There are bad songs... and then there are these, which are nothing but bad songs. Woe betide whoever attempts to listen to any of these in their entirety.
Important Note: To ensure that the album is judged with a clear mind and the hatred isn't just a knee-jerk reaction, as well as to allow opinions to properly form, examples should not be added until at least one month after release. This includes "sneaking" the entries onto the pages ahead of time by adding them and then just commenting them out.
- In 2016, actor Corey Feldman released the double album Angelic 2 the Core: Angelic Funkadelic/Angelic Rockadelic. It started production in 2006, but also tried (and failed
) to finish production through Indiegogo under the Working Title Elev8or 2 Ascension, and it shows. Angelic 2 the Core tried to combine funk with rock... plus dubstep, jazz, and often-outdated dance pop, to incomprehensible results. The guest performers (like Fred Durst, Snoop Dogg, Jon Carin, Nina Hagen, and Kurupt) don't really help save it, thanks to Feldman's bizarre vocals on songs like "We Wanted Change". Every review this album got was either negative or sarcastically positive. Anthony Fantano also made a 50-minute long Sanity Slippage review of this thing, which you can watch here. Fantano would later go on to label Angelic as the worst album of the 2010s. The podcast Jukebox Zeroes also did a two-part episode on the album, in which they definitively label it THE worst album of all time, at least until they hear Nostalgia Critic’s “The Wall.” Brad Taste In Music suffered through it live here. - brokeNCYDE's debut mixtape The Broken! was an amateurish first effort, with poorly tuned acoustic guitars; flowery, obtuse and wangsty lyrics; and embarrassing attempts at rapping. It was universally despised long before they became the headliners of crunkcore and is now out of print, with the band members disowning it and doing a complete 180-degree turn on their later music.
- Genesis suffered a substantial Audience-Alienating Era in the late 80's to early 90's, with the rise of Alternative Rock and the growing backlash against Phil Collins. But when he left in 1996, the band struggled to find a new audience, building up to next year's catastrophic ...Calling All Stations.... The album was a tonal one-eighty, trying to mix their trademark Progressive Rock style with 90s Alternative Rock. In another attempt to connect, they brought in Ray Wilson, who sang in Post-Grunge bands and managed to unite Gabriel and Collins fans in dislike of him. The end result makes even Collins' absolute worst moments sound like works of art in comparison. The synth tunes are out of place, the lyrics are cheesy, Wilson's vocals are half-hearted, and the production plays at points like a poor man's Genesis spin-off. Genesis fans and critics didn't take the album seriously. To date, the album has sold only around 100,000 units in the United Kingdom. It was their first album since 1981's Abacab to not go platinum, and in the US, it didn't even place. It only had one top 40 hit in the UK, "Congo," and failed to chart outright in the States. Genesis broke up in 2000, after a 1997-1998 tour that underperformed badly enough to get its US leg cancelled. The album is so despised that the band refused to play any songs from it during their 2006-07 reunion, and only "Congo" made it onto their Greatest Hits Album. For more, listen to Jukebox Zeroes' review of the album, in which co-host Lilz called it a "worst of all time" album.
- Switchfoot's massive fanbase has spent years trying to track down early releases made by members of the band. In the late 2000s, a teenage Jon Foreman demo was found titled ETC. While definitely not high-art, it's considered to be charming in its oddity. After relentless research from the fanbase, it was revealed that Switchfoot was first known as Chin Up and were apparently awful. A demo was released that almost stopped the band's career right in its early days. The very few fans that have heard the tracks recall a band that could barely keep in sync with itself, flat vocals that rivaled the ETC demo, and production that was horrible even for a basic demo. The record company that did eventually sign them only did so on the basis of Foreman's creative lyrics. Other than that, the executives involved called it one of the worst demos they ever had to sit through. Luckily, Switchfoot evolved into the band as they are loved today. While the demo remains lost (likely due to the band making sure it never again sees the light of day), it's become a holy grail for the morbidly curious fans.
