Category: news

Seven Kingdoms have revealed details and first single in connection with their new full-length announcement. Entitled Sono Sola, it will hit the streets on January 27th, 2027 through Reigning Phoenix Music. The 10-piece outing was mixed by Jim Morris at Morrisound Recording and mastered by BJ Ramone at Morrisound Recording.
Read more…

The most hated metal albums of all time have something in common that the worst metal albums of all time don’t: people cared enough to be furious. A boring record gets forgotten. These thirteen got petitions, refund lines, on-stage fistfights, a frontman who refuses to let his own album be reissued, and a fan base that is still arguing twenty years later. That’s why this isn’t a list of the worst metal albums. It’s a list of the records that made the loudest enemies, ranked by how much hate they drew and how long it has lasted, with the case for and against every one of them. One name turns up twice. Thirteen to one.

How We Ranked Them

Three things decide the order. How loud was the reaction at the time: did fans sign petitions, did critics pile on, did members quit over it? How long has the hate lasted: is the record still the punchline of a band’s discography, or did the argument die out? And how much did it cost: careers, lineups, record deals, reputations. Sales and chart positions are in here because they tell you what actually happened, not because they decide anything. Several of these albums sold very well. That is part of why people were so angry.

What this list is not is a ranking of quality. At least four of these records have a serious case for the defense, and we make it. The number one spot goes to the album that drew the most hatred from the most people for the longest time. You already have a guess. Hold it until the bottom.

13. Metallica – St. Anger (2003)

The album where Metallica nearly ended, recorded in a room that was falling apart. Jason Newsted quit in January 2001. James Hetfield went into rehab that July and didn’t come back to the sessions until May 2002. Producer Bob Rock played bass because there was nobody else to do it. All of it was filmed for Some Kind Of Monster, which means St. Anger is the only album on this list where you can watch the hate being earned in real time.

Two decisions did the damage. Lars Ulrich recorded with the snares off, producing the clanging tin sound that is still the first thing anyone mentions. And there are no guitar solos on a Metallica album, which Kirk Hammett explained as wanting to preserve ‘the sound of all four of us in a room just jamming’. Fans heard 75 minutes of unfinished riffs and a drum kit made of saucepans.

The case for: it debuted at number one, sold 417,000 copies in its first week, went double platinum in the US and won the 2004 Grammy for Best Metal Performance. Ulrich still says he stands behind it ‘100 per cent because, at that moment, that was the truth’. Hetfield’s verdict in 2017 was closer to the fans: ‘St. Anger could use a little less tin snare drum.’ It sits at 13 because the hate has softened into a running joke, and the band has survived it.

12. Korn – The Path of Totality (2011)

Korn made a dubstep record. Not a record with a dubstep song on it: a full album built with Skrillex, Excision, Datsik, Noisia, Kill The Noise and 12th Planet, released in December 2011 at the exact moment the genre was peaking. To a fan base that had followed the band through nu metal’s rise and fall, it looked like a 40-year-old band chasing a 20-year-old trend.

The numbers were mixed. It debuted at number ten with 55,000 first-week sales, down from Korn III’s number two debut the year before, and ‘Get Up!’ and ‘Narcissistic Cannibal’ got radio play without becoming Korn staples. Revolver named it Album Of The Year at the 2012 Golden Gods, which the people who hated it took as proof the whole thing was a marketing exercise.

Fifteen years on, it has aged better than almost anyone expected. The drops sound dated, but the songs under them are Korn songs, and Jonathan Davis has never sounded less bored. It also pulled in a generation that had never bought a nu metal record. Where it sits in the Korn catalogue is still a fight, which is exactly why it’s here.

11. Kiss – Music from “The Elder” (1981)

A medieval fantasy concept album by the band that sold lunchboxes. Kiss were coming off the disco flirtation of Dynasty and the soft-rock misfire of Unmasked, and the plan was a serious record to win back critics. Bob Ezrin produced, the story involved a boy chosen by a council of elders to fight evil, and a New York poet named Lou Reed was brought in to co-write three lyrics, including ‘A World Without Heroes’. Remember that name. It comes back.

It was released in November 1981 and peaked at number 75, the first Kiss album since 1975 to miss platinum. The band didn’t tour it, the first time in eight years they had stayed home, and Ace Frehley, who had argued against the concept and skipped sessions, didn’t play on another Kiss studio album until the 1996 reunion. Gene Simmons has been blunt about it since: ‘When the album came out, we were embarrassed.’

