The 10 most vicious albums ever made

Niandra LaDes – John Frusciante

When Red Hot Chili Peppers became famous, John Frusciante realised his days numbered. He had anticipated being in a great rock and roll band, but being the centre of attention and heralded as a guitar god was the exact opposite of what he signed up for when songs like ‘Give It Away’ started climbing up the charts. So when he finally had the chance to stretch himself a little bit more after leaving, he figured that he’d spend a bit more time getting to know a little friend of his called heroin.

For the first few years of his departure, Frusciante turned into the archetype for a rock and roll screwup, constantly doping himself up in his apartment and hardly finding time to even go outside. And while he was still being creative, Ninadra LaDes is one of the most tortured listens that he ever made, almost like being invited into his mind and knowing all of the pain that he feels about screwing himself up.

The accompanying album Usually Just A T-Shirt is no better, either, with most of the untitled pieces sounding like Frusciante is riffing, to the point where it sounds like he’s on the verge of a mental snap. He may have seen it as art back then, but if anyone was one of the fortunate souls to hear him play this from the comfort of his apartment, chances are they were worried they were looking at a bomb waiting to go off.

Life With the Lions – John Lennon and Yoko Ono

As much as people love to bash her, allow me to defend Yoko Ono for a brief second. Like it or not, John Lennon would not have taken nearly as many chances without Yoko by his side, and her need to foster creativity in him towards the end of The Beatles’ run was half the reason he could still manage to function during their final days. When they came together to create their own albums, though, there was always a 50/50 chance of it being decent or absolute torture. And it doesn’t take long to realise which one Life With the Lions is.

While Two Virgins was at least a decent experiment under the guise of them making avant-garde music, the entire first side of this record is borderline unlistenable. There are occasional bits that sound like actual instruments, but all of it is drowned out by what I can only call Yoko’s signature vocal style, which is that she screeches like a dying cat into the microphone for 20 minutes.

Although the second side does at least give us a respite with the ‘Two Minutes Silence,’ the fact that the couple didn’t see the error of their ways on this record is partly why their later projects hit a snag. Some Time in New York City may have had some good ideas, but if it’s all in service to a terrible mission statement, it should come as no surprise when people want to avoid it like the plague.

Reign in Blood – Slayer

For most mainstream rock fans circa 1986, thrash metal was normally the heaviest that anyone was willing to go. The beginnings of black metal had already started, but there wasn’t a chance that most suburban homes in the age of MTV were blasting stuff like Venom on their stereos between George Michael and Madonna. Still, Metallica was far from the heaviest you could go, and Slayer took the time on Reign in Blood to create the kind of beatdown most people only hope to survive.

While many album covers can be more than a little bit exaggerated, the hellish landscape on Slayer’s magnum opus isn’t there by accident. From lyrics about being killed to the massive tale of the Holocaust in ‘Angel of Death’, nothing is off the table here, especially when mixer Andy Wallace decided to pan everything the right way to make it sound like the guitars are hitting you in the face every time one of the riffs start.

And for an album that had come from the era when CDs were starting to become commonplace, there was still no way that anyone was going to be shortchanged by the fact that it was a little less than half an hour. That’s a lot of time left on the table, but once someone has gone through this kind of landscape, one’s enough.

Metal Machine Music – Lou Reed

Lou Reed was never one to take the traditional route with any of his music. The whole point behind The Velvet Underground was to be an antithesis to what bands like The Beatles had been doing years before, and even if that meant being a bit more aggressive, that didn’t seem to matter all that much. Every song was about Reed going where his heart took him, but Metal Machine Music isn’t the kind of record someone can put on in the background or anything.

From the first few minutes of the record, this is a nonstop assault on the eardrums, being nothing but guitar feedback for over 90 minutes. Even though the record is technically a double album, hearing the whole thing in one sitting is something that only the most determined music fans are ready for, especially when things start to get piercing and reach the point where it would trigger migraines for anyone listening in the general area.

Still, Reed never apologised for the record, either, saying that it was an honest outlet for his frustration and even considered it up there with some of his masterpieces. The album is one of the most grating pieces of music to come out of the 1970s and is a massive cacophony of noise from beginning to end, but whereas those are normally insults when it comes to any other record, having it appear on this list is almost a sign of respect.

Exmillitary – Death Grips

By the 2010s, the concept of genre was starting to get a bit more fluid than before. Even if someone classified themselves as a “rock band,” they couldn’t use synthesisers on a track or add some electronic elements to their sound. But for an age that was twisting and turning genres in all different kinds of directions, chances are none of us were quite ready for Death Grips when they arrived on the scene.

While The Money Store is their more commercial record by a mile, Exmillitary was the first time that people got to hear abject noise being turned into music for the first time. Most people had grown accustomed to what something like industrial rock sounded like, but this was like an actual machine trying to pummel you for an entire project, complete with MC Ride sounding like he was trying to rip his vocal cords out of his larynx over the course of every single song.

Is it good? Sure, but be warned before going into it that this is not the kind of record that anyone casually throws on. This is meant to be a record that beats the hell out of you for one track, gives you a second to recover, and proceeds to wail on you until the record is over. It’s still a great listen, but it also might be the first record that should have come with a waiver to sign before listening.