- Back in the days when anyone who placed decently in The X Factor could parlay that into at least a minor music career in the UK and Ireland, 2008's bronze medalist Eoghan Quigg (he of the "voting face") released a Self-Titled Album. Opener, lead single, and sole original "28,000 Friends" with twee lyrics about Facebook friends and nigh-on childrens' toy instrumentation, sets the tone for everything that follows. The rest are all covers, mostly songs Quigg already performed on the show, with production values suggesting a cheap karaoke machine. Quigg's delivery on these (especially "Never Forget") calls into question how he ever got past the first few rounds. The album received instant derisive reviews, with the Guardian review calling it "so bad that it would count as a new low for popular culture were it possible to class as either culture… or popular". Quigg was dropped from RCA as quickly as he was signed and, save for some sporadic television appearances, has been relegated to singing in a wedding band.
- The Goldwaters Sing Folk Songs to Bug the Liberals was the first (and thankfully only) album released by the long-forgotten 1964 conservative folk group The Goldwaters. As their name implies, they were originally formed with the intent to promote the Barry Goldwater presidential campaign (it didn't work), but after they released their first album they were never heard from again, for obvious reasons. They didn't compose their own music, rather they would cover Public Domain songs but sing their own blatantly pro-conservative/anti-liberal lyrics over them. The "satire" is about as subtle as a hammer to the face and any attempts at "comedy" mostly consist of extremely annoying and condescending "jokes" about how liberals are ruining America. The actual music sounds less like folk and more like stereotypical, nigh-unlistenable, banjo-picking redneck music. The album was supposedly recorded live but clearly isn't the case as it quickly becomes obvious to the listener that the same annoying laugh tracks and applause tracks are being reused over and over. The album supposedly sold 200,000 copies but since the album was released on a very tiny label, didn't chart, didn't get any radio play, and fell into obscurity shortly after release, the prospect of the album selling 200,000 seems highly unlikely-it probably sold only a few hundred copies at best. Oddity Archive took a brief look at the album.
- CONELRAD did an interview with ex-Goldwater Ken Crook (for whom the album is a major blunder) which revealed a lot about the backstory of the album: it was originally recorded under the name "Folk Songs to Bug the New Frontier" and contained several direct references to President John F. Kennedy ("New Frontier" being the label given to his administration's domestic and foreign programs). Said original version was produced by, of all people, songwriter John D. Loudermilk. He did not participate, however, in the recording of the final album, which had the Kennedy references written out following his assassination. For what it's worth, the group did a promotional tour of Republican gatherings with some success, with their act having improved since the recording session.
- CONELRAD did an interview
- Discharge! are one of the most critically acclaimed Hardcore Punk bands from The '80s, but Grave New World, their last album before their first breakup, is considered to be a total disaster. The band had been leaning towards Heavy Metal for a while, but they went fully metal on this album (even incorporating Hair Metal elements) and they just couldn't master it. The instrumentation was messy, lead singer Cal Morris' newer high-pitched vocal style sounded stupid, the lyrics were uninspired, and the production quality was way too squeaky-clean for a band of their type. They would win back some goodwill with their following two albums and really regain their brilliance with their 2002 Self-Titled Album, but this album remains a black mark on their history.
- Having Fun with Elvis on Stage is often considered one of the worst albums of all time. "But," you say, "Elvis Presley was a great singer and conversationalist, plus he cracked some good jokes! How can an Elvis album be that bad?!" Imagine an Elvis concert without said music, interesting monologues, and all the jokes that make sense. What remains is this, a solid 35 minutes of Elvis just...talking, with all context removed so you have no clue what he's talking about. It was a ploy by his manager, Col. Tom Parker, to make money off him by releasing an album that RCA Records had no rights to - not that it stopped them from distributing it themselves under their own label. Elvis was (quite rightly) infuriated and humiliated by the album's release to the point that he personally had the album taken off store shelves. Nevertheless, and bizarrely enough, it charted at #130 on the Billboard album chart and at #9 on the Hot Country LPs chart, saw numerous bootlegs, and even got a fan-made sequel. Jukebox Zeroes attempt to summarise the album here.
