It's considered one of the greatest prog metal albums ever so of course it's pretentious.

I'd put the Black Album on the list if we were talking about the worst stylistic change. But it's definitely not one of the "worst" albums ever.

One day we'll learn that the only reason "Battles" (by In Flames) exists is to make us look back on "Soundtrack to Your Escape" with kinder eyes. I know I did.

https://www.nolifetilmetal.com/defleppard.htm

Look at this! There's where I've herd that Hysteria is indeed the worst albums.

Illud Divinum Insanus isn't actually a bad record overall, though; don't get me wrong, I don't feel it's good or anything... it's just not all-time bad. Like, the shitty Industrial half of it is actually bad, but too many people disregard the other half, which is good, more traditional Morbid Angel-style material (there's a good EP lurking in it, in other words), so, while it ends up being "too extreme" of a mixed bag on the whole, albums like St. Anger or LouLou are just 100% bad records all-around, so IDI doesn't deserve to be lumped into the same category with them, and continue to be a victim of so much mindless online hyperbole, IMO.

I'm the opposite. I wish they'd go further in the Rammstein/Marilyn Manson side of industrial rock.

Surely worst stylistic chamge would go to Discharge for the Grave New World album

That or Destruction's Least Successful Human Cannonball

I'm of two minds with that. I almost felt like it would've been a one-time thing, unless they actually nailed it in a second album. Although much of the industrial half of IDI for me is how fun it is, despite not being particularly good. Still prefer it to the death metal half.

I came here just to speak about that Destruction album too! What the fuck they were thinking? I mean, look at that cover!! And the music is just terrible!

-I'm surprised no one said Cold Lake yet, this record should be included in every "worst album" list.

-Machine Head - The Burning Red: that shameless switch from groove thrash metal to godawful nu-metal with all the worst cliches of the genre (rapping, poppy melodic choruses, basic chuggy riffs...). Do you remember that horrible video with Robb Flynn impersonating Fred Durst? Oh god...I loved Burn My Eyes and The More Things Change with all my heart, so this was one of the biggest musical letdowns of my life.

-Blind Guardian - A Night At The Opera: this one will be polemic probably, but let me explain: in the 90's, Blind Guardian were my absolute favorite band, I worshiped them - so I was there, at the record shop on the day it was released, waiting for the physical records to arrive to grab my copy. The cover wasn't terrible, but it was far from the epicness of Nightfall in Middle Earth or Imaginations from the Other Side artwork, but the worst was yet to come: when I put it into the CD Player and that sort of proggy metallic Queen started to sound, I was confused at first, then really mad! Where was the epic, the soaring choruses and power riffing? I mean, did you heard that sleazy intro to Sadly Sings Destiny? The more epic songs sound like bsides or offcuts from previous records and the rest was just bland and boring. The Soulforged is a killer song, and along with And Then There Was Silence, the only two songs I usually listen from this record.

-Manowar - that terrible re-recording of Kings Of Metal: unnecessary and bland as shit. The original album sounded perfect, no one really needed this!!!

-Iced Earth - both The Crucible of Man albums - Jon fucking Schaffer, did you really convinced Matt Barlow to return to your band only to record that snooze fest that is Something Wicked part 2? No wonder the guy left again! Well, at least the following albums with Stu Block are proper heavy metal albums again.

Oh shit, forgot my crap album tax.

Stratovarius' self-titled album. How do you follow up three below-average at best power metal albums with fuckin' nu-metal cum butt rock? Borderline Least Successful Human Cannonball-tier shit.

but who could do it worse than Stratovarius, if not Massacra (or Destruction but that's implied). Humanize Human was baaaaaaaaad. Borderline neo-classical death/thrash metal band turns into a shitty version of Creed.

In terms of bands I listen to, Battle Beast - No More Hollywood Endings is the worst I've evaluated lately. Sepultura - Nation might be 2nd worst. There'll be others I've overlooked or haven't heard in a long time.

Others such as Discharge - Grave New World are too funny for me to consider them the worst. I get good entertainment out of that one!

What a pile of shit most of his later albums are. Brain Cleaner, Erasing the Goblin. I am not sure if Jayson, was any sort of driving force in the band. The stuff he did after Mortifcation, like Horde and Paramaecium are amazing. I am not a hardened BM fan. I am certain someone here will disagree.
I do like a lot of Doom and Paramaecium is excellent.
I've taken noisy shits, after a night of Taco Bell and hard drinking, that sound better the later Mortification.

So you listed albums that you just took off a website instead of leaving your own opinion?

I think Hysteria is actually a great album. Do not like anything after the death of Steve Clark. I saw the making of that album. The tediousness of Mutt Lange is incredible. Literally a hundred takes on one guitar riff. I like Pyromania better, but I do like Hysteria. A little overplayed on Sirius, but it is a great album. Just my 3 pence.

