The 10 Worst Albums From Usually Great Artists

Published Nov 13, 2026, 6:20 PM EST

Jeremy has more than 2900 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows.
His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He's also very proud of the fact that he's seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He's plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings).
When he's not writing lists - and the occasional feature article - for Collider, he also likes to upload film reviews to his Letterboxd profile (username: Jeremy Urquhart) and Instagram account.
He has achieved his 2025 goal of reading all 13,467 novels written by Stephen King, and plans to spend the next year or two getting through the author's 82,756 short stories and 105,433 novellas. 

Sign in to your Collider account

If you put out enough stuff, regardless of the field you're in, it’s pretty much inevitable that you'll miss the mark on at least one occasion. You can see it with prolific authors, busy filmmakers, and then also with artists. If an artist or band hasn’t released anything bad as far as albums are concerned, then they're either a rare breed of artist/band, or they’ve not released a ton of albums.

These artists are all great, but each has put out at least one album of questionable quality, and said not-great albums are below. So, it’s a bit negative, critiquing those albums, but it’s also good to remember that an artist has to be pretty great to be included here, with the albums below standing out since they're generally surrounded by other compelling albums.

10 'Never Let Me Down' (1987)

David Bowie

With a debut album in 1967 and a final release almost half a century later, it would've been truly surprising if David Bowie never misfired critically. As it stands, him only having a few misses is still remarkable, and then when you take into account just how high-quality most of his good albums were, it does make those less-than-great ones easier to forgive.

If you're not singling out his self-titled debut, you're probably going to turn to one of two 1980s albums by Bowie to mark as his weakest. At least 1984’s Tonight has “Loving the Alien,” while Never Let Me Down, which seemed like it was supposed to be a comeback after Tonight was largely critically dismissed, doesn’t really have any highlights. You're better off sticking with Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) and Let's Dance if you want to hear some ‘80s Bowie, and then all his post-1980s stuff is more interesting than Never Let Me Down, too.

9 'Raditude' (2009)

Weezer

It feels a little hard to get too angry at Raditude, partly because it’s already been criticized to hell and back, and partly because that album cover is hilarious and it might feel nicer to pretend to be in on the joke. Because Raditude is almost definitely a joke. Also, it’s called “Raditude.” Weezer are a ridiculous band, but they do have ridiculous or somewhat eyebrow-raising albums that are of a higher quality than Raditude.

The opening track, “(If You're Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To,” is kind of fun, but otherwise, you don’t have a lot here to really grab onto.

Even as far as funny album covers and titles go, Raditude can’t be the funniest combo, since Weezer also have an album named Hurley, and the cover is just a close-up of Jorge Garcia’s face (he played Hurley on Lost). How can you get too mad at a band that does that? It’s funny. That absurdity and willingness to be a meme can be appreciated, but if you're looking at Raditude specifically, and the music itself, uh, the opening track, “(If You're Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To,” is kind of fun, but otherwise, you don’t have a lot here to really grab onto or remember.

8 'St. Anger' (2003)

Metallica

While no one is going to mistake Weezer for Metallica, St. Anger does occupy a similar space critically to Raditude. All the bad things that could be said about an album have been said about these two, as notorious 2000s albums, yet with Metallica, it was a bit more of a downfall, since their heyday was in the 1980s, rather than the 1990s, like Weezer. Also, Weezer sort of bounced back in the 2010s, and the same can’t really be said about Metallica.

Sorry, it’s true. That doesn’t take away from that 1980s run, and then even in the 1990s, there was still some good stuff Metallica-wise. The good times can’t last forever, though. Eventually, there have to be sad times. Mad times. Angry times. St. Anger times. It gets worse for Metallica, though. Look a little further down, for another notorious album that came out eight years on from this one.

7 'The Life of a Showgirl' (2025)

Taylor Swift

You can’t win here, because there will be people who don’t like the suggestion that Taylor Swift is a great artist, and there'll probably also be people who like everything she’s done and thereby won’t like The Life of a Showgirl being criticized. To the people in the first camp, she’s done some great stuff and is popular for good reason. To the people in the other camp, she is capable of so much more.

The Life of a Showgirl felt a little worse than being just Taylor Swift on autopilot. There are three somewhat solid songs at the start, and then the whole thing derails, with some truly questionable lyrics and a lot of repetition as far as the music itself goes (even for stuff belonging to the pop genre). It can only be up from here, for Swift. Well, at least it’s hard to imagine something missing the mark more than The Life of a Showgirl any time soon.

6 'Invincible' (2001)

Michael Jackson

Calling a Michael Jackson album bad is about as risky as calling a Taylor Swift album bad, or maybe even a little more so, since he has dedicated fans as well, and saying Invincible (the album that ended up being his last) is bad probably constitutes a hot take. But Invincible is such a slog. It doesn’t have to be as good as Thriller, because not much is, but wow does that classic album move.

