October Playlist
As October folds into dusk, the light dims and the air grows deliberate, and so does the rhythm of the music that belongs to it. Our October playlist feels like walking through a misted city at night: romantic, mysterious, and faintly haunted. It bridges Japanese alt pop and K-pop, R&B, where melancholy meets allure. Each song inhabits its own world, yet their emotional pulse is similar, showing a bittersweet glow beneath fading light.
When we think of autumn songs, certain emotions instinctively surface. Curious about the reason, songs were analyzed by similar categories in music. Musically, they hovered around 90 to 110 BPM, seeming like walking slightly fast, but slow enough to breathe, yet restless enough to keep moving forward. 808 bass lines(a specific type of bass that sounds like kick drums) hum like low fog beneath clean electric guitars and Rhodes chords. For methods in singing, soft falsettos rise and dissolve into reverb. Most stay in minor keys of A minor, E minor, and D minor, circling through progressions that never quite resolve. Producers blend lo-fi warmth with digital precision, layering whispering vocals and trap-style hi-hats inside wide, cinematic space. As Halloween is the most representative event occurring during the autumn season, it displays the sound of a place that has learned to live quietly with its ghosts.
These are well shown in the songs included in our playlist. One typical song that shows this is “Iris Out” by Kenshi Yonezu. According to the music introduction from his album, Kenshi Yonezu described the song as an effort to “draw light from within darkness.” In interviews, he has said he wants his music to “capture both melancholy and allure. Capture the beauty of something fleeting and the comfort of its ache.” Built on orchestral timbres and synthetic bass, Iris Out balances contradictions. It is cinematic yet intimate, seeming to be shimmering as autumn’s half light. As he intended, its short runtime (2 min 32 sec) leaves a lingering sense of yearning, as if the intensity of its allure fades too quickly, crystallizing into pure melancholy.
Where Yonezu turns inward, Red Velvet’s "Psycho" externalizes the same tension, a fragile melody dressed in glossy menace. The track’s minor harmonies, also 808 driven heartbeat, and silky falsettos make desire sound dangerous, a waltz between sanity and surrender. In SM Entertainment’s production notes, the song was described as “a high-gloss blend of elegance and madness,” embodying the group’s trademark concept of “the Red and the Velvet”, pop brightness tainted by obsession. Psycho feels like melancholy refracted through mirrors. Its allure lies in how beautiful distortion can be.
The final turn comes with Tomonari Sora’s “鬼ノ宴 (Feast of Ghosts),” which transforms darkness into ritual. Built on triplet trap rhythms and reverberant piano, it stages a banquet between the living and the unseen. The lyric “The voice of hell hits the ear, and stepping off the path isn’t so bad” is eerie yet tender. Like Yonezu and Red Velvet, Sora doesn’t dramatize fear; he seduces it, turning the grotesque into grace.
Together, those songs define Dark Pop as restraint, beauty, and the irresistible pull of the melancholic. It shows unresolved seventh or suspended chords, deep bass that breathes rather than strikes. The harmonic tension mirrors autumn’s physics, as light shortens, colors cool, and beauty that decays.
To experience this music properly, you don’t simply listen but you surrender. Wait until night settles. Put on headphones outside, feeling the breeze of fall. Let the sub bass vibrate against your body and the upper notes hover like cold air around you. It doesn’t matter if you are sitting outside, inside, or looking through a rain soaked window. These songs were made for that moment when motion slows but emotion lingers.
Autumn music doesn’t demand attention; it waits. It hums in the breath between beats, in the melancholy that draws you closer instead of pushing you away. And if you listen long enough, you’ll hear that sometimes the most alluring light is the one that flickers inside the dark.