- In Little Miss Dangerous, Ted Nugent threw away the bluesy hard rock sound that had made him a star in the '70s and tried his hand at Bon Jovi-style AOR, with embarrassing results. The album is saturated with '80s reverb, which does no favors to Nugent's already poor singing or his guitar work — which should be the highlight of a Ted Nugent album, but is bland and repetitive under all the reverb. The title track's sexual lyrics feel disturbing as well given Nugent's history of alleged relationships with teenage girls. Even Nugent himself doesn't seem to care for this album, as none of it has been part of his setlist in over thirty years.
- Emerson, Lake & Palmer is seen as a joke in the modern age, which is sad if you're a Progressive Rock fan. Nevertheless, Love Beach is the closest thing one has to a reason why. The three had since lost their enthusiasm for playing together, and were already getting sick of one another by this point—they were legally required to record this to finish their record contract. Emerson was completely at odds with Atlantic throughout the short sessions, while Lake, Palmer, and lyricist Peter Sinfield only stuck around long enough to finish their parts. Greg Lake didn't even produce the album, and he had no hand in the lyrics. The album drew its sound from disco music and AOR, (right around when Disco Sucks was born) as per the label's insistence on making a "commercial" album. Nobody stands behind it: prog fans blame it for aiding in the decline of progressive rock, Keith Emerson called it "an embarrassment against everything I've worked for," and the band refused to promote it, beyond an appearance on The Old Grey Whistle Test. The band promptly split, without even a farewell tour—Carl Palmer's attempts at planning one went bust in short order.
- When Mrs. Miller's So Bad, It's Good covers made the charts in 1966, cash-in follow-ups were inevitable. But none were as egregious as Sam Chalpin's My Father the Pop Singer. Chalpin's only draw is his thick Yiddish accent—his pitch was even worse than Miller's, he struggles to keep the beat at all, and he has none of Miller's charisma. The backbeats are all recycled, from producer Ed Chalpin's numerous bootleg cover sessions. Sam, then 65, had no interest in pop, nor any musical experience beyond being a chazzan—his abusive son Ed pretty much forced him to be involved. Throughout the sessions, he would regularly threaten Sam, to the point of making him cry. Sam couldn't read English and had trouble remembering his lines, resulting in a constant stop-and-go that wore on the nerves of all involved. Engineer Mike Rashkow called it "terrible for me to watch, and possibly criminal to be involved in... an awful thing for one person to put another person through, let alone a son to his father." It wound up on Atlantic Records, for reasons even Mike can only guess. The whole album is on YouTube to listen to, if you dare.
- Waking the Cadaver's Perverse Recollections of a Necromangler. The band's steadily improved since, to the point of even gaining something of a devout fanbase, but this was both their lowest point and a horrendous first impression. Everyone was overly repetitive, obnoxious, or both, except for the bass, who couldn't even be heard. The singer sounded like a pig in mid-castration, which worsened the immature, trite, appalling lyrics by making them incomprehensible. The opening samples were clichéd, the band could not keep time, channeled all their focus into pointless brutality, and padded the album by recording themselves getting stoned.
- Kevin Federline, aka K-Fed, second husband of Britney Spears, released a rap album called Playing with Fire in 2006. The album was critically panned and currently holds the lowest score in the history of Metacritic with 15 out of 100. People had hopes leading up to the release thanks to the So Bad, It's Good track "PopoZão". Unfortunately, the album is filled with dull, uncharismatic rhymes about his fame, his marriage to Britney, cannabis and gangsta cliches, and music way too generic to really put any of his posturing over. One review said it best:"Perhaps we were too harsh on Vanilla Ice". As a footnote, Britney left him within a couple of weeks of the album's release, and Federline has since fallen into obscurity. Entertainment Weekly, since about 2006, usually lists a recommended song or two from an album when doing a review, since these days you can buy any song separately, but were unable to find anything listenable on Playing with Fire. To add insult to injury, "PopoZão" isn't featured on the album. The Music Video Show attacked his one and only music video for the song "Lose Control" here. Jukebox Zeroes reviewed the whole album here.
- Poser Holocaust, by Thrash or Die, had a 0% general rating on Metal Archives for a long time. The album suffers from obnoxious vocals, weak and repetitive Thrash Metal riffs repeated throughout the album, generic party lyrics, low production values, and a generally dated feel. The band later improved slightly, but this is a horrid debut.