And it also feels coherent. There are other great Michael Jackson albums where you can also admire the consistency and flow. With his 1990s stuff, maybe a little less so, but at least there were more highlights. Invincible is trying to do too much and please too many people all at once, and the resulting album is one where you feel like you're fighting to stay focused throughout. The album should be focused, and you shouldn’t have to do all that work yourself. Invincible, honestly, is a chaotic mess of an album. Sorry.

5 'Jesus Is King' (2019)

Kanye West

There might be some more recent Kanye West albums that are worse than Jesus Is King, but this was his first real miss, rather than just putting out something divisive, and also, some of these recent albums just aren’t fun to engage with or even think about. You do have to acknowledge things have gotten worse on a quality front (2021’s Donda, though, was better than Jesus Is King), and also that Kanye West, as a figure, has continued escalating the questionable things he’s willing to do and say.

Knowledge of 2020s Kanye West makes Jesus Is King look even more absurd in hindsight. It was a weirdly clean-cut Christian hip-hop album that felt a bit rushed and bizarrely produced at the time, and now it just feels bizarre, clashing with the very unwholesome things West has returned to doing. It’s around this point where it really started feeling not worth keeping up, even if you'd weathered the storm(s) up until that point.

4 'Lulu' (2011)

Lou Reed and Metallica

Since Lou Reed was credited alongside Metallica for Lulu, Metallica can sneak back on here for a second time, or more accurately, they're here 1.5 times. Lulu is more notorious than St. Anger, in any event, but neither Metallica nor Lou Reed were strangers to making divisive albums. The former had St. Anger, and the latter had Metal Machine Music, which is a wild one (research in your own time and at your own risk).

They collided to make Lulu, though, and the result was something people either gave up on long ago, or are still trying to make some kind of sense of a decade and a half later. If someone tells you they “get” Lulu, maybe they're geniuses. It’s possible. But if someone tells you they both get and genuinely enjoy Lulu, run away from them as fast as you possibly can.

3 'Cut the Crap' (1985)

The Clash

The jokes write themselves. The Clash released an album called Cut the Crap and it was… yeah. It was the band’s final album and ended what had otherwise been a pretty great run on a real bummer, because the lead-up to making it and then the production was something that pushed the members of The Clash apart, and then its negative reception when it did finally see the light of day was a real nail in the coffin sort of thing.

Best to remember the good times. You know, London Calling, the self-titled album, maybe about half of Sandinista, and a fair few songs on Combat Rock, too. You can’t go too wrong with most of the other albums by The Clash, but you also can’t go right with anything on Cut the Crap. The legendary punk rock band was mortal/human after all.

2 'Summer in Paradise' (1992)

The Beach Boys

There’s a great documentary called The Endless Summer. It isn't specifically related to The Beach Boys, but it did come out in 1966, when the band was at its peak (Pet Sounds!), and then The Endless Summer was about surfing, as were quite a few early songs by The Beach Boys. Anyway, if you wanted to argue there was some way to keep riding the high of the 1960s, continuing the summer with surfing and Beach Boys, maybe you could, at least until 1992.

Just over a quarter of a century on from all that optimism and literal sunshine came Summer in Paradise. Whether you even want to count it as a true Beach Boys album… definitely debatable. Brian Wilson wasn’t involved at all, and that’s otherwise unheard of for a Beach Boys album. And it’s been partially erased from history, in the sense that it’s out-of-print and hasn’t been reissued, and you can’t even find official uploads on the band’s channel on YouTube. They seem to want you to forget about it, and maybe you'll want to forget about it, too, should you be subjected to Summer in Paradise.

1 'Pink Elephant' (2025)

Arcade Fire

Hey, you’ve made it this far. And I’ve made it this far. Since we’ve made it this far, I’m going to get personal, and that’s where the “I’ve” and the “I’m” come in. And “I,” as in I really loved Arcade Fire. This band was everything for a while there, definitely before Everything Now, but even that album had its moments. The band’s first three albums were basically perfect. The follow-up to Everything Now, We, was a step in the right direction. And between the first three great albums and Everything Now, there was 2013’s Reflektor, which has always felt underappreciated and might well get the proper amount of love it deserves one day.

That’s all to say I either loved or felt okay with defending all of Arcade Fire’s first six albums. Then album #7 came out and I couldn’t finish it. Pink Elephant contained some of the dullest and most lifeless music I’d ever heard. I’ve listened to some albums by this band dozens, or possibly even hundreds, of times. I couldn’t get through the sonic sludge that was Pink Elephant a single time. What the actual hell happened here? Look how they massacred my boy…