10 HYPED Albums That Didn't Live Up To Their High Expectations

The '90s should have been known as the decade that killed bands like U2. Since everything was about getting back to the roots of rock and roll, the kind of bombastic posturing that Bono was doing every night on the Joshua Tree was starting to look out of touch and dated really quick. And while these Irish lads were able to roll with the punches on Achtung Baby and parts of Zooropa, Pop is where things started to really go off the rails.

Starting with Achtung Baby, U2 had already gotten in early on the idea of irony, playing up the more flashy side of rock star to the point of self parody. Along with the flashy designs though, we also had a lot more electronic soundscapes coming into the mix, which made for a glitchy mess on this record. For most of these songs, you're barely able to make out any decent guitar parts from the Edge, being hidden behind a haze of digital distortion and Bono droning on and on in songs like Mofo.

You can kind of tell what they were trying to do on this record by looking at the electronic bent of acts like the Chemical Brothers, but this is nowhere close to the kind of electronic beats that we were looking for. Looking back on it these days, this just looks like a bunch of dads trying to put together what they think electronic rock is supposed to sound like, and coming up with disastrous results in the process.