The defence is real, though. The orchestral arrangements are the most ambitious thing Kiss ever attempted, ‘A World Without Heroes’ is a genuinely good ballad, and the album has quietly built a cult. It’s hated the way only a massive band’s experiment can be hated: not for being bad, but for not being Kiss.

10. Manowar – Louder Than Hell (1996)

Picture the year. Grunge had won, nu metal was loading, and Manowar released an album called Louder Than Hell with songs titled ‘The Gods Made Heavy Metal’, ‘Return Of The Warlord’ and ‘Brothers Of Metal Pt. 1’. It was the first album with guitarist Karl Logan and the return of drummer Scott Columbus, and it did not acknowledge, in any way, that the previous eight years had happened.

That is the whole argument. To Manowar’s fans, this is the point: the band that never bent, making the record they would have made in 1986. To everyone else it was self-parody at the worst possible moment, the loincloth band shouting about true metal while the rest of the world moved on. Dee Snider has admitted there was a time he wanted to punch Manowar, and he was far from alone in the business.

Europe disagreed with America. Louder Than Hell went to number seven in Germany and charted across the continent, and ‘Courage’ became a live fixture. It sits at ten because the hate was never about the music being poor. It was about a band refusing to be embarrassed, which is either the most metal thing imaginable or the least self-aware, depending on who you ask.

9. Limp Bizkit – Results May Vary (2003)

The album Limp Bizkit made without Wes Borland, which is the first and last thing most people know about it. Borland had left in 2001, Snot’s Mike Smith came and went during the sessions, and Fred Durst ended up playing most of the guitar himself with help from session player Elvis Baskette. Four producers are credited, including Rick Rubin and Terry Date, and it still sounds like nobody was in charge.

It sold. Results May Vary debuted at number three with around 325,000 copies and went platinum, and the cover of The Who’s ‘Behind Blue Eyes’, with Halle Berry in the video, reached the Hot 100. But the Metacritic score was 33, ‘Eat You Alive’ was the only track that sounded like the band people had paid for, and Durst’s description of it as ‘more sad, more deep, drone-y’ was exactly what the fans did not want.

Borland was back within a year and the catalogue moved on, which is why this isn’t higher. The hate for Results May Vary is specific: it is the record that proved how much of Limp Bizkit was Borland. That’s a harsh verdict for a platinum album, and twenty years on it hasn’t changed.

8. Suicide Silence – Suicide Silence (2017)

The only album on this list that fans tried to stop before it came out. When Suicide Silence announced a self-titled record produced by Ross Robinson, with Eddie Hermida singing clean and the deathcore blast beats swapped for Korn-style grooves, more than 5,000 people signed a petition demanding the release be halted. The lead single ‘Doris’ got one of the most hostile reactions a metal video has ever had.

The release in February 2017 confirmed everything the petition feared. It sold 4,650 copies in its first week, down 69 per cent on You Can’t Stop Me, and peaked at number 163. For a band that had carried on after Mitch Lucker’s death in 2012 by promising to protect his legacy, a nu metal record was read as a betrayal of that promise, and the band was told so at every show for the next two years.

They heard it. Become The Hunter in 2020 was a full return to deathcore, and the self-titled record is now an orphan in the set list. It ranks at eight because the hate was total and immediate, but short-lived: the band corrected course, and where Suicide Silence stand today has little to do with 2017. The album itself is braver than its reputation. Nobody wants to hear that.

7. Megadeth – Risk (1999)

The album named after a Lars Ulrich comment. Ulrich had said Dave Mustaine should take more risks, Mustaine took the dare, hired Nashville producer Dann Huff and made a radio-rock record with disco beats, a wrestling anthem and almost no thrash on it. ‘Crush ‘Em’ was built for WCW and the Universal Soldier sequel. ‘Insomnia’ had a dance-floor pulse. Thrash fans who had bought Rust In Peace nine years earlier were not consulted.

Commercially it was a step down, not a collapse: number 16 with 74,000 first-week copies, the lowest debut of the Capitol years. The real cost was the lineup. Marty Friedman, whose alternative-rock leanings Mustaine later blamed for the direction, was gone within months, and Risk was the last Megadeth album on Capitol. Mustaine’s verdict since: ‘If anybody else’s name was on Risk, it would have sold.’ He has also called ‘Crush ‘Em’ probably the dumbest song the band ever recorded.

