn, and Coven became semi-forgotten until later re-evaluations gave them their due as pioneers of occult rock. In retrospect, their theatrical embrace of ritual and Satanism paved the way for everything from Alice Cooper to Ghost.
3. Led Zeppelin – Led Zeppelin IV (1971)
One of rock’s most revered albums of all time also carries some of the genre’s most enduring mystical associations. Guitarist Jimmy Page’s (pictured above) obsession with the celebrated occultist Aleister Crowley (he went so far as to buy Crowley’s former dwelling, the eerie Boleskine House on Loch Ness, Scotland) fed rumours of occult practices, while the band’s decision to forgo a title in favour of mysterious runes only deepened the intrigue.
The album’s epic centrepiece ‘Stairway to Heaven’, with its references to ‘the piper’ and ‘the May Queen’, has been picked apart for hidden meanings ever since. Whether intentional or not, the aura of the arcane became part of Led Zeppelin’s enduring mythology.
4. Black Widow – Sacrifice (1970)
Overshadowed by Sabbath, Leicester occult rockers Black Widow actually went even further into Satanic imagery with their own debut album. Sacrifice features songs like ‘Come to the Sabbat’, a gleefully ritualistic ode to black magic. Their live shows included mock ceremonies and ritual sacrifice, which both scandalized and fascinated audiences.
Though never commercially huge, Black Widow’s commitment to the more theatrical side of performance earned them a cult following, and they’re now remembered as one of prog’s strangest, darkest offshoots.
5. Blue Öyster Cult – Agents of Fortune (1976)
Though often playful in tone, Blue Öyster Cult leaned heavily on occult and esoteric imagery, from their mysterious ‘hook-and-cross’ logo to lyrics about death and the supernatural. Fourth album Agents of Fortune brought them mainstream success thanks to ‘(Don’t Fear) The Reaper’, a haunting meditation on love, mortality, and fate that became an unlikely hit. Combined with their cryptic album art and links to sci-fi and horror writers like Michael Moorcock, Blue Öyster Cult cultivated an aura of mystery that blurred rock with the arcane.
6. King Crimson – In the Court of the Crimson King (1969)
Prog rock’s first great masterpiece also carried an atmosphere of foreboding rarely matched in rock. From the apocalyptic despair of ‘Epitaph’ to the surreal menace of the title track, the album conjures visions of doom, medieval mysticism, and cosmic unease.
The iconic screaming face on the cover only heightened its unsettling impact. While King Crimson weren’t explicitly occult, their sound and imagery tapped into a darker imaginative vein that placed them alongside Sabbath and others as visionaries of rock’s shadowy possibilities.
7. Alice Cooper – Welcome to My Nightmare (1975)
Alice Cooper had already perfected shock rock, but Welcome to My Nightmare parlayed the nascent genre into a concept album. Structured as a child’s descent into night terrors, it introduced characters like the sinister Steven (a childlike, vulnerable figure trapped in twisted dreamscapes, who would crop up regularly in Cooper’s albums thereafter) and revelled in macabre theatricality.
Backed by a TV special and extravagant stage show, the LP blurred rock with horror in a way that felt both campy and genuinely unsettling. Cooper became rock’s master of the nightmare spectacle.
8. Rolling Stones – Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967)
Meant partly as a response to The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper, the Stones’ psychedelic detour leaned into occult connotations with its title alone. While the band themselves saw it as tongue-in-cheek, its trippy, otherworldly sound fuelled rumours of a band dabbling in darker forces. Playful or not, it cemented the Stones’ reputation as rock’s bad boys.
Later, songs like Sympathy for the Devil (1968), with its first-person Satanic narrator, fanned the flames of speculation. The band’s association with the darker side of psychedelia, links to Aleister Crowley imagery, and friendships in London’s countercultural underground, only intensified their slightly demonic aura. Then, their tragic 1969 Altamont concert, with its violence and fatality, inspired whispers of a ‘Stones curse’.
9. Marilyn Manson – Antichrist Superstar (1996)
Few albums in the ’90s provoked outrage on the same level as Marily Manson’s sophomore album. Produced by Trent Reznor, Antichrist Superstar isa theatrical, industrial-metal descent into nihilism, Satanic imagery, and societal collapse. Manson cast himself as both Antichrist and rock messiah, a grotesque inversion of American values designed to horrify parents and enthral alienated youth.
Songs like ‘The Beautiful People’ and ‘Tourniquet’ just dripped with menace, while the album’s apocalyptic narrative echoed the theatricality of earlier occult rock acts. Politicians condemned it, churches protested it, and Antichrist Superstar quickly became one of the decade’s defining shock-rock statements – deliberately standing in the lineage of Cooper, Sabbath, and Coven.
10. Slayer – Reign in Blood (1986)
With its opening cry of ‘Angel of Death!’ and its relentless, bludgeoning pace, Reign in Blood helped set the parameters of a brand new sub-genre: thrash metal. Slayer, though, weren’t just purveyors of unsettlingly fast metal – their imagery leaned heavily on Satan, death, and apocalyptic visions.
While critics accused them of glorifying evil, the band insisted their use of occult and violent themes was mere theatrical provocation. Whatever the intent, the result was one of the darkest, most brutal albums ever released by a major label, pushing occult and horror imagery deep into thrash metal’s DNA.
11. Ghost – Opus Eponymous (2010)
Most recently, Swedish doom metal outfit Ghost have revived the theatrical occult rock of the ’70s with uncanny precision. Opus Eponymous introduced Papa Emeritus and his masked Nameless Ghouls, delivering hymns to Satan teasingly wrapped in catchy, retro hard-rock riffs. Tracks like ‘Ritual’ and ‘Con Clavi Con Dio’ blended Sabbath heaviness with Blue Öyster Cult melodicism, but with lyrics straight from the Black Mass.
Unlike the shock of Coven or Cooper, Ghost presented their Satanism with tongue-in-cheek camp, winning over both metalheads and pop fans in the process. Opus Eponymous cemented their place as standard-bearers for the occult rock tradition.
Pics Getty Images