The Marshall Mathers LP – Eminem

As the 2000s were dawning, Eminem was one of the most controversial things that anyone had ever seen. Even though a lot of what he said was fairly harmless looking back on it now, The Slim Shady LP was the last thing that anyone wanted their children to buy, complete with outdated vernacular that only gets more cringy today and Slim Shady playing up his reputation as the rap equivalent of a schoolyard bully. While that record does have a cartoonish slant to it, seeing the real man behind all those songs is when people started to get genuinely frightened by what he had to say.

Despite Eminem’s attempts to get more brutal on Music to be Murdered By, nothing is going to top how real The Marshall Mathers LP can get in some places. The whole point behind this record is for him to take the mask off, and outside of songs like ‘The Real Slim Shady,’ every track feels like the plot of an insane horror movie gone horribly wrong. That doesn’t mean it can’t be funny in places, though, like at the end of the album when ‘Criminal’ comes on and Em does a skit about robbing a bank and accidentally shoots the bank teller.

When it does decide to get deep, though, there are songs like ‘Kim’ that can get downright menacing, complete with a depiction of a domestic violence dispute that ends in Slim killing his other half in the woods and then walking back to the road as he absent-mindedly disposes of her body in a lake. He had shown us that he had a heart on tracks like ‘Stan,’ but most of this album is told from the perspective from a psycho daring someone to test him.

Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk (disc 2) – Jeff Buckley

The entire story of Jeff Buckley is always hard to revisit. This was someone who should have taken on the music world and walked away with one of the greatest careers in history, but after one fatal decision, all of those songs filling his head got lost in the river in the American South. All we have now is what he left for us, but while Sketches For My Sweetheart The Drunk is still great, the second disc was an uncomfortable look into his state of mind during those final months of his life.

While we’ll never know what caused him to be swept underwater that night in 1997, hearing Buckley go through demos on the odd and ends portion of the project is downright scary. It was clear he was already having a problem getting the songs he heard in his head out, but add to that the pressure from the label, and versions of tunes like ‘Nightmares By the Sea’ on the back end are the stuff of nightmares, as if he’s trying to pull creativity out of himself and getting nowhere.

This could have been a nice look into his inner psyche, but this demo collection is something that feels too personal to be out in the wild, as if we’re watching him fall apart before he actually lost himself. And now that he’s no longer with us, the whole thing feels intrusive in all the wrong ways. Like it or not, this is where it ends, and seeing Buckley in this state is enough to wonder what was really going through his head at the end.

There Existed an Addiction to Blood – Clipping

Clipping has always felt more like a musical art project than a proper band. An album like Splendor and Misery is the rap equivalent of watching a small play take place in real time between the headphones, and when Daveed Diggs started gaining notoriety in Hamilton, it was almost understood that his musical outfit would be put on the back burner. While we got new music sooner rather than later, There Existed An Addiction to Blood is still one of the most horrifying records of the modern age.

Compared to most metal albums that talk about demons and goblins that terrorise people, the core message of this record is the kind of torture that exists all around us that we refuse to acknowledge. From the serial killer scenarios to listening to Diggs rap about stalking a woman and then watching her choke on her own blood is beautifully grotesque from back to front, especially when the raw white noise starts playing in the background.

While there has been a sequel to the record, Clipping never really managed to capture unbridled aggression and anger like this ever again. Because if he had been able to make something equally as disturbing or even surpass what he did here, it would be hard to look at ol’ Thomas Jefferson in the eye whenever he took the stage on Broadway.

Iowa – Slipknot

Nothing about Slipknot’s music was exactly meant to be happy and inviting. From the minute those discordant noises on the first album started, and people got to see the Iowa collective wearing masks onstage, they knew they were in for something that took what Korn had merely suggested and went even further. There are pieces of that debut record that are still genuinely disturbing, but they were only getting warmed up when they managed to get pissed on the road.

Since Ross Robinson had wanted to amplify their aggression, Iowa is nothing but piledriving music for an hour. While that shouldn’t be anything new to a casual Slipknot fan, hearing Taylor sing about wanting to dispose of his enemies in graphic detail on ‘Disasterpiece’ is among one of the most vicious attacks in music history. That’s before getting into the deep cuts, where Sid Wilson screams to open the record, Taylor has a go at religion on ‘The Heretic Anthem,’ or eventually mutilates himself when laying down vocals for the title track.

And what’s even more strange is the fact that the record actually earned its reputation, managing to make it all the way to the top of the charts despite being the musical version of a woodchipper. There had been records that were heavier and might have even gone harder than Slipknot ever could, but this is the kind of accolade that every single Maggot could hold up as the reason why their favourite band should be hated, loved, and feared in equal measure.

The Downward Spiral – Nine Inch Nails

So, what could possibly beat a record that feels like it’s assaulting you? There have been many albums that have touched on something depressing, but when someone hears their favourite artists actually bleeding on a record, there’s no way to properly top that. Trent Reznor knew that he wasn’t going to get anywhere with raw noise, so The Downward Spiral is the sound of him getting under your skin first and then refusing to let go.

Since he had already made his first magnum opus in Pretty Hate Machine, Reznor’s second record was meant to be his visceral reaction back at the music industry. He knew that he didn’t have any hit on his hands with this record, but seeing him tell the story of someone losing all sense of humanity and turning into a living social demon was still too much for any casual rock fan to look away from.

And if ‘Closer’ is too much for some people, the title track is enough to give people nightmares for days on end, with Reznor talking about how easy it would be to take his own life as screams are heard in the background. Many people have struggled with their own demons from time to time, but out of every record that came before or has come out since, this is the most authentic version of what it feels like to be inside the mind of an emotional sadist.