Even the most sacred cow lets out the occasional stinker. From Iron Maiden to Metallica, Slayer to Morbid Angel, there’s a consensus that some of metal’s biggest and most legendary bands have at least one record that should never have seen the light of day.
Or should they? While it might seem easy to dismiss divisive records like No Prayer For The Dying and Diabolus In Musica, there’s an argument to be made that these records are nowhere near as bad as critical consensus would have you believe. That in mind, Hammer dives in on the supposed “bad albums” that deserve a second look…
Slayer – Diabolus In Musica (1998)
Kerry King hates Slayer’s eighth album. Bummed out by the rise of Korn, Limp Bizkit and the nu metal movement, the guitarist took a back seat when it came to songwriting. Result? A phoned-in, zeitgeist-chasing record that longtime fans hated as much as one of the men who played on it.
That’s the story, but it’s harsh on Diabolus…. Sure, there’s plenty more groove here than you’ll hear on the classic Slayer records, but the idea that this is a blatant Coal Chamber or Spineshank rip-off is absurd. Listen to Diabolus In Musica today and you’ll find a set of meaty, heavy ragers with all of the things that you love about Slayer present and correct; Tom Araya’s blood-curdling scream, the King-Hanneman guitar team’s wild and unpredictable solos, and the stench of pure dread and evil permeating every facet of songs like Perversions Of Pain, Bitter Peace and Scrum.
What you won’t find is rapping, DJ scratching or any of the other nu metal tropes. Even the songs that are closer to where metal was in 1998, such as the brilliant Stain Of Mind or Love To Hate, have way more in common with Prong or Godflesh than they do Linkin Park. It might not be pure thrash, but Diabolus In Musica is miles away from being a cynical nu metal album, and is way better than the bloke who played guitar on it would have you believe. Stephen Hill
THEY SAY: “When we made the Diabolus In Musica record, I wasn’t into writing music because I was so offended by that shit. I couldn’t understand why anybody would make music like that, let alone like it. That was definitely my darkest time as a musician.” – Kerry King
Iron Maiden – No Prayer For The Dying (1990)
1984’s Powerslave might have cemented Iron Maiden as metal A-listers, but it was a tipping point – the first glimmerings of the prog sensibilities that saw the songs get longer and more excessive, culminating in the 13-minute Rime Of The Ancient Mariner. Follow-up Somewhere In Time? Just one song under five minutes. Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son? A concept album with a near-10-minute title track. Suddenly, Run To The Hills seemed a very long time ago.
No Prayer For The Dying was the antidote, even if people didn’t appreciate it at the time and certainly don’t appreciate it now. It’s regularly written off as the weakest of their Bruce Dickinson-fronted albums, a misguided attempt to get back to basics, right down to recording in Steve Harris’s barn. And what’s with Bruce’s weird, growling voice? But that’s exactly the point. This is Iron Maiden sounding hungry and hard again, in ways they hadn’t since 1982.
Yes, Bruce sounds like he’s been chain-smoking chimney stacks, but songs such as Holy Smoke need that grit. It’s hardly like the band were chucking the baby out with the bathwater, either; there are grandiose, galloping melodies on Tailgunner, lighter-bait guitar work on the title track and widdly leads aplenty on Public Enema Number One.
More than anything, No Prayer For The Dying feels like somebody had lit a fire under Maiden’s arses again. Thrash was peaking, and they were in serious danger of looking antiquated if they wrote another nine-minute song about some ancient Macedonian general. Instead, the band tightened their songwriting and gave us tracks like Fates Warning and The Assassin, whose urgency lends them a genuine sense of menace.
Of course, there’s always Bring Your Daughter… To The Slaughter, the record’s most obvious target and the stick that is often used to beat No Prayer For The Dying with. But this was the first metal single to go to No.1 in the UK, and with good reason – it’s a knowingly daft celebration of heavy metal’s preoccupation with horror, with a massive singalong chorus at its heart. And let’s face it, nobody’s reaching for Rime Of The Ancient Mariner to get a party started, are they? Rich Hobson
THEY SAY: “I think it’s a really strong album. At the time, we had gotten so big, with all the grandiose shows, that we were trying to go back to basics a little bit. We were trying to make it sound like a live album, which is why we got the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio to record it live in the barn.
We probably should have put audience noise on it, because it would have sounded more like a proper live album – we did that with the Tailgunner video, and it made a big difference. It got slagged off, but I don’t care about that stuff anyway. If someone says they don’t like something, that makes me embrace it even more. You’ve got to believe in what do, haven’t you?” – Steve Harris
Lou Reed & Metallica – Lulu (2011)
Critics have maligned Lulu and fans have all but written it off from their discography, but it did something important. For decades, Metallica’s albums were produced to a fine polish. Lou Reed stripped all of that away and forced the band to record together live, often in one take, frequently improvising, and that’s what you hear on Lulu – it is Metallica exposed, with all the warts and scars left in.
