10 Worst Genre Switches In Rock Music History

5. St. Anger - Metallica

As embarrassing as the documentary Some Kind of Monster can be for Metallica fans, it really needed to get made. Since the band had already been going through therapy, it's nice to at least see that these metal gods whom we've idolized for so long are at the very least human. What's a little more inexcusable is when they decided to turn that kind of pain into music.

In practice though, this feels like it should be a slam dunk. Metal has always been about darkness and some level of anger, so an album full of that stuff should have sold like gangbusters, especially in the era of nu metal that brought us bands like Disturbed and Staind. Somewhere along the way though, that anger got twisted into something much more ugly on St. Anger, complete with the worst production job on any Metallica record and some of the most uninspired riffs of their career.

When you look at the songs on paper though, this sounds like Metallica trying to make a "Cry of Anguish" record much like Nirvana was doing on In Utero just a few years later. The important difference here is that Nirvana were deliberately trying to alienate some of the fanbase that they got with Nevermind. By trying to have it both ways, St. Anger stands as a record that disappoints on both ends. It immediately turns off the people who came on during the Black Album, and the production is too harsh to win back the OG thrash fans from Master of Puppets.