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Current 93 is an experimental neofolk band that has been actively recording since 1982. At the helm is David Tibet (né Bunting), who was born in Malaysia from English parents and immigrated to England in his childhood. Originally releasing harrowing Industrial music, Tibet transitioned to a vein of Neofolk known as Apocalyptic Folk by 1988. He has worked with members of Death in June, Coil and Throbbing Gristle, as well as Thomas Ligotti, Tiny Tim and Shirley Collins. Steven Stapleton of Nurse with Wound was also a regular collaborator, appearing on nearly every Current 93 release until The New '10s, when his bandmate Andrew Liles stepped in (and Tibet also regularly appears on Nurse with Wound releases.) Recurring themes of his work include religion (primarily esoteric offshoots of Christianity), mythology, philosophy and nihilism.

Discography:

• Mi-Mort (1983)^note With Nurse with Wound.
• LAShTAL (1984)
• Nature Unveiled (1984)
• Dogs Blood Rising (1984)
• Live at Bar Maldoror (1985)^note Despite the name, this is actually a studio album rather than a live album.
• In Menstrual Night (1986)
• Dawn (1987)
• Imperium (1987)
• Christ and the Pale Queens Mighty in Sorrow (1988)
• Swastikas for Noddy (1988)^note Later renamed to Swastikas for Goddy.
  • Crooked Crosses for the Nodding God (1989)^note Re-recorded, more polished version of the record above.
• Earth Covers Earth (1988)
• Looney Runes (1990)^note Part EP, part live album.
• Horse (1990)^note Originally released as part of a box set with Sol Invictus and Nurse with Wound, later re-released with an extended tracklist as Horsey.
• Island (1991)^note Collaboration with Hilmar Orm Hilmarsson.
• Thunder Perfect Mind (1992)
• Of Ruine or Some Blazing Starre (1994)
• The Fire of the Mind (1994)^note Mini-album.
• Lucifer Over London (1994)^note EP
• Tamlin (1994)^note EP
• The Inmost Light (1995-1996)^note Trilogy of interconnected EPs and albums, based around an overlying message about losing one's innocence.
  • Where the Long Shadows Fall (beforetheinmostlight) (1995)
  • All the Pretty Little Horses (TheInmostLightItself) (1996)
  • The Starres Are Marching Sadly Home (Theinmostlightthirdandfinal) (1996)
• In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land (1997)
• Soft Black Stars (1998)
• Sleep Has His House (2000)
• Faust (2000)
• The Great in the Small (2000)^note More or less a remix/compilation album comprising of every single recording Current 93 was involved with combined into one track.
• Bright Yellow Moon (2001)^note With Nurse with Wound.
• Music for the Horse Hospital (2002)^note With Nurse with Wound.
• Black Ships Ate the Sky (2006)
• Birth Canal Blues (2008)^note EP
• Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain (2009)
• Baalstorm, Sing Omega (2010)
• HoneySuckle Æons (2011)
• I Am the Last of All the Field That Fell: A Channel (2014)
• The Moons At Your Door (2015)
• The Light Is Leaving Us All (2018)
• Invocations of Almost (2019)
• If a City Is Set Upon a Hill (2022)

Tropes present in his works include:

• A cappella: Ian Read and Freya Aswynn's appearances on Swastikas for Noddy, which are ritualistic chants consisting of either a "The Reason You Suck" Speech or Germanic runes.
• And I Must Scream: Discussed frequently during the '90s, usually in relation to Patripassianism (which is the perspective that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are aspects of one entity, whose eternal fate is this.)
• Animal Motif: Many, but the foremost is cats, which were the motif of one of his favorite artists (Louis Wain) and an object of worship in ancient Egypt.
• The Antichrist: Shows up repeatedly in the band's lyrics.
  • "From Broken Cross, Locusts" from Dogs Blood Rising says that the Catholic clergy is this, a very unsubtle Take That! to the Church.
  • The opening spoken-word section from "Beausoleil" (at least on Swastikas for Noddy) features a speech from a man claiming the Antichrist will be a black man. Considering who the song is about, this is likely a Take That! to the Manson Family's racist beliefs.