- Celtic Frost, legends of Black Metal, had a stinker with their 2002 demo Prototype. Here, Celtic Frost attempted to experiment with electronica, industrial rock, and hip hop and sound nothing like Celtic Frost at all. Starting with a butchering of "Helter Skelter", going through songs that feature barely-comprehensible vocals and finishing with the hilariously-terrible "Hip Hop Jugend", which sounds like Rammstein attempting to create a rap song and failing miserably, this obscure demo makes Cold Lake, widely considered their worst album, sound like a masterpiece in comparison.
- Despite very publicly falling from grace after a very long time off the radar (for completely unrelated reasons), Trapt still attempted a comeback, with the New Sound Album Shadow Work. Here, lead singer Chris Taylor Brown took the band's trademark Alternative Metal sound in a Lighter and Softer direction. The end result is at best generic safe radio-friendly rock songs and at worst extremely tedious ballads that are frustrating to sit through, complete with a mediocre cover of Jewel's "Who Will Save Your Soul". The album became one of rock's most infamous bombs in years, only selling 600 copies in the first week, and missing the US Billboard 200 entirely. The Needle Drop listed it his second worst album of the year.note Jukebox Zeroes tears into both the record and the frontman's online antics here.
- As is common with bands that have been around for a long time, Deep Purple's fandom can be very polarized over which era of the band is best. The Mark V lineup's Slaves and Masters, however, is the one album that all fans despise. Allmusic compared the album's sound to "a generic Foreigner wannabe", with its cheesy AOR songwriting and titles (like "Love Conquers All"). Only Joe Lynn Turner continues to perform any materialnote from it live.
- The Beach Boys' Stars and Stripes Vol. 1. Their first album after Brian Wilson rejoined, though you'd hardly know it—he may as well never have. The album came out on a short-lived and obscure independent label, owned by Record Producer Joe Thomas. Here, the band was relegated to backing vocals on re-recordings of some of their biggest hits, while a mostly-unimpressive cast of country musicians sang lead. It couldn't even stick to that premise, as it also featured Eagles bassist Timothy B. Schmit, Christian pop singer Kathy Troccoli, and Al Jardine's son Matt. The Beach Boys didn't even play; nearly every note came from Joe Thomas or a Nashville session musician. While Troccoli's take on "I Can Hear Music" made some noise on the AC charts, three more tracks were tested at country radio—each only spent one week at the very bottom of the Hot Country Songs charts. (It didn't help that, in two cases, the guest singer was otherwise then-unsigned.) It was also torn apart by critics for lifeless singing and production: The Encyclopedia of Popular Music called it an "awful legacy", Allmusic rated it 1.5 out of 5, and Entertainment Weekly gave it a "D". Fans were no more approving, as the album only went to #101 on the Billboard 200 and did not crack the Top Country Albums charts at all. Its Rate Your Music score is 1.75 out of 5. Many even pointed out that the album didn't make sense conceptually, as the Beach Boys were never a significant influence on country music or vice-versa (this was the only time they even entered the country music charts). A second volume was cancelled midway through the sessions, with only one song (Tammy Wynette's "In My Room") ever seeing the light of day. This, plus Summer In Paradise below, is probably why the band didn't release a new album of original material until That's Why God Made the Radio in 2012.
- Summer in Paradise, by The Beach Boys... minus Brian Wilson. Mike Love took the helm, the band's years on the nostalgia circuit having clearly gone to his head. He leads the band (again stuck mostly on vocals) through 12 embarrassing retreads of past hits, past motifs, and past glory, all fed through painfully dated production. Low points include the creepy sing-spoken pseudo-hip-hop of "Summer of Love," (salvaged from a rejected Bartmania cash-in) and a high-volume power-ballad butchering of Dennis Wilson's classic "Forever," which touring drummer John Stamos also sang lead and produced—his only appearance in-studio. This is one of only two Beach Boys albums that has never been reissued (the other album being Still Cruisin'). It sold fewer than 10,000 copies; some say it sold less than 100 copies on its release date. The album's US distributor, Navarre, soon declared bankruptcy. The album ended up being their last release of original material for two decades (the compilation of country covers mentioned above notwithstanding). Even Mike himself has seemingly disowned it as he seldom mentions it in his autobiography (save for the title track) despite it being his own pet project. For more, see Todd in the Shadows' Trainwreckords episode on it.