If you do not expect a raging metal monster or even a harder rockin' album then Hysteria is great. Simplistic? Sure. Full of hits and catchy hooks? You betcha!

IX Equilibrium. Maybe not a drastic stylistic change, that drop in quality though. You build up with your early recordings, release In the Nightside Eclipse, follow it up with Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk, and then this? You alright there, guys?

The latest Nightwish album is horrendously bad, and even though EFMB was pretty phoned in, I've liked everything they'd done up until that point.

Hahahahha.

I guiltily like that big hit, "Two Princes" and love the solo enough to where I've been working on playing it on guitar, but I can't help but laugh at them and this description.

Megadeth 'Risk' is a big one for me. I get that Dave wanted to try something different as the thrash element was becoming increasingly watered down on his latest studio records, but what the fuck was this all about? I love 'Criptic writings' and I would place it in my top 5 Megadeth albums, but this...

The guy who owns that site also hates with a passion the song "Bottle Rocket" by Guardian, I enjoy teasing him on Facebook by mentioning his name and the song in the one breath.

A blatant leap towards commercialism and shooting for the charts. He said as much himself.

Mutt Lange is such a great producer. Albums like Hysteria and Back In Black wouldn't be nearly as good without his magic.

I think the guys in Def Leppard would agree with this statement about Mutt Lange as much as anyone.

I watched a making of this album with the guys from Def Leppard and they all said he was such a massive part of putting together their ideas into the hits they became.

Three albums come to mind immediately:

Sabaton - The Great War. What more can I truly say about this album - it's a useless, stupid, detestable slab of super glossy, formulaic Disney metal that glorifies the First World War.

In Flames - Soundtrack to Your Escape. Whilst I've never been remotely a fan of post-Clayman even I can still recognise that this is the worst of that entire stretch of their career, and one of the worst metal albums of all time. All of the instrumentation and songwriting is basic, boring and redundant. The vocals are beyond the bottom of the barrel and are pushed to the forefront in very vocally-orientated songs. The production is super processed, clanging and irritating. There is no enjoyment I can derive from this album; even their other albums from this era have things I can point to and say they are enjoyable. There are other albums in the styles this draws from that I would vastly prefer listening to over this. It's just awful.

Machine Head - Catharsis. It's Machine Head. It's bad, even by their standards.

I tried once. Got as far as the vocals kicking in on the very first track. To quote the band themselves, "never again".
Re NSBM, I picked up Absurd's 'Facta loquuntur' mainly out of morbid curiosity and it is indeed very shitty. I can force myself to pick out a couple of not-so-bad bits, but that's probably only because what they're surrounded with is even worse.

Really? But I don't even see anything particularly commercial about it either, just... bad.

In a way it is beyond commercial - even simpler instrumentation, less guitar, rhytms that more palatable to the "average listener" etc. But yeah - it just sucks.

I'm sure there are plenty worse albums out there, but if we take the "from a band that should've know better" premise into consideration, then I'd say Thornography is my choice.

Abrahadabra being another strong contender as well, but not sure if Dimmu qualifies as a band that should know better at that point.

Calling the Black Album one of the worst albums of all time because it dropped the thrash elements of Metallica's sound is a prime example of why I can't take thrash fans seriously. See also trying to rewrite history by claiming the musical progression shown on Arise leads directly to mid 90s Sepultura.

But as for shit albums, here are the prime candidates:

Metallica - St. Anger: Look, this may be an obvious choice, but there's no getting away from it. This album is dreadful. On every level - song writing, production, enjoyability, melodies - this is a total failure across the board and the fact that it was produced by the biggest band in the history of heavy metal is downright embarrassing. Even if a local garage band had made it, it would still be abysmally shite.

No guitar solos (Hammett should have just quit there and then). Dire lyrics (Hetfield was just out of rehab and in no state to contribute anything, he needed a long sabbatical), dumbed down riffs that are blatantly cut and pasted in ProTools over and over again to make 8 minute songs, and as acknowledged in SKOM a blatant attempt to hop onto the nu-metal trend bandwagon that had practically sunk by this point.

The entire record is essentially a Lars Ulrich solo demo that he assembled from whatever was lying around in the studio. I could do better than this. Most people I know could do better than this.

But you know what really elevates this to the top of the shitpile? The snare sound. It makes the album physically impossible to listen to. You can't put it on in the background and ignore it. You can't enjoy listening to it. CLANG CLANG CLANG CLANG - the only solution is to stop. You just can't make it through more than about 15 minutes without turning the record off.

Seriously claiming Lulu - not a good album, but more of an experiment that didn't really work - is somehow worse than this is laughable. At least I managed to listen to Lulu from start to finish. With St. Anger a friend downloaded it and copied a CD-R for me, and I still felt ripped off.