  • "Hitler as Kalki (SDM)" from Thunder Perfect Mind purports Adolf Hitler to be this and says his goal was to bring about the Apocalypse by killing God/Jesus. He doesn't succeed.
  • According to Tibet, the titular Black Ships from Black Ships Ate the Sky are the Antichrist, only in a much more abstract form.
• Apocalypse How: Most of his works play with this trope in some way or another. Some, like Nature Unveiled and Black Ships Ate the Sky deal with demons and Eldritch Abominations; others like The Inmost Light refer to a personal, yet still very much real and full-scale apocalypse. "The Seven Seals Are Revealed at the End of Time as Seven Bows: The Bloodbow, the Pissbow, the Painbow, the Faminebow, the Deathbow, the Angerbow, the Hohohobow" details a Gnostic interpretation of the Bible's Book of Revelation.
• Apocalypse Wow: His end-of-the-world scenarios can get particularly bizarre or spectacular, from reality-destroying, malevolent boats to surrealistic displays brought about by angry deities.
  • The Inmost Light trilogy portrays the loss of childhood innocence and wonder as its own, very real apocalypse, in glorious and disturbing detail.
• Arc Words: "Black Ships", "Menstrual night", "Imperium", "Arise arise, full of eyes, of eyes", "Baalstorm, sing Omega", "Theinmostlight"... loads of them, really, both arcs within albums and arcs linking albums.
• As the Good Book Says...:
  • "KillyKillKilly (A Fire Sermon)" features a child creepily reciting the Lord's Prayer. This happens two or three times: once in a whisper, then as a panicked shout and in reverse behind the latter recital.
  • The four-part Title Track to Imperium quotes a lot from The Bible. For instance, "Imperium I" quotes directly from the Psalm 23 and the Book of Ecclesiastes.
• Berserk Button: David Tibet strongly resents being identified with the Goth scene.
  • In an interview with German Online Magazine ''Black''👁 Image
    , Tibet has also expressed disliking the application of genre terms like Post-Industrial or Neofolk to his music.
  That's pathetic. They put me into categories that have nothing in common with me.
• Boléro Effect: Pretty much every track on Horsey employs this trope, building in intensity over a repeated noise folk texture.
• Bookends:
  • Swastikas for Noddy begins and ends with two similar tracks, respectively titled "Benediction" and "Malediction". Both are A cappella pieces sung by Ian Read, both with similar lyrics serving as a "The Reason You Suck" Speech directed towards a Demiurge Archetype. In Crooked Crosses for the Nodding God, the same recordings are used, albeit slightly re-edited and also in reverse order (i.e. the "Benediction" recording is now the final track and vice versa).
  • Music From the Horse Hospital begins with Tibet saying "Alpha" and ends with him saying "Omega", the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet respectively, as a reference to the Book of Revelation ("I am Alpha and Omega, the First and the Last.")
  • Black Ships Ate the Sky begins and ends with versions of "Idumæa": specifically Marc Almond's and Shirley Collins' version.
• Broken Record:
  • The sample of "Eve of Destruction" in "Great Black Time", comprising of McGuire singing the word "Destruction" repeated ad infinitum.
  • Christ and the Pale Queens Mighty in Sorrow featured the titular phrase across 25 full minutes of the album. The final track "Night" is a 3-second section of the backing track from the 20 minute title track looping for another 18-and-a-half minutes.
• Call-Back: Occurs all over the place due to Tibet's Worldbuilding:
  • "Ach Golgotha (Maldoror is Dead)", the opening track of Nature Unveiled is an expanded version of "Maldoror Est Mort", previously released on Nurse with Wound's Mi-Mort EP.
    • Also, Andrew Liles' remix of "The Mystical Body of Christ in Chorazim (The Great in the Small)" ends with an excerpt from LAShTAL, Current 93's debut EP.
  • "From Broken Cross, Locusts" from Dogs Blood Rising quotes from a sheet included with vinyl versions of "Nature Unveiled", specifically the words "We know who you are, Antichrist!".
