10 albums guaranteed to give you a headache
Any musician is going to want to make their album a pleasant experience. As much as people might like to rock out and try a billion different ideas on every song, there’s only so much you can do before things get cluttered. You have to keep the mix open just a touch, but artists like Metallica threw caution to the wind and made albums that seriously hurt their audience.
Then again, there’s a difference between an album that’s bad and an album that’s hard to listen to. Whereas most artists have made albums that people never want to hear again because of how little quality is there, the opposite effect is having an album of what could be good songs buried under walls of distortion every time you listen to it.
In many cases, the issue comes down to production choices rather than songwriting. Pushing levels too far, over-compressing tracks or layering too many elements on top of each other can leave a mix feeling suffocating rather than powerful. What might have sounded massive in the studio can quickly become exhausting for listeners when there’s no room for the music to breathe.
That problem is often amplified when bands chase a specific aesthetic without considering how it translates outside the recording environment. An aggressive, dense sound might feel exciting in the moment, but repeated listens can reveal its limitations. Without dynamics or clarity, even the strongest material can struggle to leave a lasting impression.
The real shame is that the songs behind a lot of these albums are actually pretty good. Compared to the songs that come from bands that aren’t trying anymore, this is the kind of stellar tracklist that most fans hope for, which is somehow caught between the band’s vision and the vision of the producer half the time.
Some artists may have learned their lesson from the first time around, but others ended up finding themselves in a hole when playing this style, going further and further down this rabbit hole until nobody wanted to hear them anymore. The songs may have been coming together in the studio just fine, but it’s a pretty big problem when they sound better on the stage than they do on streaming services.
10 albums that will give you a headache:
‘Toxicity’ – System of a Down
Metal has always been designed to be the opposite of easy listening. For a genre that’s based on loud guitars and guttural vocals that are meant to scare people to death whenever they’re sung, no one’s really expecting to hear Sinatra or anything when they put on a record. As for System of a Down, though, Toxicity is the reason why the term “tonal whiplash” exists in the music world.
That’s not to say that any of the songs on here are bad. There are stone-cold classics like ‘Chop Suey!’ and the title track, but to have them put next to dada-ist humour songs like ‘Bounce’ is one of the most perplexing production choices they could have made. Then again, maybe the joke tracks are meant to break up the sound of this mix, which sounds like if Rick Rubin turned everything to 11 and gave a middle finger to compression.
Even though a metal guitar is supposed to sound punchy, Daron Malakian’s thick walls of guitars may as well be hitting you in the head every time they come in. System of a Down definitely got a few more classics and even improved their production game over time, but really, how can you fault an album that does exactly what it says on the tin? It’s a toxic listening experience, so you may as well be prepared for scars.
‘Vapor Trails’ – Rush
By the time that Rush made Vapor Trails, the goal wasn’t to make an amazing album; it was just to make an album. There was a slim chance that Neil Peart was ever going to pick up two sticks ever again, and the fact that they came together at all to make music again is at least a small victory. Since that victory was achieved amid the loudness wars, every one of them feels like a letdown.
Given that the band had made some of the squelchiest-sounding keyboard productions of the 1980s, those thankfully have been given the boot, leading to Alex Lifeson taking centre stage. Now if only he could turn the gain down on his amp because the entire mix feels like a weird musical soup for every instrument, where the entire band is clipping on every microphone in the room.
There are some slower songs, but by the time you hit tracks like ‘Ghost Rider’, it practically feels like an act of mercy that they put a more downtempo track into the mix. Because if this was a huge production all the way through, there’s a good chance that the prog rock die-hards would probably walk away from this album completely deaf.
‘White Light/White Heat’ – The Velvet Underground
The Velvet Underground always had a reputation for not going along with the program. Since their first album was full of songs that had nothing to do with the mainstream market, hopes weren’t exactly high for them to make the answer to Pet Sounds on their follow-up. They were never going to match that kind of pristine production, so why not go in the exact opposite direction?
From the minute White Light/White Heat starts, fans know what to expect, with the guitars sounding like static coming out of the speakers. While the band’s producer warned them about everything sounding distorted on playback, the band took that feedback and proceeded to do absolutely nothing to change it.
What we get instead are songs that lean towards shoegaze in how abrasive the mix is, with Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison duelling with guitars on the track ‘Sister Ray’. The Velvet Underground were meant to soundtrack the grimy side of rock and roll, and this is the kind of raucous mix that feels as if a street fight were put to music.
‘Born Again’ – Black Sabbath
Someone really should have kept Black Sabbath in check when it came to singers. While it’s easy to see Ozzy Osbourne as the band’s default madman, the amount of people behind the microphone during their prime was Spinal Tap levels of dysfunctional. With Ronnie James Dio having left the band after The Mob Rules, why not get the guy who worked the same magic for Deep Purple to take a crack at it?
First off, Ian Gillan isn’t the worst musician to be in Sabbath, given the fact that he and Osbourne both had their roots in blues traditions. What really throws everything out of whack is the amount of distortion on the final mix, which sounds just about as bad as the god-awful album cover of a demon baby, which looks like it was put together in Microsoft Paint.
Before Sabbath fans get mad, even the band isn’t looking to defend the production job, thinking that it was a major screwup and should never have been released to begin with. Born Again feels more like an idea for a new side project than a fleshed-out album, but whoever had the final say in putting the final mix to vinyl needed to be given a severe lecture on how to mix properly.
