10 Metal Bands That Have Never Made A Bad Album

You can’t talk about metal bands with perfect, squeaky clean slates of albums without bringing up Slipknot, who have ingeniously avoided making bad records by… very rarely making records at all.

Do we even need to talk about their self-titled debut? Everyone reading this list has probably listened to it several times already (if not, what the hell are you doing with your life?) and, in the process, know all about the visceral nu metal that it provided in spades. There was nothing like Slipknot when it hit shelves in 1999 and there, arguably, still isn’t in 2018.

Iowa soon became the perfect follow-up, upping the melancholia and sheer, guttural horror of its predecessor while also making room for such new features as upped melodies and a monumental title track. Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses) then became even more experimental, adding in guitar solos, acoustics and clean vocals to make for the band’s most diverse disc to date. A truly unsung masterwork.

All Hope Is Gone, while hated by some members of Slipknot itself, was a hit-dispensing machine, becoming the rock album of 2008 thanks to the radio success of “Psychosocial”, “Dead Memories” and “Sulfur”.

Finally, .5: The Gray Chapter showed Slipknot’s ability to adapt and overcome, turning the tragedy of bassist Paul Gray’s death and the turmoil of Joey Jordison’s exit into a seminal piece of thrashing madness, but one that also had some of the diversity of the earlier Vol. 3.