  • The original recording of "Maldoror est Mort" is featured verbatim as the B-side of Dawn.
  • "Happy Birthday Pigface Christus" directly namedrops In Menstrual Night in its opening verse.
  • "The Ballad of the Pale Christ" re-mentions "Fields of Rape" and slightly rewrites the opening lines of "Great Black Time". (Specifically, "And his mantle of strength descends on those in his service.")
  • Swastikas for Noddy alone has a lot of these:
    • The opening line of "Black Sun Bloody Moon" from Swastikas for Noddy indirectly harkens back to a line from "Ach Golgotha (Maldoror is Dead)" where Tibet shouts "The sun went black, the moon it bled".
    • "The Final Church" name-checks Nature Unveiled.
    • "(Hey Ho) The Noddy (Oh)" features the line "In fields of rape I lie", harkening back to "Falling Back in Fields of Rape".
    • Multiple call-backs in "Beausoleil":
    • Firstly, the lyrics repeatedly refer to dog's blood (a call-back to Dogs Blood Rising).
    • The line "grey benediction of the final church" name-checks two previous tracks on the album: "Benediction" and "The Final Church".
    • "Death in June under a menstrual moon" indirectly harkens back to In Menstrual Night, which is in turn mentioned again later in the song.
  • "The Blue Gates of Death" reiterates the concept of In Menstrual Night - "where dreams go to, when they die" - verbatim in the final stanza.
  • All the Pretty Little Horses opens with a small recap of its preceding conceptual EP, Where the Long Shadows Fall.
• The Cameo: Björk(!) provides backing vocals on the song "Falling".
  • Thomas Ligotti shows up at the very end of All the Pretty Little Horses, reading a passage from his story "Les Fleures".
  • Shirley Collins speaks a few lines to kick off Thunder Perfect Mind.
  • Black Ships Ate the Sky: Each version of "Idumaea" is this for the singers, save for Anohni's (she gets another solo later in the album) and of course David's.
• Careful with That Axe: From him and a few of his guests, including Lilith Stapleton, who was at most eight years old at the time. "She Took Us to the Places Where the Sun Sets" is a particularly horrific example.
• Cats Are Magic: A recurring motif in his lyrics.
• Child Hater: His work consistently characterizes God as such—in fact, "The Seahorse Rears to Oblivion" suggests the first three things God made were children's crying, a Creepy Doll and a similarly unsettling rocking horse.
• Cluster F-Bomb: It's not immediately apparent, but Annie Anxiety's muttering in "The Mystical Body of Christ in Chorazin (The Great in the Small)" actually involves Spanish swear words, most notably "la pinga"^note "penis" and "maricón"^note "faggot".
• Concept Album: Most of them. Each one has a page of text dedicated to its concept. Many of them are about how the Apocalypse will occur, or Gnostic interpretations of Biblical scripture.
  • In Menstrual Night: Where dreams go to when they die.
  • Swastikas for Noddy/Crooked Crosses for the Nodding God: While the albums both are thematically rather disjointed, a recurring theme is the infamous Manson Family and their viewpoints, as well as the end of the 60's and the hippie movement, making both of them at least semi-conceptual.
  • Of Ruine or Some Blazing Starre: David Tibet reflects on his religious self-discovery and how he came to his present theological viewpoints.
  • The Inmost Light trilogy deals with maturing from childhood and adulthood and losing the senses of innocence and wonder in the process, portraying such loss as though it were the end of the world.
  • In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land is based on four thematically linked Thomas Ligotti stories, one of several collaborations David Tibet has done with the author.
  • Soft Black Stars: Tibet reflecting on his ending relationship with his then-girlfriend.
  • Sleep Has His House is David Tibet processing his father's death in near-real time.
  • Faust: An adaptation of a short story of the same name by Count Eric Stenbock, in turn based on the legend of Faust.
  • Bright Yellow Moon: Based on Tibet's experience of being hospitalized for treatment of peritonitis, as well as recounting another patient's untimely death. The liner notes describe the events that the album was inspired by in excruciating detail.