‘Metal Machine Music’ – Lou Reed
It’s every artist’s right to be as experimental as they want. Even if the experiment turns into a disaster, at least you can say you broke some new ground and found what you weren’t able to accomplish that successfully. If you’re Lou Reed and you’re trying to make things sound weird, you end up giving your fans a blast of noise right to the solar plexus.
Despite his various ventures into spoken word, Metal Machine Music is one of the few times where Reed’s creative ingenuity got the better of him. Instead of making an album of music that people might like to sing along to, this is just a double album of nothing but guitar feedback, which wastes one of the greatest metal album titles of all time.
Then again, this feels like something that’s less of a passion project and more of an elaborate way for Reed to pull a fast one by his record company as if he needed one more album to be finished and shat this out in a few hours. As a way to mess with industry heads, this album is hilarious, but outside of the novelty, this can only be recommended to the deaf community because of the vibrations.
‘Use Your Illusion’ – Guns N’ Roses
Guns N’ Roses were never going to be told what to do by anyone. If there was anyone behind the scenes telling them how their video should have looked, there’s a good chance that guy would have been dealt with accordingly by either the band or one of their crew. This wasn’t a band by the 1990s, though. This was Axl Rose’s show, and the rest of the band became glorified window dressing on Use Your Illusion.
Spread across two albums, this was the project Rose thought would leave their debut in the dust, putting together songs that had a broad sonic palette and extended solos that tested what the band could do. That’s just the fancy way of saying that the album is way too long, especially with songs like ‘Estranged’ which came in with seven minutes of song and only five minutes worth of actual quality.
When your temples aren’t throbbing from the sheer length of the songs, you get hit with the kind of lyrics that make your eyes roll into the back of your head, especially when Rose tries to make more experimental songs on ‘My World’. The long-lost follow-up to Appetite for Destruction is probably out there somewhere, but that band that gave us ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ died before this album was even finished.
‘Be Here Now’ – Oasis
For a while, Oasis was one of the only bands that actually could pull off making a disappearing act up their own ass. The ground had been laid with Definitely Maybe, and against all odds, the band’s What’s the Story Morning Glory managed to do a million times better than anyone expected. All that was left to do was to complete the three-album run, and Noel Gallagher took all that potential and shoved it directly up his nose.
Influenced by God knows how much drugs, Be Here Now became one of the most botched sequels in the history of rock because of how far Oasis was willing to go. Thinking that the best thing they had ever done was ‘Champagne Supernova’, an album of nothing but long songs masked as classic rock tunes should have done the trick, right?
In theory, yes, it did, but the sales didn’t make up for the production, including songs that ran on for too long and producer Owen Morris pushing the album to sheer white noise more than a few times during the mixing process. Be Here Now makes for an interesting case study of what success does to a band, but after you get done working out the migraine you just suffered, you start to realise just how bad too much polish can be.
‘Songs for the Deaf’ – Queens of the Stone Age
All stoner rock knows the power behind the volume. Whatever’s loud must go louder at some point, and artists like Sleep have been able to use the sludgiest riffs to their advantage whenever they made any of their albums. While Queens of the Stone Age may have been the poster children for what stoner rock could sound like at its most mainstream, that doesn’t make Songs for the Deaf any less of a fatiguing listen during its runtime.
While the album is one of the best projects to come out of the 2000s, the maximalist production and strict emphasis on loud guitars make the whole album feel tiring to get through in one go. By the time you hit songs like ‘Hanging Tree’, your ears are going to need some sort of break because of how much the band have been throwing at you.
In fact, that’s probably the optimal way of listening to this album. After getting through the various interludes, go right through every song and cherry-pick the ones you like before taking it in as a whole. Because if you’re introduced to this as one of the greatest rock albums ever made and then have to tap out halfway through, you’re selling yourself short on some of the band’s best riffs.
‘Two Vrgins’ – John Lennon/Yoko Ono
All first dates tend to be a little bit awkward. There’s always that internal tension when you’re trying to get to know the person, and it can make for a few stumbling blocks when going out for the first time. John Lennon was no different when meeting Yoko Ono for the first time…it’s just that his version of their first date was captured on vinyl for all of the world to hear.
After Ono visited Lennon while his wife was on holiday, they spent the entire night staying up and recording Two Virgins, which was meant to be considered music thought of in the listener’s mind. Well, okay, let’s see what we have to listen to. For as much as people might like to dream up the music, the entire album is nothing but discordant noise, featuring Lennon and Ono screaming all the way through and barely breaking any new ground in the process.
While the music is definitely interesting for at least a minute, one can only imagine the look on Beatles fans’ faces when they put this on the turntable and knew that things were not going to get any better. Lennon and Ono would eventually make two more avant-garde albums together, but in this case, one’s really all you need to see if it’s your thing or not.
‘St Anger’ – Metallica
For a band that has the pedigree of one of the biggest metal bands in the world, Metallica deserves to have a better class of production. Even though they may have had brilliant recordings in the past, they’ve also had outright dogs like And Justice For All, which famously suffered from having absolutely no bottom end. There may have been small tweaks to be made to get perfection, but St Anger takes every wrong step when it comes to making a commercial product.
Inspired by the problems they were going through during therapy, half of the album sounds like James Hetfield is about to pull his vocal cords apart while playing the most half-assed detuned riffs imaginable. In the interest of creating an even greater cacophony, Lars Ulrich’s idea to unhook the snare from his snare drum makes for a rhythm section that’s ripped straight out of a junkyard.
While Metallica has stood by the album as an important stepping stone for them to stay together, it’s not just the mediocre production that turns this album into a headache. It’s the fact that this album is the product of a handful of inflated egos that somehow decided that their therapy should be put on display for their fans rather than staying private.
