Why Pop Music Sounds Darker and What That Says About Us

Hearing evolved not just to detect danger, but to regulate emotion and synchronize communities.

Over the past 50 years, American pop music has steadily shifted toward darker, slower, and more emotionally intense sounds. This isn’t just nostalgia talking. Large-scale analyses of Billboard charts show clear trends: fewer major keys, more minor keys, slower tempos, and lyrics increasingly centered on sadness, stress, and anger.

One new wrinkle comes from a 2025 Scientific Reports paper (Foramitti et al.) analyzing over 20,000 US Top 100 lyrics from 1973–2023: it found long-term rises in stress-related language alongside drops in positive sentiment and lyrical complexity, but major shocks like COVID-19 actually coincided with an attenuation of those trends, suggesting people may sometimes gravitate toward emotion-incongruent music as a form of mood regulation (i.e., escapism) rather than “more darkness” in the moment.

At its core, this shift reflects a broader cultural change. Where pop once served as glossy escapism, today it prioritizes authenticity. Artists are rewarded for vulnerability and emotional honesty, mirroring a society that is more open about mental health but also more weighed down by economic insecurity, political polarization, climate anxiety, and a nonstop news cycle.

Technology has amplified this mood. Streaming platforms optimize for “vibes” and emotional states, often reinforcing melancholy through mood-based playlists and algorithmic recommendations. Modern production tools (digital, isolated, and bass-heavy) also tend to create tenser soundscapes than the warmer, communal recordings of earlier eras.

Importantly, darker music isn’t inherently a problem. For many listeners, it offers catharsis and connection: the relief of hearing private anxieties reflected back. The real concern is imbalance. When stress-heavy music dominates, it can trap listeners in an emotional loop.

The path forward isn’t about forcing happiness into pop. Instead, it’s about widening the emotional palette: encouraging discovery over mood-matching, supporting communal music spaces like dance floors and live venues, reinvesting in music education, and, most critically, addressing the societal stressors that shape the art in the first place. A healthier culture naturally produces a fuller spectrum of sound.

REFERENCES

Foramitti, M., Nater, U.M., Lamm, C. et al. SSocietal crises disrupt long-term increases in stress, negativity, and simplicity in US Billboard song lyrics from 1973 to 2023. Sci Rep 15, 41733 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-28327-5  

Veblen KK, Waldron JL. Fast forward: Emerging trends in community music. The Oxford handbook of music education. 2012 Sep 6;2:203-19.

DATA

OSF | Diachronic Analysis of Stress, Sentiment and Complexity in Lyrics of Popular Music between 1973 and 2023

BLOGS

Hearing Research: Music in the Streaming Age

DISCUSSIONS

US pop music has grown darker and more stressed over 50 years: Words related to stress, anxiety and pressure increased 81% from 1973 to 2023, tracking rising depression and anxiety. Lyrics became more repetitive and less complex, tracking declines in education test scores and cognitive measures. : r/science

Happy Music Could Help You Recover From Motion Sickness

Motion sickness is a frustrating travel companion. Whether you’re reading in a car, riding a bus, or sitting in a self-driving vehicle, that familiar dizziness and nausea can quickly ruin your day. While medications and sensory tricks are common solutions, new research suggests that your playlist might also be a powerful tool.

A study published today, September 3, 2025, in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience explored how different genres of music affect motion sickness recovery. The findings? Joyful and soft music significantly helped participants feel better, while sad music actually made things worse—even compared to no music at all.

Researchers from a collaborative team in China recruited 30 participants and used a highly realistic driving simulator (complete with a steering wheel, pedals, and a surround-sound system) to induce motion sickness.

Once participants started to feel queasy, they were asked to recover while listening to one of four music types: 

• Joyful music

• Soft music

• Stirring (passionate) music

• Sad music
  

  A control group had no music at all.

While participants reported their feelings, researchers also measured their brain activity using EEG (electroencephalography). This allowed them to build a machine learning model to objectively track changes in motion sickness severity.

Joyful music reduced motion sickness severity by 57.3%, and soft music by 56.7%, making both highly effective in helping participants recover.

Surprisingly, sad music reduced discomfort by only 40%, which was less effective than sitting quietly without music (43.3%). The emotional weight of sad tunes likely deepened feelings of discomfort.

Stirring music helped somewhat (48.3% improvement), but wasn’t as consistently beneficial as joyful or soft music.

EEG Confirmed the Link

The researchers used a neural network model to analyze brainwave data, achieving 85.6% accuracy in detecting motion sickness states. They found that a brain activity measure called Kolmogorov–Chaitin (KC) complexity in the occipital lobe (the brain’s visual center) strongly correlated with sickness severity.

Music doesn’t just entertain—it can change your brain state.

Soft music may calm the nervous system, reducing dizziness by lowering stress and balancing sensory signals.

Joyful music might distract from discomfort by activating reward centers in the brain, lifting mood and reducing nausea.

Sad music, however, can intensify negative feelings, amplifying discomfort instead of soothing it.

