10 Disappointing Albums By Legendary Bands

Every band has to have at least one dud in them. No artist has a perfect track record for their entire career, and there’s always going to be those few records that never really hit the mark like they should have. Any album can be bad though…but disappointment is even worse when you’re expecting it to be good.

That being said, not all of these are terrible albums from front to back or anything. There are varying degrees of good spread across each of these albums. What makes them sting so much is the leadup that many fans had going into these albums, thinking they were going to get something amazing and then getting something mediocre instead. It’s not like something like St. Anger, since most Metallica fans knew well ahead of time that this was going to be a rough listen before the proper album came out.

No, these are the albums that we were rooting for this whole time but were not able to come through as the mammoth showstopping record that they were supposed to be. Even if these aren’t necessarily up to snuff though, their power just emphasizes the classics even more, making them more of a footnote in the band’s career or a fan favorite among some of the diehards. No one touches the sky every single time, but records giving us less than what we wanted is always a hard pill for fans to swallow.

From the minute that Matt Bellamy opened his mouth on the first Muse album, fans have always dogged on these prog rockers for being too influenced by Radiohead. Though there are some similarities in the way that both Matt and Thom Yorke sing from time to time, both bands seem to have their own identity, with Muse going for a much more dystopian bent to their lyrics and adopting classical influences that give a Queen-like epicness to their sound. The rock scene looked a lot different in the 2010's though, and Muse proceeded to just write an album that would make decent background music on Stranger Things.

That's not to say that Simulation Theory is all in one ear and out the other though. Throughout the entire record, you can tell that the band do have a genuine interest in the synth heavy side of their sound and wanted to explore that through the '80s aesthetic, but the end results come together with a bit of a clunk, with songs like Propaganda sounding a lot more haphazard than what you would expect from the guys who gave you songs like Uprising or Knights of Cydonia.

For all of the shockers on the album though, songs like Something Human and Get Up and Fight do reach the heights that they were originally setting up, having solid hooks and even toying with their sound in different ways by using acoustic guitar in some capacity. Muse have more than enough talent to make their way through whichever genre they want to, but this just sounds like their usual schtick being fed through an Atari sound system.