5 Mediocre Albums By Great Bands

No band is perfect. While many bands have a track record of putting out exceptional records, each band tends to have peaks and valleys in their discography. Even some legendary bands have been known to release albums that were miles below their usual standard.

That being said, these albums can more often than not be learning experiences for the bands that make them. Maybe it's a bold new direction that just didn't work out, or it may have been the songs were lagged by shoddy production work. Either way, these albums show that bands we know and love are indeed fallible.

Does that make every album on this list repulsively terrible? Well...not exactly. There may be some half-decent tunes, but the execution of them may not have panned out the way the artist intended. Some songs on these albums are great moments in the band's career, but they stand as moments on the record rather than an amazing album experience.

Whether you love them, hate them, or are just indifferent, these artists can certainly do better than what these albums gave us.

Linkin Park had an interesting artistic trajectory in the 2010's. After ushering in electronics on A Thousand Suns and Living Things, their aggression came back with a vengeance on 2014's The Hunting Party. Fans were psyched that Linkin Park was getting back into rock again.

Once One More Light came out though, those same fans were especially heartbroken. Instead of continuing down the more aggro direction, Linkin Park decided to make a pop crossover that alienated a core portion of their fanbase. On songs like "Heavy" and "Battle Symphony," the keyboards and synths tend to drown out the rock instrumentation almost entirely.

Unfortunately, the One More Light tour cycle was also met with a tragic end as Chester Bennington committed suicide shortly thereafter. This album was not the band's greatest, but it will remain the band's unintended epitaph until further notice. Those circumstances help show the album in a different light, so to speak. Given the lyric sheet, fans can listen to the struggles that Bennington had with depression and how he was still diligently trying to face his demons. While this album is far from the band's finest hour, it doesn't diminish the great music that Bennington gave us throughout his lifetime.