10 Rock Bands That Bounced Back From Bad Albums

Having the one bad record is what separates the adults from the children in the music world. For any regular act, a bad album can usually tear apart an entire career, killing any momentum that they might have going forward. The real professionals find a way to keep things moving though.

That's not to say that all of the records that preceded these were reprehensible or anything. While still far from their best work, a lot of these artists were in a bit of a creative lump at this point in their career, where they could either sink or swim along with the changing tides. It's never easy to recover from a bad album, but you can really hear the blood sweat and tears being poured into each and every one of these releases.

Instead of the usual cynicism you would get from a bad album rollout, these next installments were masterclasses in course correction, steering them away from the more ill-advised moments of their career to create something entirely new.

It takes a great deal of courage to actually stand by your failure, but it's even more bold to admit your failure and come back stronger for it.

In an industry who's artists typically drop like flies, these bands proved that they were going to be sticking around for a long time.

You can only count on one hand the amount of rock bands who were able to thrive without their lead singer. Since the one delivering the tunes is known as the mouth of the band at the best of times, there's always going to be special attention paid to them before anything else. When it came to Black Sabbath, it really felt like the end of an era once Ozzy Osbourne decided to call it quits.

Coming off of the often maligned Never Say Die, Ozzy was burned out and couldn't really see working with Tony Iommi and the rest of his bandmates in the future. Instead of getting an Ozzy clone though, Iommi found another one of a kind frontman in Ronnie James Dio, who brought them to the top all over again with Heaven and Hell. The new Sabbath felt like a rebirth in every sense of the word, going from the bluesy attack of the Ozzy years to a much more refined metallic spit with Dio's shrieks.

Considering this was coming off of the early '80s, this also became the foundation for the new guard of heavy metal going forward, with the New Wave of British Heavy Metal not far behind this very album. For all of the drawbacks that came with losing a guy like Ozzy, this is where Sabbath became a dark phoenix that rose from the ashes of their first fallout.