  • Black Ships Ate the Sky: The End of the World as We Know It at the hands of the titular Eldritch Abomination.
  • Aleph on Hallucinatory Mountain: Retells stories from the Book of Genesis (especially the story of Cain and Abel) and the fall of Lucifer, piecing together the story of how sin came into the world.
  • The Light is Leaving Us All: Conceptually similar to The Inmost Light, as both tackle the concept of loss of innocence and both are about a "light" that is implied to be the human soul.
• Cover Version:
  • "St. Peter's Keys All Bloody", the closing track from Dogs Blood Rising, comprises of a mash-up between two rather unnerving cover versions of "The Sounds of Silence" and "Scarborough Fair".
  • Two from Swastikas for Noddy:
    • "Oh Coal Black Smith" is basically a Darker and Edgier rendition of "The Two Magicians", made popular by Steeleye Span.
    • Later, there's an unrecognizable cover of "(This Ain't) The Summer of Love" by Blue Öyster Cult.
  • Thunder Perfect Mind features a version of "May Rain" by Krautrock band Sand (titled "When the May Rain Comes" on the record).
• Creepy Children Singing: From the beginning Tibet has used this to evoke a particular uncomfortable mood. His earliest use, the epic "Falling Back in Fields of Rape", featured a child yelling an insanely creepy poem. It still continues to this day, to a certain extent.
  "Mothers, babies, bleeding! You stand there laughing! Unquestionable; unconfronted! Poetic lines on the art of dying! Falling back in fields of rape! Falling back in fields of rape!!"
• Crucified Hero Shot:
  • Nature Unveiled features the Gero Cross (a depiction of the crucifixion on display at the Cologne Cathedral) on its cover art, with a coloured filter put on top of it.
  • The band's early logo was a drawing of the crucified Jesus imposed on a unicursal hexagram👁 Image
    , reflecting the band's references to both Christianity and Thelema.
  • The liner notes to In Menstrual Night also features a drawing of Noddy crucified on a unicursal hexagram, based on a drug-induced hallucination of Tibet's (that later inspired the title of Swastikas for Noddy).
• Cryptic Conversation: A recurring theme, and a recurring source of inspiration.
• Dark Reprise:
  • On Thunder Perfect Mind, the early track "A Sadness Song" is reprised near the end as "A Sad Sadness Ending". The latter has a similar structure to the previous, with a few differences. For one thing, the former is mixed clearer and is a duet between David Tibet and Rose McDowall, while the latter has a more muddled mix and features only McDowall on vocals.
  • "The Starres Are Marching Sadly Home" ends on a reprise of "All the Pretty Little Horses", performed by Shirley Collins. What makes this a dark reprise is the ominous, almost empty soundscape the song is performed in (compared to Tibet and Nick Cave's more melodic performances on All the Pretty Little Horses), as well as the gruesome rewrite of the song's lyrics.
  "Bees and butterflies peckin' out his eyes / Poor little thing cries: 'mommy'"^note Originally, the line went "fluttrin' round his eyes".
• Digital Piracy Is Evil: He takes this a bit more literally than most. Promotional releases of Aleph At Hallucinatory Mountain even opened with the following announcement:
  This is a promotional CD. Anyone illegally selling, copying, uploading or downloading this material is condemned to eternal hellfire. Happy listening, God is love.

He would later go on to say that he was only half-joking.

• Drone of Dread: Present in a lot of his stuff. Dogs Blood Rising and Nature Unveiled are built mainly around this, and it still pops up frequently in his folk material. "Twilight Twilight Nihil Nihil" is an especially unnerving example.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • The band's early work is noticeably different from the folk music Current 93 was known for later, comprising of harsh, tape-loop laden Sound Collages more reminiscent of Industrial and Dark Ambient than anything else. Only in the late 80's/early 90's material of the group did they move into their more well-known folk style.
    • LAShTAL, their debut EP, is even more odd, as it is mostly made up of cult-like Industrial soundscapes, with little of the tape loops and atmospheric soundscapes of their next few albums.