So why only seven? Because Mustaine has owned it, the band rebuilt, and some of the songs (‘Breadline’, ‘Prince Of Darkness’) hold up as decent hard rock. Risk is hated as a decision more than a record. Where it lands in the Megadeth catalogue is not in dispute: the bottom. But the bottom of that catalogue is a long way above the bottom of this list.

6. Machine Head – The Burning Red (1999)

Ross Robinson again. Machine Head had made two of the heaviest groove-metal albums of the nineties, lost guitarist Logan Mader, hired Ahrue Luster, and went into the studio with the man who produced Korn and Slipknot. Robb Flynn came out with a shaved head, red Adidas and a rapped verse on ‘From This Day’. To the Burn My Eyes fans it was the most visible sell-out in metal, and they said so for a decade.

Robinson also pushed a cover of The Police’s ‘Message In A Bottle’ onto the record over Flynn’s objections, and Flynn still doesn’t like it. The irony is that The Burning Red worked: it debuted at number 88, the band’s best US chart position at the time, sold more than 134,000 copies in America and went silver in the UK. ‘From This Day’ is still one of their most-played songs on streaming.

Flynn’s own relationship with the album is the saddest on this list. He has said it was therapy during a dark period and that he can’t listen to it now because of what it brings back, and the band rarely plays it live. The Blackening in 2007 restored their reputation so completely that The Burning Red is now a footnote. It ranks at six because for eight years it was the album metal fans pointed to when they explained what nu metal had done to a great band.

5. Ill Niño – Confession (2003)

The polished one. Ill Niño’s debut Revolution Revolución had earned them a following on the strength of Latin percussion, Spanish-language verses and real aggression. Confession, produced by Bob Marlette with drummer Dave Chavarri, sanded most of that off in favour of melodic choruses and radio-length songs. ‘How Can I Live’ went onto the Freddy Vs. Jason soundtrack, and that placement told the old fans everything.

It paid. Confession debuted at number 37 with 27,863 copies, ‘This Time’s For Real’ followed as a second single, and the album has sold more than 600,000 copies worldwide, the biggest of the band’s career. The hate came from the sense that the band had looked at Linkin Park’s numbers and decided to be a different band. In 2003, with nu metal already sliding, that read as cynical and late at the same time.

It’s at five because the backlash never really ended. Confession is the album the band’s own fans treat as the dividing line, the point where Ill Niño stopped being a hardcore proposition and became a Roadrunner product. The songs are better than that story allows. ‘How Can I Live’ is one of the best singles the genre produced in its dying years. But a hit that fans resent is still a hit they resent.

4. Coal Chamber – Dark Days (2002)

A band falling apart on tape. Coal Chamber had been one of the first nu metal acts on Roadrunner, and by 2002 the genre was dying, the band was fracturing and Dez Fafara was already thinking about what became DevilDriver. Dark Days, produced by Ross Hogarth, came out in May 2002 and was received as exactly what it was: a competent, generic record by a band that no longer wanted to be in the room together.

It did better than its reputation. Dark Days debuted at number 34 with more than 31,000 first-week copies and ‘Fiend’ got active-rock airplay. But the tour ended the band. At a show in Lubbock, Texas, guitarist Meegs Rascón struck Fafara with his guitar during an on-stage argument, Fafara told the crowd it was Coal Chamber’s last performance, and it was. The break-up was official within a year.

The album is at four because it became a symbol: the nu metal record that proved the genre was over, released by a band imploding in public. The reunion in 2011 and the Rivals album in 2015 softened some of it, and Dark Days has picked up a nostalgic following among people who were fifteen in 2002. But it’s still the record most Coal Chamber fans skip, and the one most metal fans use as the punchline when they talk about the nu metal era ending.

3. Slayer – Diabolus In Musica (1998)

The Slayer album with the down-tuned, groove-heavy, nu-metal-adjacent sound, which to Slayer fans is a sentence that should not exist. Diabolus In Musica was the band’s first album written primarily in C sharp tuning, recorded with Rick Rubin in 1997 and released in June 1998 into a world where Korn and Deftones were the new heavy. Jeff Hanneman wrote most of it. Kerry King has never pretended to like it.

