10 Perfect 1990s Rock Albums With No Bad Songs

If you were one of the heavy hitter bands back in the '80s, you had one of two choices in the next decade. You could either choose to wither away and die and go back to your day job, or you could try to change with the times and hope to God that whatever you do doesn't sound incredibly dated by the end of the year. U2 ended up doing neither. They just camped out in their studio and painted their masterpiece.

Arriving just before the grunge kids started to clog up the charts, Achtung Baby is the sort of bombastic rock music that should have been laughed out of the room in the '90s. So why didn't it? Well, it turns out that these Irishmen got on the train of irony long before we caught wind of Seattle, as Bono did a transparent satire of what rock stars were supposed to be at this time, complete with dystopian stage setups.

When you bothered to actually listen to the songs though, these weren't the hopeful people who gave us the Joshua Tree. Across songs like Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses and One, you can hear a sense of apprehension in their voice, as if they've forgotten how to even build connections. Whereas the last album thought we could conquer the world, these are men who realized that the world is a lot scarier than they thought. Then again, if we made it over the hump once, even the most jaded people can do it again.