10 Hard Rock Albums Critics Were Completely Wrong About

10. Drones - Muse

It's pretty hard to make a call on a rock album so close after its release date. For as much as critics may like to slog anything new, they don't typically have the benefit of hindsight to see how the record has held up. However, even with just a few years behind it, Muse's Drones is the one record in their catalog that continues to be misunderstood.

At the time, the critics' opinion of the album was fairly mixed, oftentimes singling out individual tracks as good but nothing too spellbinding overall. Upon further inspection though, Drones is probably one of the more ambitious undertakings that this power trio has ever done. Centered around a dystopian society (like most Muse albums), this one shows the band honing their craft as mainstream rock giants, with songs like "Mercy" and "Dead Inside" stacking layers of vocal harmonies while the bass foundations thunders away at the bottom.

While a single like "Psycho" can seem a bit basic, it doesn't really matter if the riff is this captivating. Complete with a few stomper tracks like "Reapers" and "The Handler," this is not just Muse striving to make a good rock record, but to make one of the best rock offerings the 2010's had ever seen.