  • Even the folk material has shades of this trope. Imperium and Christ and the Pale Queens, Mighty in Sorrow are essentially Industrial albums that sample folk music. Due to the presence of Douglas P., the folk material from the band's transitional period is a lot harsher and less pastoral sounding than the albums with Michael Cashmore.
  • Also, in a minor case, the band initially named themselves 93 Current 93. The first 93 was cut from Imperium onwards and it's stayed that way ever since.
• Eldritch Abomination: The Black Ships. Also, possibly, The Inmost Light.
• Epic Rocking: All of Current 93's early albums except for Dogs Blood Rising comprise of ca. 20 minute tracks separated over one vinyl record. Other examples include:
  • Their guest appearances on Nurse With Wound's early cassette tapes are all over 6 minutes long.
  • Dogs Blood Rising: "Falling Back in Fields of Rape" (14:40), "From Broken Cross, Locusts" (6:04) and "Raio No Terrasu (Jesus Wept)" (13:56) all qualify.
  • The non-album single "Happy Birthday Pigface Christus" is 6:04 minutes long.
  • Imperium: The four part Title Track, if counted as one "track", comes out at 25 minutes. The remaining tracks on the album are all over 6 minutes long save for "Time Stands Still" and "Be".
  • "Crowleymass" in its longer 7 minute version, as well as the Maxi single B-side "I Arise" (11:43).
  • Christ and the Pale Queens: "Forever Changing" (9:36), "Christ and the Pale Queens" (19:57) and "Night" (18:24).
  • Swastikas for Noddy has "Beausoleil" (8:33). Its re-recorded version Crooked Crosses for the Nodding God features a slightly shorter version (7:58) retiled "The Ballad of Bobby Sunshine". Additionally the latter album features "Looney Runes" (6:17).
  • "Hourglass for Diana" from Earth Covers Earth (6:43).
  • All tracks on Horsey, except maybe "The Death of the Corn" (which runs at 5:59).
  • "Anyway, People Die" from Island (7:07). The bonus track "Crowleymass Unveiled" also counts (7:41).
  • Thunder Perfect Mind: "All the Stars Are Dead Now" (9:08) and "Hitler as Kalki (SDM)" (16:28). The bonus tracks featured on Emblems also include "Our Lady of Horsies" (6:34), "Maldoror is Ded Ded Ded Ded" (12:10) and "They Return to Their Earth" (6:18)
  • Of Ruine or Some Blazing Starre: "The Teeth of the Winds of the Sea" (7:15), "The Cloud of Unknowing" (7:28) and "Dormition and Dominion" (6:19)
  • The EPs between Of Ruine or Some Blazing Starre and "Where the Long Shadows Fall" consist of only over 6 minute tracks (except Lucifer Over London which features the 5:43 track "Sad-Go-Round").
  • The Inmost Light: Both of the conceptual EPs are over 19 minutes long. All the Pretty Little Horses also features "The Frolic" (8:11), "Twilight Twilight Nihil Nihil" (8:22) and "The Inmost Light Itself" (9:29).
  • All of the tracks on ''In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land" are over 10 minutes long.
  • Soft Black Stars has "Larkspur and Lazarus" (6:05), "Judas as Black Moth II" (6:17) and "Chewing on Shadows" (9:48 on CD, 12:06 on vinyl). "Judas as Black Moth" is 9:33 minutes long in its full unedited form.
  • The non-album track "Lazy Moon" from An Introduction to Suffering is 18:27 minutes long.
  • "I Have a Special Plan for This World" is exactly 22 minutes long. It's vinyl B-Side "Excerpts from Bungalow Tapes" is 18:40 minutes long.
  • Sleep Has His House has "The Magical Bird in the Magical Woods" (8:47), "Immortal Bird" (6:33), "Niemandswasser" (6:07) and the title track (24:17)
  • Faust and The Great in the Small both consist of one large track each. The former is about 36 minutes long, while the latter is over an hour long, making it the longest track in the entire project.
  • Bright Yellow Moon has "Disintegrate Blur 36 Page 03" (17:30), "Nichts" (7:45) and "Die, Flip, Or Go to India" (11:02)
  • All four renditions of "The Seahorse Rears to Oblivion" are over 6 minutes long. The longest, recorded live at Tonic, is 7:37 minutes long.