This process took the band back to their club days, when most fans believe Metallica were at their most ‘Metallica’. Songs like Pumping Blood and Mistress Dread showcase some classic riffage that would have been applauded on a more traditional Metallica release. Even Lou Reed’s spoken-word delivery layered over the top can’t obscure what Metallica are doing underneath. Lulu did something unexpected – it pushed Metallica outside their comfort zone. Justin Beckner
THEY SAY: “It’s aged extremely well. It sounds like a motherfucker still. So I can only put the reaction down to ignorance.” – Lars Ulrich
Machine Head – Catharsis (2018)
Riding on a no-fucks-given vibe, Catharsis felt like Robb Flynn having fun by writing ragers – such as the title track and the volatile, er, Volatile. Some are callbacks to the band’s early days in LA: Triple Beam is a portrait of drug life and California Bleeding is a love letter to the underbelly of the Sunshine State. Kaleidoscope celebrates metal itself, and Razorblade Smile is silly yet topical.
There are pauses for breath, too, in the acoustic Behind A Mask and vocal harmonies of Screaming At The Sun. However, it’s not perfect. Psychotic, Grind You Down and the bizarre folk-rocker Bastards could all be lopped off.
It wasn’t only controversial among fans: drummer Dave McClain and guitarist Phil Demmel left soon after, partly because they were unhappy with the band’s direction. But ignore the haters – rarely has Robb sounded so off-the-chain. Eleanor Goodman
THEY SAY: “I’m proud as fuck of that record. I knew it was going to piss people off. A bunch of asshole trolls who got their fuckin’ panties in a bunch about it. Fuck ’em! I ain’t gonna apologise for shit!” – Robb Flynn
Guns N’ Roses – Chinese Democracy (2008)
You don’t hate Chinese Democracy. You just hate what Axl did to GN’R. By the time the notoriously delayed album arrived, Slash, Duff et al were long gone; Axl had effectively reduced the band to himself and a revolving cast of characters. The knives were out and duly sharpened for an album that had taken 14 long years and a reported $13 million to make.
Once it finally dropped, critics and fans largely either laid into it or, worse, simply shrugged it off. Nearly two decades on, can we all admit that the album is actually pretty damn good? It’s a little overstuffed, but there’s something giddy in the way Axl let his rock opera ambitions run wild, and there are some belting songs on here. The title track and Better are now setlist staples; Sorry is a deliciously woozy doom-country ditty; Shackler’s Revenge’s NIN-indebted stomp is irresistible, and the unbelievable one-two of power ballads If The World and There Was A Time are just outstanding. Merlin Alderslade
THEY SAY: “I think Axl sang his ass off. He made the record he wanted to make and I’m happy for him. I thought he did a great job.” – Duff McKagan (er, who didn’t play on the album…)
Paradise Lost – Host (1999)
Host bears all the hallmarks of a bad album. It’s an electronic detour from veteran metallers who’d never touched that sort of thing, and the band were in dire straits when they made it: signed to mega-label EMI (who had no idea how to promote them), facing fan outrage over their short haircuts, and weathering internal turbulence, not least the loss of frontman Nick Holmes’s father.
Few give Host the time it deserves, and many dismiss it as Depeche Mode worship. Yet, despite the genre change, PL kept the same focus on dark, catchy songs they developed on 1993’s Icon. So Much Is Lost, Nothing Sacred, In All Honesty and Host itself boast some of the strongest hooks in their canon.
Nick’s baritone over moody synths and industrial beats may betray Dave Gahan and Martin Gore’s influence, but the strings and female backing vocals had been staples since 1991’s Gothic. More people need to wrap their heads around Host’s slick synth-pop melancholy. Matt Mills
THEY SAY: “Songwriting-wise, Host is a great album. There are some great songs on there and it was always about that. It was never about playing them at rock festivals or anything like that.” – Nick Holmes
Morbid Angel – Ilud Divinum Insanus (2011)
When Morbid Angel’s eighth album was released, the death metal pioneers’ unexpected reinvention as an industrial juggernaut wasn’t regarded as a brave left turn, so much as a revered band repeatedly hitting their head against a wall.
Fans bemoaned the absence of drummer Pete Sandoval and Trey Azagthoth’s leads in favour of a reductive stomp, but Illud was a riot from a band who’d earned the right to go off on one. Much of Illud’s verve was provided by Dave Vincent’s hammy vocals slathered over the gabba groove of Too Extreme! and the high-camp battle march of Destructos Vs. The Earth / Attack, and it wasn’t as if Illud was unprecedented, the band having collaborated with industrial provocateurs Laibach as far back as ’94.
Morbid Angel disowned it, yet they’d never sounded so self-assured, and this one-off, steeped in pomp and absurdity, deserves celebration. Jonathan Selzer
THEY SAY: “I thought it was gonna sound a lot more heavy. But nothing could save a silly song like [electro-adjacent track] Radikult, which I just tried to ignore. I had nothing to do with that thing.” – Trey Azagthoth
Korn – The Path Of Totality (2011)
Back in 2011, electronic dance music was having a moment, and dubstep was reaching its peak. If any metal band was gonna get in on the fun, it was gonna be Korn, given their penchant for pushing boundaries whether through bagpipes or birthing a whole bloody subgenre in nu metal.
