10 Terrible Rock Albums From Genuinely Great Bands

10 Terrible Rock Albums From Genuinely Great Bands

A new album release from a legendary rock act in music is often heralded as a masterpiece before it has got anywhere near a listener’s ears. More often than not, this is a fairly safe bet, as these bands are considered legends for good reason; however, there are regularly notable exceptions to this rule. Make no mistake about it, even the best of bands can release really terrible music.

Like a fitness model loudly breaking wind, this is a moment that breaks all conventional norms. Before the fun begins, it would be remiss not to point out that all of these acts have classic songs and albums that will stand the test of time, creating catharsis and soundtracking life’s great moments for listeners for the rest of time. Just don’t expect any songs from these albums to be on that particular list.

10 AC/DC

Blow Up Your Video (1988)

Accusations exist that AC/DC have essentially created a tried-and-tested formula from the first note of their career, and rode that sucker until the wheels fell off. Angus and Malcolm Young’s blues-driven hard rock may be given dashes of extra flavor, but most AC/DC songs have a 4/4 beat, a catchy blues strut, and a double-entendre-laden vocal narrative dripping in innuendo. However, Blow Up Your Video proves there is such a thing as a bad AC/DC record.

AC/DC haven’t played a song from Blow Up Your Video since 1991.

While the high-octane boogie of «Heatseeker» may have been enough to satisfy some of their more hardcore fans, Blow Up Your Video felt stale next to everything happening in hard-hitting guitar music at the time. Guns N’ Roses had emerged with their unstoppable debut, Appetite For Destruction, and Slayer and Metallica were fuelling the exhilarating thrash metal movement. This collection of sub-par, cliché-ridden duds came at the worst possible time, as this pedestrian and joyless collection made AC/DC look bloated by comparison.

9 Bruce Springsteen

Human Touch (1992)

One of the greatest songwriters of all time, Bruce Springsteen has been consistently releasing fantastic all-American rock music for over 50 years. It stands to reason that there would be one shocking album since his recording debut in 1973. Like many rock acts who thrived in the 1980s, the post-Nirvana landscape of the early ’90s was a difficult time. Springsteen got divorced, traded New Jersey for Los Angeles, and released 1992’s Human Touch, the flattest, most unconvincing album of his whole career.

Cruelly, the album kicks off with its rollicking title track, an anthem powered by passion and The Boss’s undeniable soul. The record then falls off a cliff pretty spectacularly, with Springsteen knocking out dull Americana that’s spectacularly below his usual standard. He’s more than made up for it since, but both Human Touch and Lucky Town, released in the same year, remain maligned to this day for pretty good reason.

8 Foo Fighters

Medicine At Midnight (2021)

Something that’s often correctly said about Dave Grohl’s touring hit machine, the Foo Fighters have a collection of singles and well-known material that can entertain any field of humans for hours at a time, anywhere on Planet Earth. Ask yourself this question though. How much of that music has come from the last 10 to 12 years? Something that isn’t said anywhere near enough about the Foos is that it has been a really long time since they excited people with their new material.

With the glorious exception of their superb 2011 album Wasting Light, the Foo Fighters have struggled to put together anything of real creative merit within the last 15 years. Worst of the bunch is the smug, self-satisfied and lazy collection, Medicine At Midnight. As far removed from the sugar-coated adrenaline rush of «This Is A Call» or sprawling, heartfelt epics like «Walk» and «Aurora» as possible, it is loaded with actively bad rock music that sounds lethargic, uninspired, and lacks the infectious, child-like fun that makes Grohl’s band one of the world’s most beloved rock acts.

7 Def Leppard

Slang (1996)

There aren’t many rock bands that define the 1980’s better than Sheffield’s Def Leppard. Their brand of carefree, good-time rock music had big hair and bigger choruses, but when Nirvana came along and invented sadness in 1991 with their Nevermind album, it was a bad time to be in a band like Def Leppard. Jon Bon Jovi cut his hair and moved with the times, but every other enormous act from his scene was relegated to being considered irrelevant dinosaurs, almost overnight.

Def Leppard took this cultural change a lot worse than almost all of their peers. The band decided to «get grungey» to try and embrace their darkness and move with the times. There was a lot more stubble on the band’s faces, and several ill-advised moments, including the album’s title track where Joe Elliot almost raps. It’s safe to say Warren G was not worrying about Sheffield’s finest taking his spot on MTV. Avoid this album at all costs.

6 Aerosmith

Just Push Play (2001)

Aerosmith have quite a varied reputation. Depending on who you talk to, there are people who love the excess-loving swagger of their Toxic Twins ’70s heyday, but who cannot abide the big-budget Hollywood videos and syrupy ballads that make up much of the band’s well-known material from the ’80s and ’90s. Your writer likes all of these eras more than you like your own parents, but it was on 2001’s soulless Just Push Play that one of America’s greatest rock bands finally jumped the shark.

