10 Rock Albums That Haven't Aged Well At All

It should be every musician's dream to make something that will last much longer than they will. You’re only on this Earth for a certain amount of time, and it’s probably best to write something that’s going to resonate with someone 50 years from now as much as it does today. Some bands have definitely left their blood on the pages, but some of them have not exactly held up to the passage of time.

Then again, there’s no real way to quantify whether all of these are dated or not. Going through every single one of these records, you can tell that some of them were definitely trying to cash in on a certain trend that was happening at the time, either through the production that they were using or singing about subjects they had no right talking about. It’s easy to get caught up in the trends of the day, but some of these have aged like milk, going from something that seemed like it was pushing the envelope to making fans facepalm nowadays and wonder what the hell they were thinking.

That doesn’t exempt stuff that was dated at the time either, with some of these records just sounding out of touch by the standards of the time. You can try to see some of these records through rose colored glasses if you want to, but it starts to get harder and harder to do that as the years go by.

There's a good case to be made that some of the best Metallica songs turn up on And Justice For All. After years of refining the more epic side of their sound, hearing songs like the title track and Blackened makes it feel like the thrash legends have reached their final form, with the ballad One being one of the ultimate examples of their strengths. This album does have more than a few blemishes on it though, and it all comes back to the production.

When they were originally mixing the album, Metallica were also sorting out things with new bass player Jason Newsted, which included countless hazing rituals to make sure that he was good enough to be a part of the Metallica family. Such hazing wasn't limited to different pranks on tour, treating him like an annoying little brother on stage, and in the case of this album, turning the bass down so low that you can barely hear it in the mix.

Even though these lyrics might be some of the more potent that James Hetfield have ever written, it doesn't even matter when they don't have any bottom end to hold it down, which leads to a metal record that lacks a good chunk of its teeth. Metallica may have been reaching a peak in terms of their musicianship, but considering how much this sounds like a demo, it made sense that they would roll the dice with Bob Rock on the Black Album a few years later.