Top 10 Albums That Aged Like Milk

Lars Ulrich recorded his snare drum sounding like a trash can lid and the band said "yeah, ship it." No guitar solos on a Metallica album. The Some Kind of Monster documentary about making this record is universally considered better art than the record itself. St. Anger went double platinum on name recognition alone, and virtually nobody has willingly replayed it since 2004.

Fresh off Tha Carter III selling a million copies in its first week, Wayne decided the logical next move was... a rock album. "Prom Queen" charted because people were curious, not because it was good. Even Wayne himself has essentially disowned it, calling it an "experiment." That's a generous word for an album that made Green Day fans and hip-hop heads equally uncomfortable.

Jay-Z came out of retirement for this? After The Black Album's perfect farewell, Hov returned with an album full of champagne-lifestyle bragging over lukewarm Swizz Beatz and Just Blaze beats that sounded like B-sides. It sold 680,000 copies in week one purely on goodwill and has been systematically ignored by Jay-Z himself on every tour since. Even the title aged badly — it was not, in fact, a kingdom come moment.

Pitchfork gave it a 0.0. Not a 1. Not a 2. A zero. Kid Cudi's grunge-inspired double album featured him screaming over distorted guitars with the confidence of someone who had never actually listened to grunge. The Beavis and Butt-Head interludes weren't ironic enough to save it. Cudi later pivoted back to what he does well, but this remains the most bewildering creative decision of the 2010s.

Em linked up with Ed Sheeran, Beyonce, and P!nk for a bloated 19-track album that sounded like it was focus-grouped by a committee of dads who just discovered Spotify. The choppy flow, the cringe punchlines about getting old, the Rick Rubin production that stripped all the energy out — Revival proved that even rap's greatest technician can make something deeply forgettable. Kamikaze was basically his apology letter.

By 2003, nu-metal was already gasping for air, and Fred Durst decided to accelerate the genre's death with a George Michael cover and songs about his breakup with an MTV VJ. Wes Borland had already quit, taking the one musically interesting element with him. The album debuted at #3 but dropped 80% in week two — the musical equivalent of a bounce rate that would make any website admin cry.

Lou Reed and Metallica walked into a studio and created something that pleased exactly neither fanbase. "I am the table" became an instant meme. Reed doing spoken-word poetry over thrash riffs sounds like a bit from a comedy sketch, except it's 87 minutes long and entirely sincere. Rolling Stone gave it one star. Lars called it "the best thing we've ever done," which says more about Lars than about the album.

Chance went from the mixtape darling who won three Grammys without a record deal to releasing a debut album so aggressively corny that it tanked his entire cultural cachet. Twenty-two tracks about how much he loves his wife, delivered with the subtlety of a Hallmark commercial. The 71% drop in second-week sales told the whole story. It's the album that proved the indie-to-major pipeline can flow in reverse.

Forty-five tracks. Two hours and thirty-eight minutes. Chris Brown released the musical equivalent of a Terms and Conditions agreement — technically present, impossible to get through, and you know someone is benefiting but it definitely isn't the listener. It went platinum because streaming counts any 30-second skip as a play, which says everything about the streaming economy and nothing about the music.

Lars Ulrich recorded his snare drum sounding like a trash can lid and the band said "yeah, ship it." No guitar solos on a Metallica album. The Some Kind of Monster documentary about making this record is universally considered better art than the record itself. St. Anger went double platinum on name recognition alone, and virtually nobody has willingly replayed it since 2004.

Fresh off Tha Carter III selling a million copies in its first week, Wayne decided the logical next move was... a rock album. "Prom Queen" charted because people were curious, not because it was good. Even Wayne himself has essentially disowned it, calling it an "experiment." That's a generous word for an album that made Green Day fans and hip-hop heads equally uncomfortable.

Jay-Z came out of retirement for this? After The Black Album's perfect farewell, Hov returned with an album full of champagne-lifestyle bragging over lukewarm Swizz Beatz and Just Blaze beats that sounded like B-sides. It sold 680,000 copies in week one purely on goodwill and has been systematically ignored by Jay-Z himself on every tour since. Even the title aged badly — it was not, in fact, a kingdom come moment.

Pitchfork gave it a 0.0. Not a 1. Not a 2. A zero. Kid Cudi's grunge-inspired double album featured him screaming over distorted guitars with the confidence of someone who had never actually listened to grunge. The Beavis and Butt-Head interludes weren't ironic enough to save it. Cudi later pivoted back to what he does well, but this remains the most bewildering creative decision of the 2010s.

Em linked up with Ed Sheeran, Beyonce, and P!nk for a bloated 19-track album that sounded like it was focus-grouped by a committee of dads who just discovered Spotify. The choppy flow, the cringe punchlines about getting old, the Rick Rubin production that stripped all the energy out — Revival proved that even rap's greatest technician can make something deeply forgettable. Kamikaze was basically his apology letter.

By 2003, nu-metal was already gasping for air, and Fred Durst decided to accelerate the genre's death with a George Michael cover and songs about his breakup with an MTV VJ. Wes Borland had already quit, taking the one musically interesting element with him. The album debuted at #3 but dropped 80% in week two — the musical equivalent of a bounce rate that would make any website admin cry.

Lou Reed and Metallica walked into a studio and created something that pleased exactly neither fanbase. "I am the table" became an instant meme. Reed doing spoken-word poetry over thrash riffs sounds like a bit from a comedy sketch, except it's 87 minutes long and entirely sincere. Rolling Stone gave it one star. Lars called it "the best thing we've ever done," which says more about Lars than about the album.

Chance went from the mixtape darling who won three Grammys without a record deal to releasing a debut album so aggressively corny that it tanked his entire cultural cachet. Twenty-two tracks about how much he loves his wife, delivered with the subtlety of a Hallmark commercial. The 71% drop in second-week sales told the whole story. It's the album that proved the indie-to-major pipeline can flow in reverse.

Forty-five tracks. Two hours and thirty-eight minutes. Chris Brown released the musical equivalent of a Terms and Conditions agreement — technically present, impossible to get through, and you know someone is benefiting but it definitely isn't the listener. It went platinum because streaming counts any 30-second skip as a play, which says everything about the streaming economy and nothing about the music.