- Serial offender Mike Love released a new album in 2017, to the horror of Beach Boys fans everywhere. Unleash the Love, released 37 years after his last album, is half forgettable Love originals and half Beach Boys classics butchered by the current touring lineup. Love's already grating voice is drowning in Auto-Tune here; particularly on the "Do It Again" remake, featuring Mark McGrath and John Stamos desperately trying to make the best out of it.
- Cryptopsy's 2008 album The Unspoken King. Within a month of its release, there were 15 reviews on Metal Archives with an average rating of 8%. A botched Genre Shift (Technical Death Metal to Deathcore) got them accused of Jumping the Shark, but it had several other problems: the production was bad, the songwriting trite, Lord Worm's replacement lacked his energy and presence, and the clean sections were terribly off-key. When confronted about the album and its quality, the band totally handled it in the worst way possible: They threw fits, telling other people they weren't "getting" the message behind it, and tried to avoid people who wanted to ask them about the album.
- Van Halen III (1998) was Van Halen's only album with former Extreme frontman Gary Cherone on lead vocals following the departure of Sammy Hagar. Eddie Van Halen was more domineering than ever; he played most of the bass in lieu of Michael Anthony, did one song completely solo, allowed Cherone no musical input, and allegedly muscled in on most of the production. Cherone was left awkwardly trying to pen lyrics over instrumentals with none of the structure the past two singers typically provided, and Anthony is barely even present. The result is narmy, incoherent, agonizingly dull, and inexcusably mixed from beginning to end. Rolling Stone gave it two stars out of five, while Robert Christgau gave the album a bomb. Fan reception was hardly any better; the album barely went gold, and got 1-star reviews with great consistency. Cherone only stuck around for another year. They have since deleted this album from their discography, and only made one more album in the 22 years before Eddie's cancer claimed him while planning a tour. This was Mike Post's only production credit since 1981, and he would swiftly return to his more famous job as a TV theme composer. For more, see TheHappySpaceman's review, Jukebox Zeroes' review and Todd in the Shadows' Trainwreckords episode on it.
- In 2017, the Tiny Tim/Isadore Fertel split War Between the Sexes was released, and it is simply awful. Tiny's side consists of drunken a-capellas with the production values of a home demo. The material itself is offensive and outright juvenile; at points, he sounds ashamed to even perform it. Isadore's side is a reissue of her only single, which was nothing to write home about the first time. What is gained from the use of an actual studio and instruments, is lost due to Fertel's total lack of singing chops (and her heavy lisp). It is worth noting that both parties had been dead for many years by the time this came out, and that the label seemed to be releasing this for a lark.
- Former Escape the Fate and current Falling in Reverse frontman Ronnie Radke has been known to incorporate rap verses in his music to...mixed results, but FIR's rap rock fusions are nowhere near as baffling as his solo rap mixtape Watch Me. The first track, "Asshole", opens with news coverage clips of Radke's own arrest and turns into an attempt at emulating Eminem's worst tendencies, complete with a skit in which Radke and featured singer Andy Biersack shoot up a public place, and it's all downhill from there. Of note is Danny Worsnop's featured hook on the supposedly emotional ballad "Brother", where he sounds like he's wheezing through a life support machine (meanwhile Radke opens with the lines "Yesterday my brother died driving to work...damn, that shit really hurts"). It's telling that Watch Me was never released in full. Brad Taste In Music has fun ripping the mixtape to shreds here.
- Suicide's 1992 album Why Be Blue got mixed reviews for continuing in the pop direction of previous albums, but wasn't all bad. Until it was remastered in 2005 by Martin Rev. Well, not so much remastered as drowned in reverb and out-of-time phase shifting, plastered over the final mix without nuance. All thought began and ended there, burying Alan Vega's vocals and all of the music in general. Worse still, as a quote-unquote "remaster", it supplanted the original version on all subsequent issues, including all official music platforms and later Greatest Hits Albums.