Commercially it was fine: number 31 with 46,000 copies, in line with Divine Intervention. The hate was about identity. Slayer were supposed to be the band that never changed, and ‘Stain Of Mind’ and ‘Bitter Peace’ sounded like a band listening to the radio. King’s own verdict is the harshest on record: it is ‘the one record that I really paid not enough attention to because I was really bitter about what kind of music was popular’.

The defence comes from inside the band. Tom Araya has called it ‘very underrated’ and Paul Bostaph names it as his personal favourite Slayer album for how experimental it got. It sits at three because almost thirty years later it is still the record that gets left out when people talk about the Slayer catalogue, and because no band on this list had further to fall from its own standard than Slayer did.

2. Celtic Frost – Cold Lake (1988)

The only album on this list that its own creator has tried to erase. Celtic Frost had just made Into The Pandemonium, one of the most influential extreme metal records of the eighties. Martin Eric Ain was gone, Tom Gabriel Warrior brought in guitarist Oliver Amberg, bassist Curt Victor Bryant and drummer Stephen Priestly, and the band released a glam metal album in September 1988, complete with teased hair and a photo shoot that fans still cannot look at.

Warrior has spent his career apologising for it. He has said he ‘loosened control too much’ and ‘was too eager to simply have a good time’, and he has called Cold Lake ‘the absolute worst I could do in my lifetime’ and ‘possibly the worst album ever created in heavy metal’. Amberg was fired almost immediately. When the band’s catalogue was reissued in 1999, Cold Lake was deliberately left out, and it has never been officially reissued since.

It ranks at two because of that: nearly forty years of a band’s founder refusing to let his own album exist. Vanity/Nemesis in 1990 clawed back some respect, and a few Cold Lake songs appeared in heavier remixes on the Parched With Thirst Am I And Dying compilation, which is as close to a pardon as Warrior has offered. The genre has produced worse records. It has never produced one its author hated more.

1. Lou Reed & Metallica – Lulu (2011)

Told you the name would come back. Thirty years after The Elder, Lou Reed collaborated with the other biggest band on this list and made the most hated metal album of all time. Lulu is a 10-track, 87-minute double album based on Frank Wedekind’s Lulu plays, with Reed reciting poetry about a sex worker’s degradation over riffs Metallica wrote in the room. It grew out of a jam at the 2009 Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame anniversary concert and was recorded in San Rafael in spring 2011.

The reaction was unlike anything either act had experienced. The first single, ‘The View’, gave the internet the line ‘I am the table’ and never recovered. The album debuted at number 36 with 13,000 copies, had sold about 33,000 in the US three years later, and scored 45 on Metacritic, with Pitchfork awarding it 1.0. Reed said Metallica fans had threatened him and shrugged it off: ‘I don’t have any fans left. Who cares?’ Lars Ulrich admitted Reed had challenged him to a street fight during the sessions. James Hetfield dismissed the critics as ‘fearful people who are probably typing from their mom’s basement’.

And yet. Reed died two years later, and the reappraisal started almost immediately. Laurie Anderson revealed at his 2015 Hall Of Fame induction that David Bowie had called Lulu Reed’s greatest work. Ulrich’s prediction was that ‘twenty-five years from now, millions will claim they loved it’. We’re fifteen years in. It is still number one here because no record in metal history has united more people in dislike, and because, unlike every other album on this list, nobody involved has ever apologised for it.

The Ones That Just Missed

Five albums that were in the conversation and didn’t make the thirteen. Morbid Angel’s Illud Divinum Insanus (2011) is the industrial-dance record death metal fans still cannot say out loud, and it is the strongest case for a fourteenth entry. Cryptopsy’s The Unspoken King (2008) added clean vocals and deathcore to a tech-death institution and got the same petition-level reaction Suicide Silence would nine years later. In Flames’ Siren Charms (2014) is where the melodeath purists finally gave up.

Further back, Judas Priest’s Turbo (1986) put synth guitars on a Priest record at the height of the glam era, and Discharge’s Grave New World (1986) turned a hardcore punk institution into a hair metal band so abruptly that audiences threw things. All five earned their reputations. None of them cost a career, ended a band on stage, or made a frontman refuse his own reissue, which is the bar the thirteen above cleared.

Why Hated Albums Get Rehabilitated

Every record on this list has defenders now, and the pattern is the same each time. The hate was never about the music alone. It was about a band breaking a contract with its audience: Slayer were supposed to stay Slayer, Celtic Frost were supposed to stay evil, Metallica were supposed to have guitar solos. Once the band either apologised, as Mustaine and Flynn did, or carried on long enough for the wound to close, the album was free to be heard as music again.