With autonomous driving technology advancing rapidly, more passengers will spend travel time reading, working, or watching videos rather than focusing on the road. This shift could make motion sickness more common, making solutions like real-time, music-based interventions especially valuable.

The study even suggests future in-car systems could monitor brain activity or physiological signals to detect motion sickness early and automatically adjust music playback to help passengers recover faster. 

While this research offers exciting insight, it’s still early days. The study used a small group of participants and a driving simulator rather than real-world conditions, so more work is needed to confirm its findings on the road.

Still, there’s no harm in experimenting with your own motion sickness soundtrack. Next time your stomach churns on a winding road, slip on your headphones—skip the ginger candies for a moment—and try letting music work its magic.

Go for gentle, calming pieces like The Swan by Camille Saint-Saëns or Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1 to soothe your senses. Or, if you’d rather boost your mood and distract yourself from queasiness, opt for bright, cheerful classics like Benny Goodman’s Sing, Sing, Sing or Louis Armstrong’s On the Sunny Side of the Street.

Your perfect playlist might just become your best travel companion.

REFERENCE

Li Y, Li Y, Li Y, Luo B, Tang B and Yue Q (2025) A study on the mitigating effect of different music types on motion sickness based on EEG analysis. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 19:1636109. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2025.1636109

Other musical suggestions

River Flow in You: orchestral version on youtube

Sheep may safely graze: on youtube

Clair de Lune, Claude Debussy

Weightless , Marconi Union

Spiegel im Spiegel, Arvo Pärt

Ambient 1: Music for Airports, Brian Eno

Elegia - New Order

Just Add Fish

Imagine waking up one day in the not-so-distant future with a strange craving for nuts and a sudden urge to swim in circles. No, you're not losing it - you've just signed up for Humanity 2.0: The Bio-Upgrade Edition.

Tooth Fairies, Prepare for Mass Layoffs. Squirrels have been holding out on us. These adorable little tree-huggers have been casually regrowing their teeth their entire lives, thanks to a quirk of evolution known as elodonty—a fancy way of saying “teeth that never stop growing.” (Yes, like toenails you keep trimming back every week.)  

Scientists, inspired by our nut-hoarding cousins, are now exploring how humans might regrow teeth too. Clinical trials are under way to see if we can stop being dental snowflakes and finally grow a fresh molar or two. In this future, losing a tooth in a bar fight or to a rogue popcorn kernel won’t mean years of implants or awkward partials—it’ll mean 6-8 weeks of waiting and a celebratory steak.

Hearing Loss? Just Add Fish. Now let’s swim over to our aquatic miracle workers: zebrafish. While they may not ace a SAT or fetch your slippers, zebrafish are quietly revolutionizing hearing research.

These little swimmers have an internal sonar system (called the lateral line) made of teeny-tiny structures called neuromasts. When damaged, zebrafish just regrow them - like it’s no big deal. Scientists noticed this, blinked in disbelief, and then got to work figuring out how we could do the same.

Turns out, two genes - ccndx and ccnd2a - control how these fish pull off their auditory magic trick. It’s like finding out there’s a “reboot hearing” switch coded into their DNA. The goal now? Hack that code, port it to humans, and voila! No more batteries, implants, or pretending you heard what your spouse just said.

What's Next? Regrowing Our Cool? With regenerative medicine gaining speed, teeth and hearing might just be the beginning. Lost your sense of smell? Your knee cartilage? Your youthful optimism? There might be a gene therapy for that.

In the future, instead of aging like fine wine, we may just cycle through repairs like a vintage Mustang - new tires, fresh upholstery, a rebuilt transmission, and ears that hear better than your grandkid’s.

Hearing restoration will be as routine as getting a flu shot - minus the lollipop. Picture this: instead of fiddling with hearing aids or struggling to lip-read in crowded restaurants, you simply get a painless inner ear injection packed with reprogrammed stem cells and a dash of zebrafish-inspired genetic wizardry. Over the next few days, your damaged hair cells regenerate, your neural pathways recalibrate, and suddenly you’re catching the faint hum of ceiling fans and the subtle sarcasm in your teenager’s voice again. Audiologists may soon trade in tuning forks for gene sequencers, and the phrase “What did you say?” might finally go extinct - along with cassette tapes and awkward Bluetooth earpieces.

Just imagine:

Hearing Beethoven in high fidelity (again).

So next time you see a squirrel gnawing on a tree branch or a fish wiggling through an aquarium, give them a little nod of thanks. They may not know it, but they’re paving the way for a world were losing a part of yourself doesn’t mean it’s gone forever.

And if you do start craving acorns or feel an urge to school-swim with friends - maybe take a break from the gene therapy clinic. Or don’t. The future’s weird, and we’re here for it.

REFERENCE

Lush ME, Tsai YY, Chen S, Münch D, Peloggia J, Sandler JE, Piotrowski T. Stem and progenitor cell proliferation are independently regulated by cell type-specific cyclinD genes. Nat Commun. 2025 Jul 14;16(1):5913. doi: 10.1038/s41467-025-60251-0. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-60251-0 PMID: 40659618; PMCID: PMC12259956.