Metallica well and truly quit their place at metal's top table in 2003 and left the way clear for Maiden, and they've never really regained it since.



Sepultura - Roots: Speaking of quitting one's place at the top table, it would be hard for most bands to match the trajectory that Sepultura embarked on in the mid-90s. While it got criticism from thrash diehards, Chaos AD was a great album IMO. Not thrash, but a really good powerful modern metal album with a righteous sense of anger driving it forward.

Then it all went wrong. I don't know what happened to Max Cavalera in 1995/96, did he have some sort of mental breakdown? Carrying forward the tribal sounds and themes from Chaos AD was a pretty good idea and quite distinctive in the metal scene at the time, and in fact these elements are the best thing about Roots. However they're massively outweighed by the fact that Max decided to copy Korn. Roots is an unapologetic nu-metal record, and apart from a few songs (Roots Bloody Roots, Spit, and Itsari) it's a monumental failure and one of the most alarming artistic declines of any band I can think of. I mean this came out just a couple of years after the Chaos AD era, and all of a sudden Max is hanging out with Jonathan Davis and playing empty, meaningless 2-chord riffs all over the place.

There is very little decent metal to be found here, the entire album is just a shameless Korn pastiche. The production job is the usual Ross Robinson mess of sludgy crap which makes the entire album sound even more shitty than otherwise. The lyrics lack all of the 'get up and fight' mentality of the previous album and are just typical nu-metal style wallowing in angst with no forward momentum or drive. The whole album feels horribly claustrophobic and it's not invigorating or cathartic in any way. Even from a nu-metal band this album would suck shit, but from the band that made BTR/Arise/Chaos AD it's just incomprehensible. Sepultura then toured the album, playing setlists where about 60% of the songs were from Roots and nearly all of their old stuff was played in medleys or shortened versions (the ultimate dereliction of duty by an artist to their audience).

Seriously, what the fuck happened to Sepultura in this period? People criticise the Green years but nothing the band made post Max is anywhere near as dire as Roots. They went from leaders to followers in one go.

there's a weird trend in metal to judge records not as they are, but what listeners want the album to be. The Black Album is sort of the example of this. the amount of people who dismiss it because they're expecting a followup to Master of Puppets or ...And Justice for All is quite absurd. it isn't thrash, it isn't trying to be, and calling it "bad" because of that is absurd. it's very, very hard for me to take opinions that call it bad or in this case, one of the "worst albums ever" very seriously. it's one thing to not like the direction change or think the 80s albums are better, or to even dislike it for those reasons but to say it's bad seems absurd. taken on it's own merits, it's a fantastic album that is maybe a bit long in the tooth.

see also Hysteria being listed because it isn't a NWOBHM album. no, it isn't, but it isn't trying to be, and really by 1987 Def Leppard weren't a NWOBHM band. it's totally valid to be disappointed if you're a fan of their first two records, but i similarly find it absurd to call it a bad album.

OK I'll admit I've never heard a full album but fucking Juice WRLD pisses me off in a way few artists can because I kinda like some of that type of music, and among that I'd categorize Juice as "Complete fucking mids" if I can so boldly claim. So yeah you hear one song it's pretty mediocre whatever, let's see what else you got, you hear another, it's the exact same thing stylistically and quality wise, but a little more annoying and then you hear hear 3 4 5 6 7 8 songs in a row of the same fucking shit and by the end you're just completely fucking pissed off because he never does a fucking thing besides make mediocre melodic trap songs about "my feelings have gone away cuz of the percs bro I'm so sad " and it just gets irritating and I couldn't imagine listening to a full album of that it'd genuinely make my mood decrease

And the hilarious part is when he died idk why he just didn't bite the bullet and get caught with the shit, he was popular enough to have probably gotten some lawyer to get him a light sentence, I highly doubt he would've ended up like fucking Tay-K or some shit.

Dude I mean really Hysteria is one of the worst albums. Even Martin Popoff gave it a 0/10 on the guide to heavy metal the 80s.

Hysteria is not the "worst album ever" but it IS the absolutely most over-produced, watered down, bland, neutered and lifeless album ever released by a band that had ever been metal at one point in their career. Even as an 80's styled synth-pop album it is...neutered and lifeless. I think that is my fairest assessment of that record. And oh, I have heard albums that were far, far worse, so I'm not really ripping on it as much as being honest about it. I'd much rather listen to "Hysteria" than anything by, for example, Car Door Dick Smash or Tank Genocide.

...and?

St Anger & Van Halen 3.


JUST THE WORST.

WENT THE TROLLY!!!

That literally means zero, zilch, nothing, so two people have the same opinion, doesn't make it correct. WTF?

So what's your problem? You don't have to blame it on Scott, Martin and ME! We just have a different opinion.

By the way try to know much what real metal is like their iconic "On Through The Night" which IMO is the best.