Aerosmith have been no strangers to using outside songwriters, and some of the band’s most defining moments and albums have large contributions from the likes of Desmond Child and Diane Warren. Just Push Play has outsider contributions so far from the band’s core that it ultimately sounds devoid of the band’s trademark charisma, color, and personality. Tyler sounds bored, and the band sounds uninspired. Aerosmith ordinarily oozes with star appeal and magnetism, but here they unfortunately sound like a 3rd-rate Matchbox Twenty trying to imitate themselves.

5 Kings Of Leon

Can We Please Have Fun (2024)

Kings Of Leon calling their album Can We Please Have Fun before revealing some of the most mind-sappingly tepid rock music ever created is one of the more underrated comedic contributions to 21st century rock music. Scorching through the early 2000s indie rock scene with a mainstream sound that had just enough rootsy Southern charm in it to make them interesting, the ill family’s signature sound captured hearts far and wide. Kings Of Leon’s output eventually became a lot more homogenized and generic, with the likes of «Use Somebody» taking their popularity to new heights and their music to new creative lows.

With their mainstream days long behind them, Kings Of Leon had the freedom to create whatever they wished to in 2024. What they decided upon was to cynically recreate the blandest version of their most critically-acclaimed material imaginable. Bringing nothing to the band’s back catalog, Can We Please Have Fun is an album that satisfies nobody but the men playing it. At least «Sex On Fire» was annoying enough to hate it. This is just sad.

4 Weezer

Pacific Daydream (2017)

Even to this day, Weezer are a band whose back catalog ignites such extreme emotional reactions that Saturday Night Live! devoted an entire skit to it. There are a few records in the Weezer canon that are difficult to assign any real value to, but Pacific Daydream is the one whose existence is hardest to justify. As breezy as it is off-kilter, this bizarre mix of saccharine sweet melodies and zeitgeist-capturing production is so relentlessly peppy that it becomes unbearably annoying in record time.

For a closer look at the pain of being a Weezer fan, Rivers Cuomo and his band produced two albums that were pretty universally enjoyed by the band’s fanbase directly before this turkey of an album. They then it with The Teal Album, a tastefully played cover album largely made up of Dad’s Favorite Driving Songs, adding to this quirky-but-lovable chaos.

Since then, there have been albums influenced by The Beatles on OK Human and ’80s hair metal on Van Weezer. To love Weezer, you have to be willing to embrace this kind of madness, but Pacific Daydream‘s irritatingly upbeat vibe is less like a fun summer soundtrack and more like an endurance test.

3 No Doubt

Push And Shove (2015)

With a glut of albums rammed with era-defining hits, an irresistible melding of ska and new wave, and a once-in-a-generation frontwoman, No Doubt is a band that had it all. Their influence was felt on fashion, pop culture, and music videos, all while crabby music critics continually pushed for Gwen Stefani to leave the band and embrace a pop career. This eventually happened, as Ms. Stefani became an even bigger success in that world, but No Doubt wasn’t ready to retire just yet.

No Doubt included no songs from Push And Shove in their reunion set at 2024’s Coachella Festival.

11 years after their sensational Rock Steady collection, No Doubt released one of the most disappointing comeback albums in memory with Push And Shove. An unconvincing and disjointed collection, the Orange County collective felt like a band that didn’t know how to recreate the magic of the past or have anything of relevancy to contribute to the present. Gwen then went back to her pop career, adding country and Christmas to her canon with Blake Shelton and Santa Claus respectively, and the band teamed up with AFI frontman Davey Havok for the underrated ’80s-inspired Dreamcar project.

2 Red Hot Chili Peppers

Unlimited Love (2022)

It isn’t much of a reach to suggest that guitar prodigy John Frusciante is the catalyst for much of the best material produced by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Present on all the band’s biggest albums (BloodSugarSexMagick, Californication, By The Way), it felt as though the troubled musician’s second departure from the band in 2009 would be his final contribution to the Funky Monks. His return in December 2019 was greeted with much fanfare, for all of these reasons.

The two subsequent albums since his return, Unlimited Love and its -up The Return of the Dream Canteen, have had none of the hallmarks that saw their union bare such rich fruit before. While the second of these albums has the charm of feeling like friends reconnecting musically for their own enjoyment, Unlimited Love doesn’t even have the band’s more comedic creative missteps. Frusciante and the Chili Peppers in unison should never ever feel bland, but not a lick of this sexless and meandering record lands.

1 U2

Songs Of Innocence (2014)

U2 have always been something of a polarizing proposition, no matter how deservedly respected they are. To devotees, they are one of the most powerful, poignant, and moving rock bands to have ever recorded music, but to others, they are a pompous and overrated drag, fronted by one of music’s most loathsome figures. The latter is very relevant, as when 2014’s Songs Of Innocence album came packaged with your iPhone, whether you wanted it or not, it made it very easy for the band’s detractors to take aim.

This incredible act of self-sabotage not only showed all the arrogance of a band that couldn’t comprehend that listeners wouldn’t want their music even if it was free, but also made an unfathomable number of people instantly aware of how bad their new album is. Opening with a nauseating, bloated tribute to punk icon Joey Ramone, it starts at the bottom of the drain and spends an hour trying to tunnel lower. The stupidity of this release has not been topped since, and the creative bar has never been lower for the third or fourth-best band to ever come from Ireland.

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