  • Music from the Horse Hospital, once again, consists of one long track running about 41 minutes.
  • Both Hypnagogue pieces are over 20 minutes long. "Hypnagogue II" in particular pushes towards 30 minutes.
  • Black Ships Ate the Sky features "Black Ships Were Sinking into Idumea" (11:05).
  • Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain features "Invocation of Almost" (8:48), "On Docetic Mountain" (8:14) and "Not Because the Fox Barks" (10:13).
• Everything's Louder with Bagpipes: "Inerrant Infallible (Black Ships at Nineveh or Edom)" uses bagpipes.
• Face on the Cover:
  • The cover of Earth Covers Earth, a photo of the involved musicians posing in front of a tree.
  • Faust is a variation, as the cover art doesn't depict any member of the group, but instead an Extreme Close-Up of Count Eric von Stenbock, whose writings the album is based on.
  • Birth Canal Blues LIVE features the band members all standing in front of a concrete building. Notably, all members are afflicted by a distortion effect, except David Tibet.
  • Special mention also goes to Black Ships Heat the Dance Floor, showing David Tibet in a swimming pool with two scantily clad women while sitting in a blowup toy.
• Fake Guest Star: Steven Stapleton, Michael Cashmore, and others.
• Genre Mashup: As a folk singer—he primarily does English or Celtic folk, but will link it together with such things as drone, noise rock and industrial.
• Genre Roulette: While most of his career has been gothic folk music, his early industrial drones have crept back periodically into his work. He's also experimented with new age, synth pop and even metal every so often.
• God Is Evil: Frequently played with through references to Gnosticism.
  • One line in particular from "Black Flowers, Please" heavily seems to imply this perspective.
  "Well christus tell us that little children suffer" / "It's only right that we should learn to suffer too"
  • "The Seahorse Rears to Oblivion" repeatedly states this, putting into question the traditional Christian view of an omnibenevolent, omniscient and omnipotent God. Among other things, God is said to have created children's crying before he created "the worlds" and treats the stars like little more than cattle (Tibet describes God whipping the stars at one point), who are forced to return to their "home" (a metaphor for human souls having to return to God after death).
• Gratuitous Foreign Language: Many. Of note: quite a few of them are dead languages, associated with old religious texts or, more recently, fallen empires.
• Growing Up Sucks: Exaggerated: The Inmost Light and The Light is Leaving Us All portray it as, quite literally, the end of the world.
• Harsh Vocals: Very rare, but "She Took Us to the Places Where the Suns Set" uses this trope to terrifying effect.
• Have a Gay Old Time: Occurs prominently on a few occasions, usually as the result of quoting old poetry.
  • "Falling Back in Fields Of Rape" does this rather deliberately—"rape" is also an archaic shorthand for rapeseed.
• Hot as Hell: He believes that Satan manifests as beauty of all forms, which is why the concept tends to be a recurring motif in his art and music.
• I Am the Band: David Tibet is Current 93, though he has a fairly regular cast of collaborators.
• Ironic Nursery Tune: Tibet is obsessed with Noddy and its nursery rhyme influence is present in all of Tibet's folk work.
  • Some of their earlier records, in particular In Menstrual Night, the "Happy Birthday" single and Thunder Perfect Mind also feature in some way the Japanese children's song "Tōryanse👁 Image
    ", usually in the background of a larger piece. "Sucking Up Souls" in particular has a buried recording of Keiko Yoshida singing the song amongst the larger cacophony of voices that comprise the piece.
• Jump Scare: "She Took Us to the Place Where the Sun Sets" starts with a minute or so of tolling clocks and elegant classical piano, before suddenly exploding into David Tibet's incredibly distorted Harsh Vocals shouting in a Voice of the Legion. He even gets one last line in after the song has already ended.
• Kids Rock: For the times when this isn't scary as all hell, it ventures into softer singalong or backing vocal territory.
• Kind Hearted Cat Lover: Beyond making them a recurring theme in his work, he's kept several of his own at any given time. He even posts pictures of them to the band's Facebook page. Aww.
