10 Artists That Hate Their Own Albums

No one going into making an album is aiming to do a bad job. You’re always going to want to put your heart and soul into every single project you do, but there are always going to be those few that miss the mark compared to others. You can still stand by your work, but there are also some artists who want to distance themselves from it as well.

The passage of time can really change a person, and every one of these musicians despise what their records have become in the past few years, not really putting them up on the same pedestal as the rest of their albums. Even though it would be easy just to put god awful albums on a list like this, there are bands that see some of their greatest work as failures as well, chalking them up to either bad production or just a nasty experience that they had when making the project.

You also have to pay attention to what the public thinks of the record, which has had a heavy hand in shaping the artist’s opinion going forward. You may have thought that these songs were great at the time, but when you release them out into the wild, it becomes a bit of a different story when you see what they stand for. The magic might still be there on the studio version, but the real heart and soul behind these albums were ditched a long time ago.

Any fairweather rock fan about to listen to At the Drive In really needs to know what they're getting themselves into. Being fed up with the same genre clashes that they had seen when they were kids, the work of Omar Rodriguez Lopez and Cedric Bixler-Zavala remains some of the most chaotic rock and roll that had ever been put to tape since the turn of the century. And on their watershed moment Relationship of Command, the band never felt like they were able to reach their true potential.

During the actual recording, Omar had mentioned that the entire operation was going great, thinking they were capturing something a lot more primal than what was going on in radio at the time. By the time we got to hear tracks like One Armed Scissor on the airwaves though, Omar was not really happy about the final mix of the record, saying that it was much too glossy for his taste. Although he was quick to praise engineer Andy Wallace (who will come up later in this list), he says that what you hear now is some of the most lifeless performances that he's ever heard of himself on a record.

Which is really saying something considering what we got, with tracks like Cosmonaut and One Armed Scissor sounding like they're on the verge of anarchy by the time they really kick into high gear. For Omar, this could have been something much more primal that what it became, but I guess we'll all just have to settle with this post hardcore masterpiece instead.