Every Judas Priest Albums Ranked Worst To Best

18. Rocka Rolla

It’s always best to start at the beginning. Rocka Rolla was actually Judas Priest’s debut studio album and, for our money, the worst of the entire bunch. Whilst many bands seem to struggle to improve upon a dynamite debut effort, Priest had a rare case of starting at their worst point.

The 1974 work was criticised for being immensely unfocused. This was compounded by the recording process which saw the band record the album live, all in the same room as each other. As anyone with recording experience will tell you, this is normally the process for a ‘first draft’ of a record, rather than a finished work. This messiness is unfortunately very evident upon listening. Certain tracks - Never Satisfied in particular - showed a lot of promise, however.

To be fair to the band, none of this was really their fault. Having openly discussed the pressure they were under, a bad production cycle and good old label interference, the band noted that the whole work had been an unnecessarily difficult process from start to finish.

At least they could only go up from here! Sort of… `