Music critics can be vicious. Rolling Stone‘s review of Bob Dylan’s 1971 album Self-Portrait famously began with the line “What is this shit?”
Some of music’s biggest artists have risked making these writer’s job’s too easy with album titles like Trash, Dookie and Load, which easily lend themselves to insults or negative puns.
The latter was the title Metallica chose for the follow-up to their massive self-titled 1991 commercial breakthrough. Although the album received mixed to good reviews, both Load and its 1997 sister album Reload were criticized for being too long and lacking in terms of quality control. The jokes write themselves from there: Oversized Load, Load of ____, etc.
“In retrospect, the Load/Reload stuff could have used a little bit of editing,” drummer Lars Ulrich later admitted. “But when James [Hetfield] and I ended up writing 27 songs for that album in the fall of ’95, we were damn well going to put all 27 on the album. In retrospect, could the world have done with 12 or 15 less of those? Probably, but back then we didn’t have an edit button on our instrument panel.”
Read More: The Rejected Titles of 30 Classic Albums
Of course, there’s no way to protect yourself from bad reviews with even the safest album title. Just ask GTR, the Genesis / Yes supergroup whose self-titled 1986 debut album was pretty much dead on arrival as soon as J.D. Considine declared it “SHT” in Musician magazine.
Luckily, most of these albums were too good to justify the cheap shots their names could have enabled. Here’s our look at 25 Album Titles That Were Just Begging for Bad Reviews:
25 Album Titles That Were Just Begging for Bad Reviews
These artists risked making life way too easy for music critics.
Gallery Credit: Matthew Wilkening
