10 Most Expensive Rock & Metal Albums Ever Made

The making of an album is a long and arduous process. Producers, engineers and the band themselves may have different ideas of where to go with an album; time spent recording and composing can be tiring and even tedious.

Listeners tend not to think about how much money goes into a project, or what kind of things happened behind the scenes, but the following list is going to do just that.

Be it injuries, long studio time, fall outs, epic feuds, drug use or all of the above, the albums on this list were all beset by issues aiding to their immense costs. Not all the bands on this list fully recovered from their journeys, and others have gone from strength to strength.

Everything from 80s pop-rock to heavy metal will be included here, and once you've given their stories enough time, maybe consider checking out the albums and listening to them with a fresh perspective. Because the fact that some of these albums even exist is incredibly unlikely given what the bands went through. But for all of them, we're glad they're here all the same.

My Bloody Valentine is an Irish rock band whose second studio album, "Loveless", was subject to an incredibly messy and unproductive recording. The album, released in 1991, was started at the beginning of 1989 and saw the band change producers twice and struggle to commit to a studio.

The band's label, Creation Records, wanted the album recorded in only five days, but once this proved to be impossible the band moved studios and didn't record anything for eight weeks. Guitarist Kevin Sheilds was unhappy with their first engineer, Nick Robbins, and replaced him with Harold Burgon. Shields was often unhappy with the crew in the studio and the studios themselves, and would ask Creation owner Alan McGee for a change in venue.

To top it off, engineers and band members often had to take long periods off from recording - to work with other bands, recover from illnesses, and tour - and the stop-start nature impeded the album's progress. Creation Records were quickly running out of money and a leading staff member, Dick Green, is said to have suffered a nervous breakdown after two years of poor progress and inconsistent behaviour from Shields.

Shields himself disagrees with McGee's estimates of the cost of the album (around half a million), and at this point the album's birth is stuff of legend: Creation Records went bankrupt soon after the album's release, and today "Loveless" is regarded as one of the best albums of the 90s, a touchstone in the shoe-gaze rock genre.