10 Hard Rock Albums Critics Were Completely Wrong About

Critics tend to have a reputation as the snooty sort of music fans. When all the rest of us want to enjoy the albums that we have in front of us, these guys have come to the forefront to say that these jams aren't as great as we think they are. However, even the most dignified critics weren't right all the time, and nowhere has this been more apparent than with hard rock.

Throughout the years, it's almost become a trend that critics don't take a liking to the heavier side of rock. For the more pretentious sort, the thought of rocking out to loud riffs may seem like the most barbaric thing a listener could imagine partaking in. When these guys aren't tearing these classic records to ribbons, they are normally missing out on some of the greatest music of their generation.

Whether it be lambasting something classic or praising something abysmal, no critic is safe from the keen eye of hindsight. With a lot of material to sift through, let's take a look at just a small helping of the artists that got endless amounts of ridicule without deserving a single shred of it.

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.