• Last Note Nightmare: Has appeared in several songs over the course of his career—even ones that were already soul-crushingly terrifying.
• Leitmotif: Many albums have one, from chord progressions or instrument parts to lyrics, or even entire songs. Black Ships Ate the Sky is the most prominent case, featuring nine different renditions of the Methodist hymn "Idumaea."
• Looped Lyrics: Common, and in multiple instances, overlapped with BSoD Song or Madness Mantra.
• Lyrical Dissonance: Rather common—"Misery Farm," "The Beautiful Dancing Dust," "The Frolic," among others.
• Madness Mantra: "MALDOROR IS DEAD" and "JESUS WEPT" were two that were repeated several times early in his career.
• Mad Oracle: He even describes himself as one during "Black Ships Were Sinking Into Idumaea":
  And if I make no sense to you
  Well, I make no sense to me
  The dreams I have are sticky as dreams
  That leave trails of words
  That will mean churches' fall!
• Miniscule Rocking: Appears just as frequently as the opposite trope.
  • The final track of the "Happy Birthday" single, a 25 second long parody of "Happy Birthday to You".
  • "Be" from Imperium (0:53).
  • Most of the tracks on Swastikas for Noddy and its rerecording Crooked Crosses for the Nodding God are under 2 minutes long. Most of these are interludes.
  • "The Dilly Song" from Earth Covers Earth (1:08).
  • The opening track of ''Thunder Perfect Mind", aptly titled "A Beginning" (0:44). The bonus tracks also include "Red House" (0:28) and "Anyway, People Die" (1:46).
  • Some of the interludes from Of Ruine or Some Blazing Starre also count, the shortest being 22 seconds long.
  • "Calling for Vanished Faces I" (1:50) and "The Inmost Light" (1:45) from All the Pretty Little Horses.
• Mood Whiplash: Frequent and extreme. The Inmost Light is notable for swinging back and forth between hauntingly beautiful neofolk and terrifying industrial drones with very little warning.
• New Sound Album: Imperium transformed Current 93's harrowing drones into psychedelic free-form jams and solidified Tibet's signature Spoken Word in Music vocal delivery style. It also introduced Current 93's signature neofolk sound, which wasn't embraced fully until Swastikas for Noddy, two albums afterward.
  • There are instances where he ditched the standard neofolk sound but mostly makes his signature poetic speak-sing vocals intact:
    • Soft Black Stars doubles down to piano only sound reminiscent of Arvo Pärt sometimes (some tracks feature minimal strings and ambience).
    • Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain is literally Current 93 if they were a stoner rock band.
    • HoneySuckle Æons, some tracks go back to the Soft Black Stars-like piano-based minimalism and some take inspiration from Arabic folk music.
    • I Am the Last of All the Field That Fell continues the piano-based sound of HoneySuckle Æons but also incorporates influences from Dark Jazz artists like Bohren & der Club of Gore and the Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble.
• Nightmare Fuel Coloring Book: A few cases, but the liner notes for Black Ships Ate the Sky stand out for featuring actual childrens' drawings.
• Non-Indicative Name: The title Live at Bar Maldoror would make you think it is a live album performed at some place called Bar Maldoror. Actually, it's a live-in-studio recording re-arranging two earlier pieces, with "Bar Maldoror" simply being the name of the venue Current 93 and (when they still performed live) Nurse with Wound would play at.
• Ominous Latin Chanting: A recurring motif, most prominent in his first two albums and The Inmost Light.
• Piss-Take Rap: Crowleymass, done in conjunction with HÖH, pulls this off with remarkable aplomb.
  "Don't give us no sass, or we'll kick your ass
  For we're the heralds of Crowleymass!"
• Precision F-Strike: Tibet doesn't often swear, once or twice per album at most, but it sticks out quite clearly when he does.
• Punny Name: Looney Runes. He even played this up by having a pastiche of a golden age character on the cover, with the back reading Merry Malaise.