The ones that stay hated are the ones where the contract was broken and nobody has made amends. That’s why Lulu sits at the top and will for a while yet, and why Cold Lake is still an orphan. It’s also why St. Anger is slipping down lists like this one: Metallica survived it, laughed about it, and kept playing the title track. Hate needs an open wound. Time closes most of them. Not all.

Full Ranking: The 13 Most Hated Metal Albums Of All Time

13. Metallica – St. Anger (2003)
12. Korn – The Path Of Totality (2011)
11. Kiss – Music From “The Elder” (1981)
10. Manowar – Louder Than Hell (1996)
9. Limp Bizkit – Results May Vary (2003)
8. Suicide Silence – Suicide Silence (2017)
7. Megadeth – Risk (1999)
6. Machine Head – The Burning Red (1999)
5. Ill Niño – Confession (2003)
4. Coal Chamber – Dark Days (2002)
3. Slayer – Diabolus In Musica (1998)
2. Celtic Frost – Cold Lake (1988)
1. Lou Reed & Metallica – Lulu (2011)

TL;DR

• The most hated metal albums are not the worst ones. They are the records where a band broke its deal with the fans, and the hate lasted.
• Three of the thirteen sold huge numbers anyway: St. Anger (number one, double platinum), Results May Vary (platinum) and Confession (600,000 worldwide).
• Two were produced by Ross Robinson, two came out in 1999, and Lou Reed is on two of them, thirty years apart.
• Cold Lake is the only album here its own creator has refused to reissue. Lulu is the only one nobody involved has apologised for. That’s why they are two and one.

FAQ

Which album did we get wrong, and what would you add? Morbid Angel fans, we know. Tell us in the comments. Follow Loaded Radio for the albums-ranked series and daily metal news.

The post Most Hated Metal Albums Of All Time: 13 Records Fans Still Fight Over appeared first on Loaded Radio.

Album Review: Sari Schorr – Running Wild Provogue Records – October 9th, 2026 Reviewer – David Brighouse This is the third studio album from the acclaimed New York born singer, recognised for her range and the ability to move effortlessly from vocal powerhouse to emotional balladeer with equal intensity and impact. Album opener and lead single […]

The post Album Review: Sari Schorr – Running Wild appeared first on ROCKPOSER DOT COM.

In March, Slayyyter unleashed WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA, which topped our list of the best albums of the year so far. Now, the sleazy star is announcing its brother album, Wor$t Man In America, out in December.

The post Slayyyter Announces New Album <em>Wor$t Man In America</em> appeared first on Stereogum.

Ahead of this Friday’s new album release Landfall, metalcore collective Wage War present a visualizer video for the last new single “God Complex”.
Read more…

Friday Night Fever: Inside the Cult of Half Man Half Biscuit by Steve Hill Route Publishing Out Now Buy Here Half Man Half Biscuit occupy a unique place in British culture. Existing largely outside the music business, this idiosyncratic Birkenhead band has flown under the radar for over four decades. Without embarking on anything that […]

The post Friday Night Fever: Inside the Cult of Half Man Half Biscuit by Steve Hill – Book Review appeared first on Louder Than War.

The Finland’s quintet Atlas has debuted a music video for the new single called “Bittersleep”. It was mixed and mastered by Tuomas Kurikka.
Read more…

The title track to their upcoming album.

The post HYPNO5E Debut “Trame Noire” Music Video appeared first on Theprp.com.

And we are back at Bannermans – it is hard to stay away when they get so many good bands passing through! We are here tonight to catch those New York boys Spread Eagle, but first up we have a couple of Scottish acts, Vantage Point and Eld Varg, to enjoy. The Vantage Point boys … Continue reading Gig Review: Spread Eagle / Eld Varg / Vantage Point – Bannermans, Edinburgh (3rd October 2026)

Last year, Queen discussed new music and a potential Sphere residency. The legendary band unearthed the previously unreleased Christmas song “Not For Sale (Polar Bear)” for the holidays, and now Roger Taylor released a new solo album called Violence Insane In A Beautiful World. Meanwhile, Brian May says Queen’s done with touring and that he’s wary of doing an avatar show because of the AI usage that would be involved.

The post Brian May Says Queen Won’t Tour Again, Wary Of Avatar Show Because Of AI appeared first on Stereogum.