10 Rock Albums That Were Ahead Of Their Time

Almost half of the battle of the music business is about being in the right place at the right time. For every act that lights up the charts in their day, there’s a good chunk of them that are quite happy to just ride the trends for however long it will take them, hoping to capture an audience that will stick around once the fashions turn away from them. While we were all focusing on the charts though, these bands were flying under the radar with some of the greatest music ever made.

As much as these albums are known as classics these days, they were greeted with a lot more confusion when they were first released. If you go back and read some of the reviews from around the time these came out, you’re going to find a lot of strange reactions, with critics either being disgusted by what they just heard or not quite being able to put it into words. Whether they wanted to admit it or not, these records were the sounds of the future.

For all the people who didn’t get it back in the day, time has been a lot kinder to these records since, being trailblazers for future genres or signaling a new guard for what the music scene was going to be going forward. Every musician has to keep up with the times to stay afloat, but when it comes to these artists, it’s almost as if time needs to catch up with them.

As the '70s started to turn a corner, the new age of music in the '80s was about to be highly focused on image. Though there were the likes of glam rock in the last decade, the arrival of MTV almost made your visuals as important as the music, with bands looking to strut their stuff whenever they showed up to make music videos. So in that kind of atmosphere, it is jarring when you saw this little art rock outfit out of Athens, Georgia climbing the album charts alongside the likes of Michael Jackson and Prince.

Around the same time that the blockbuster '80s were starting, R.E.M's debut Murmur became an unlikely hit on the college rock scene, with songs that were borderline incomprehensible half the time because of Michael Stipe's unique approach to vocals. It didn't even matter what he was singing though, with fans taking these ramblings and interpreting what it means to them, having a bit of a friend to help you through your adolescence on songs like Perfect Circle and Radio Free Europe.

Though there were these kind of acts that were a bit less mainstream at the time, the success of Murmur became the cornerstone of what would become alternative rock once the '90s exploded, with everyone from Eddie Vedder to Kurt Cobain talking about how much they loved the band. Rock and roll was definitely getting glamorized around this time, but you don't need that many layers of makeup when the songs speak for themselves.