10 Bands That Destroyed Their Careers
9. U2
Not every band has to break up to be considered career destroyers. Some bands can still be going for years upon years before they realize that they actually crushed their reputation a while ago. Though U2 remains one of the biggest concert draws in the world, they had to sacrifice their relevancy in order to actually get there.
In the '80s though, you would have sworn that these Irish lads were going to be as big as the Beatles, making some of the greatest concert tours known to man and managing to transition with the times going from the Joshua Tree to Achtung Baby. Then the late '90s happened and things started getting weird, with Pop seen as the first major betrayal of U2's core ethos.
Even though they were able to recover from it very nicely with All That You Can't Leave Behind, the 2010's have been the moment where Bono bit off a little more than he could chew. Since No Line on the Horizon, U2 has been doing everything they can to have people not care about them, from making trendy songs to blend with the times to forcing their music on your phone whether you asked for it or not. For a band that seemed to look towards the future, the past few years was when U2 started to follow the crowd rather than lead it.