For their 10th album, they teamed up with dubstep and EDM artists to brew up huge riffs, juddering bass, spacey beats and giant anthems for a suckerpunch of a record that Jonathan Davis called ‘future metal’. But were you readdday for this future? It seems not.
Fans and critics scowled that Korn had sold out on a trend. But this inventive mash-up was a match made in metal heaven, bursting with fresh bangers from start to finish and proving that, 17 years on from inventing one of the most divisive scenes in metal, Korn were still shaking things up. Hannah May Kilroy
THEY SAY: “I love that they did that, and they got some really cool songs out of it, like Get Up. But I didn’t join Korn to do that type of music.” – Head (who rejoined Korn after The Path Of Totality)
Suicide Silence – Suicide Silence (2017)
Subject of a thousand “Teehee!” memes and even a petition to block its release in a particularly demented instance of fan entitlement, Suicide Silence is one of the few albums to disrupt the deathcore status quo.
That genre was already drawing plenty from nu metal but Suicide Silence went one step further and roped in Ross Robinson to produce their fifth album. He lent it a ragged, deliberately messy sound that called back to the audio horror of Korn’s game-changing debut, with Eddie Hermida’s vocals breaking away from deathcore pigsqueals and into tormented, unhinged wails.
It was designed to unsettle, but was too out-there for fans expecting standard-issue Pro Tooled breakdowns and vocal animal noises in all the places they’re supposed to be. Suicide Silence was an attempt to push deathcore into legitimately dangerous territory. That it didn’t perhaps said less about the band and more about the people who listened to it. Perran Helyes
THEY SAY: “We took a lot of heat for it and the backlash was much more severe than we thought it would be. That definitely affected us personally.” – Eddie Hermida
Megadeth – Risk (1999)
When Dave Mustaine unveiled an album called Risk and started talking about taking chances, metalheads reacted as though he’d announced a jazz-fusion collab with Sting. The verdict was swift and brutal: sellout, disaster, misfire. That’s nonsense. People judge Risk as a failed thrash album instead of what it actually is: a great hard rock record.
OK, Crush ’Em is moronic bluster, but beneath the wrestling-theme bombast lies some of the strongest songwriting of Dave’s career. Breadline is absurdly catchy, Wanderlust aches with melancholy and Time: The Beginning boasts a level of maturity and reflection few Megadeth records even attempt.
Most bands accused of selling out simply make worse versions of themselves. Risk was far more interesting: it committed to a different vision. Nearly 30 years on, stripped of expectation and outrage, it sounds exactly what it always was: bold, melodic and unfairly condemned. Joe Daly
THEY SAY: “If I drink a little bit I’m gonna want to do a bit of blow. If I do blow I want to do heroin. And if I do heroin I end up writing an album like Risk again – and nobody wants that.” – Dave Mustaine
Judas Priest – Nostradamus (2008)
When Judas Priest reunited with iconic vocalist Rob Halford in 2003, the metal world rejoiced. Two years later, reunion album Angel Of Retribution was warmly received. But three years after that, the British legends released Nostradamus: an overblown and ambitious double concept album about the life of 16th-century seer Michel de Nostredame, the medieval equivalent of that octopus that used to predict the results of football tournaments.
Weirdly, Priest’s unashamedly indulgent 16th studio album was given a mixed response. Too long. Too synth-heavy. Too ridiculous. Nostradamus was praised by some, but given a rigorous kicking by everyone else. In truth, Nostradamus is exactly the kind of unapologetic, aggressively over-the-top statement that such a pioneering band should be making.
Heavy metal is supposed to be big, bold and occasionally stupid, and since Priest coined the majority of the genre’s in-built clichés, they have the right to exploit them. Nostradamus is an extravagant, symphonic metal masterpiece, with several of the finest songs the band have written this century. Prophecy, Death, Pestilence And Plague and Persecution are all monsters, and the title track is both epic and catchy as fuck.
The album’s numerous interludes and atmospheric detours are the perfect showcase for Rob Halford’s still-extraordinary voice. Guitarists K.K. Downing (who quit after the album’s release) and Glenn Tipton have never been on such inventive form, and guest keyboardist Don Airey decorates the record with lavish moments of inspiration.
Although overshadowed by subsequent albums – Firepower and Invincible Shield in particular – Nostradamus was the late-career triumph that nobody saw coming. Dom Lawson
THEY SAY: “It was really fun to do. It came together very quickly too because we weren’t scratching around trying to write another Breaking The Law or another Painkiller or something. It was completely fresh. I understand that the Priest fans didn’t get it, they know what they want.
They want consistency like they get from AC/DC or Iron Maiden or something like that, where they stick to what they know and what they do best. But I’d have to say that I’m very happy that we did that album.” ex-Priest guitarist K.K. Downing
