“After Dark” is a 2014 song by Mr.Kitty, and as far as we could find, he has never publicly explained what it means. What we can show is where the song comes from, why it sounds the way it does, and how it found a second life online years later.
We describe the song in our own words. This page quotes none of its lyrics.
The verdicts
The song in brief
- Artist: Mr.Kitty (often written Mr. Kitty), the synth-pop project of Forrest Carney.
- Album: Time, released in 2014. Apple Music lists it with 15 songs.
- Track: “After Dark” is track 9, and runs 4:19 on Apple Music.
- Label: credits differ. A 2014 review lists the album as self-released with Juggernaut Music Group. The UK charts list the label as Juggernaut. Apple Music’s listing credits Negative Gain Productions.
That review was published on 11 July 2014. It said Time was nominally part of Carney’s “Dark Youth” series of albums. It also heard the record as close to the “dark synthwave” of other artists.
About this song, the reviewer wrote that it was as “darkly romantic” as anything Carney had written. That is the closest thing to an early, outside description of the song that we could find.
What does “After Dark” mean?
We found no explanation from the artist. We looked for interviews and posts in which he talks about the song, and found none. Lines that circulate online as his explanation come with no interview, date or outlet we could trace, so they are not used here.
That leaves the song itself, and the ways it can be heard. These are readings, not facts. You may well land on a different one.
- A love song. This is the reading closest to the 2014 review, which heard it as romantic. On this reading, night is simply the time when two people can be close.
- Night as freedom. The dark can stand for privacy: a time when you can be yourself without being watched.
- A darker mood. The song can also be heard as uneasy. The same review described the album as a whole as “the sober entry into a whole new world of anxieties”.
The song does not settle which reading is right, and we can’t either. Without the artist’s own words, the meaning you hear is a fair answer for you.
Is “After Dark” demonic? Why does it sound creepy?
Nothing we found connects it to anything demonic. We found no review, interview or official source that describes occult or religious themes in the song. The one review from 2014 that we could read heard it as romantic.
So where might the eerie feeling come from? Here are a few possible sources, none of them sinister.
- The style. Mr.Kitty makes synth-pop, and the 2014 review compared Time to dark synthwave. In that review, “dark” describes a mood and a sound, not a belief.
- Mode and tempo. In one set of listening experiments, people judged music as happy or sad mostly from its mode (major or minor) and its tempo. Those tests used 32 classical excerpts, not this song. We could not confirm the song’s key from an official score.
- The title. “After dark” just means after the sun has gone down. Night brings its own associations, and the title invites them.
- The videos around it. Much of the song’s fame came through other people’s videos, as the next section shows. In our view, that kind of context shapes how a song feels, though that is our reading, not a measured finding.
How a 2014 song went viral
“After Dark” was not new when it took off. It had been out for years before the trends that made it famous.
- 2014: released on Time.
- 2019: a fan-made video set the song to scenes of Jennifer Connelly from the 1991 film Career Opportunities. That date comes from an entertainment site writing in January 2022. It said the video carried the song “out of the underground scene and into the mainstream”.
- March 2021: a TikTok trend, the “side eye challenge”, used it. People filmed their eyes up close and looked away on the beat, to see if their eyes looked a different colour from the side.
- June 2022: it entered the UK’s Official Independent Singles Breakers Chart, where it peaked at No. 8 and spent 42 weeks.
- July 2022: it spent one week on the UK’s Official Independent Singles Chart, at No. 48.
- October 2022: it spent one week on Billboard’s Global 200, at No. 195, on the chart dated 22 October 2022.
Here the order ran trend first, charts later. The song was eight years old by the time it reached Billboard’s Global 200.
Where the phrase “after dark” fits
In ordinary English, “after dark” means after the sun has gone down. That plain sense is the one the dictionary gives.
A title like this sets a time of day and leaves the mood to the listener. That openness may be part of why so many different videos have been able to borrow the song.
How to read a song’s meaning yourself
This is our view, not a rule. When you want to know what a song means, these checks help.
- Look for the artist’s own words, with a date and an outlet. An interview, a liner note or the artist’s own post outweighs any explainer page.
- Check the credits and the release date. Knowing who made it, when, and on which album tells you what the song sat beside.
- Read reviews from the time. A review written when the song was new, like the 2014 one quoted here, shows how the song was heard before any trend.
- Notice what a trend adds. If you first heard a song under someone else’s video, part of what it means to you may come from that video.
- Hold your reading lightly. When the artist has not explained a song, your reading is yours, and that is fine.
What we could not confirm
- An explanation from the artist. We found no interview or post in which he says what the song means.
- Certifications. Other sites report a UK certification for the song. We could not open the official record, so we leave it out.
- The song’s key and exact tempo. We found no official score, only automated estimates.
- Streaming totals. We found no official figure we could open.
How we checked this · Last checked October 2026
- Release details come from a 2014 review and Apple Music's album listing; the chart runs come from the Official Charts Company and Billboard.
- We looked for interviews and posts in which the artist explains the song and found none; lines quoted online as his explanation had no source we could trace, so they are not used.
Checked October 2026.
Sources
- I Die: You Die, review of Mr.Kitty, Time (11 July 2014).Popular
- Apple Music, Time by Mr.Kitty (album listing, read October 2026).Primary
- Official Charts Company, “After Dark” by Mr Kitty, chart history and Mr Kitty artist page.Primary
- Billboard, Billboard Global 200, chart dated 22 October 2022.Primary
- Capital FM, Katie Louise Smith, “TikTok’s Side Eye Challenge: The viral trend explained” (10 March 2021).Popular
- TheThings, Dylan Parker, “The Reason The Internet Is Suddenly Obsessed With Jennifer Connelly” (17 January 2022).Popular
- Cambridge Dictionary, “before/after dark”.Scholarly
- Isabelle Peretz, Lise Gagnon and Bernard Bouchard, “Music and emotion: perceptual determinants, immediacy, and isolation after brain damage”, Cognition 68 (1998).Scholarly