10 Major Albums Where Everything Went Wrong
9. St. Anger - Metallica
Every single artist can claim to have a slight hiccup whenever going into one of their albums. It's pretty much the nature of the beast to have that one album that has something stacked against it, be it a deadline or just a creative hurdle that you have to jump through. By the time Metallica got to that point though, every single trope came back to bite them on the ass for St. Anger.
Throughout most of the runtime, you can hear the raw frustration that the band had in the studio making this one, as Jason Newsted quit and James Hetfield spent the better part of a year away from the band in rehab. Though the skeletons of these songs would have made for something fairly decent, the god awful production and the shotgun snare is still the stuff of nightmares for any production guru who dares to give this record a listen.
Even the stuff that would have been alright on Metallica standards tends to clock out here, as Hetfield's lyrics feel too artificial for their own good and the riffs sounding some cheap attempt at nu metal. While the band eventually moved on from the sting of St. Anger, this is the kind of metal that would have been laughed out of the room if it was from any other band.