• Real Dreams are Weirder: Tends to pop up on occasion, since Tibet's beliefs profess that all dreams, even ones that fall under this category, are the soul's way of communing with God.
• Rearrange the Song: Reworkings and alternate mixes are a very common practice, be they individual songs (some of which get mashed up live) or entire albums (as was the case with Swastikas for Noddy, Sleep Has His House, and Black Ships Ate the Sky, among others), to say nothing of Like Swallowing Eclipses, in which Andrew Liles remixed five of his albums and two of his EPs.
• Religious Horror: Many of Tibet's works fall under this; it helps that the religion in question is Gnosticism.
• Remix Album: For whatever reason In Menstrual Night has two of these: A Little Menstrual Night Music (remixed by Andrew Liles) and How He Loved the Moon (Moonsongs for Jhonn Balance).
  • Like Swallowing Eclipses is a whole boxset of remixes of every Current 93 album up until Dawn, as well as "I Have a Special Plan for This World" and Faust.
• Rule of Three: In both his music and his nonmusical writings, he often repeats a single word, phrase, or sentence three times over.
• Sampling: Possibly in homage to his friend Steven Stapleton, "Great Black Time" spontaneously includes the entirety of "California Dreamin'" by The Mamas & the Papas, from start to finish. Granted, its buried by many other sounds, so it may not be obvious at first.
  • "Where the Long Shadows Fall" is built upon a loop of the castrato singer Alessandro Moreschi singing.
  • Nature Unveiled and Dogs Blood Rising are mostly built around tape collages with David Tibet sometimes providing vocals. Notable samples include Gregorian choirs, a little girl singing nursery rhymes, and a man giving a furious "The Reason You Suck" Speech to the listener.
• Sanity Slippage: A recurring theme.
• Scary Musician, Harmless Music: Alternatingly inverted and averted. Their music can be panic inducing at times, but Tibet himself is a polite and friendly man who adores cats.
• Self-Backing Vocalist: In an interesting take on this trope, Tibet's multiple vocal takes are usually entirely different and do not match up perfectly when heard side by side.
• Shout-Out: Everything from old children's rhymes to the works of Louis Wain.
  • Finnegans Wake is referenced a few times, notably as the lyrics to "Be" from Imperium.
  • "Thunder Perfect Mind" is based on the Gnostic poem The Thunder, Perfect Mind, an extended monologue by a deity describing their contradictory nature.
• Spoken Word in Music: Quite a bit, usually from guest performers. Tibet himself borders on this most of the time.
• Surreal Horror: Many, many examples, among them the Black Ships. Current 93's music in general carries a hallucinatory, dreamlike feeling, to the point where most of the band's work can be summed up as this trope.
• Take That!:
  • The liner notes to Nature Unveiled feature an unsubtle one towards the Roman Catholic Church, referring to the Pope and clergy as the Antichrist.
  • "A Gothic Love Song" points its barbs at goths and their pretenses.
  I see all too clearly now why you could be discarded.
  And though I could pray for you, I probably shan't,
  Having had my cup filled up
  With your lies and your makeup.
  You were nothing thinking you're something.
• The Stars Are Going Out: A recurring topic, be it in songs ("The Starres Are Marching Sadly Home"; "The Seahorse Rears to Oblivion") or in albums (Black Ships Ate the Sky.)
• Viewers Are Geniuses: His work will make a lot more sense if you have a robust knowledge of various occult and esoteric topics.
• Villain Song: His are some of the strangest. One notable example is "The Frolic", which is from the perspective of John Doe, the villain in the Thomas Ligotti story the song is named after.
• We All Die Someday: Considering Tibet's predilection for apocalypse scenarios and Christian mysticism, this trope is entirely inevitable. There's even a song called, "Anyway, People Die".
• We Didn't Start the Führer: "Hitler as Kalki (SDM)", which posits that Adolf Hitler was the Antichrist and that his end goal was to murder Christ and bring about the apocalypse.
• The Wild Hunt: The climax of Tamlin involves a human ambushing them to take him away.
• World of Symbolism: Tibet's lyrics are loaded with hidden double-meanings referencing Gnosticism, Christian history, and other esoterica.