What does ‘worst’ mean when it comes to music? One person can savage an album, and another can reply with “you say it like it’s a bad thing!”

However, there’s a Wikipedia page that has a list of music considered the worst, and we thought we’d listen to it all, and pass judgement ourselves. We’d see how bad – or perhaps more pertinently how good – these records are.

It’s a hefty list, so we’ve got our work cut out and we’re listening to them so you don’t have to. Or rather, you don’t have to listen to them all, because we’re better some of them are worth your time because the critics were wrong, or they were so right that these abominations need to be heard to be believed.

Let’s go.

Philosophy Of The World , The Shaggs, (1969)

There’s been a reappraisal of The Shaggs by those who cheered on the enthusiastic amateur and those who saw rock n roll as something that could do with breaking. Technically speaking, The Shaggs are a bad band, but it’s hard not to root for teenage girls who had absolutely no interest in becoming musicians, who were forced to do it by their dad.

The resulting disjointed mess sounds avant garde and erratic, so when Susan Orlean wrote a profile on the group for The New Yorker, and said “depending on whom you ask, the Shaggs were either the best band of all time or the worst”, you have to kinda shrug and say that’s pretty much spot on.

We root for The Shaggs, but we get it if anyone else can’t make it through one of their songs, let alone a whole album.

Lord Sutch and Heavy Friends, Screaming Lord Sutch (1970)

At the time, derided, this album by Screaming Lord Sutch who would go on to be the face of the Monster Raving Loony Party who would appear at numerous vote counts on election day, this album is a who’s who of ’60s rock music.

Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, John Bonham, Nicky Hopkins, and Noel Redding played on, and subsequently distanced themselves from this album. However, what the ’60s thought of as trash shows just how deep the riches ran compared to other decades, as bits of this aren’t half bad.

If ‘Flashing Light’ had been recorded by Can, it would be considered a classic these days, and Sutch’s shock-rock schtick paved the way for Alice Cooper, Arthur Brown, and half of heavy metal. ‘Heavy Friends’ has its moments – by no means the worst of anything.

Attila, Attila (1970)

A young Billy Joel, before turning himself into America’s McCartney, was in a heavy psych group called Attila. They recorded one album, which Joel has since referred to as “psychedelic bullshit”.

Well, psychedelic bullshit is one of our favourite genres, and while this isn’t an all-time classic, Joel’s wailing and heavy organ sure is fun to listen to.

Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic may be a decent bloke, but he sounds like a joyless dork writing: “Attila undoubtedly is the worst album released in the history of rock & roll—hell, the history of recorded music itself. There have been many bad ideas in rock, but none match the colossal stupidity of Attila.”

Maybe we kinda like colossal stupidity, but the heavy wig-outs and funky noise puts us in a good mood. Exuberant, silly rock n roll.

Popular Classics and Hallelujah! — Portsmouth Sinfonia Live at the Albert Hall, Portsmouth Sinfonia (1974)

The Portsmouth Sinfonia formed and the premise was this – invite musicians to play famous classical pieces, but they had to play instruments they’d never picked up before. With that, it’s intentionally funny and they described themselves as the “world’s worst orchestra”. So, to review their work seriously is to be a total buzzkill.

We included a track from their first album, but honestly, we love this. Sure, it might be a bit art school prankish, but it’s a joyful, horrendous racket. And Brian Eno was a member, which is fun.

Having Fun with Elvis on Stage, Elvis Presley (1974)

There’s no music on this record, and was released solely so Elvis’ awful manager – Colonel Tom Parker – so he could own all the rights to it. Exploitative? A cash-in? Absolutely.

Presley’s label RCA Records claimed the rights to the record all the same, so it doesn’t really matter. That all said, Elvis is pretty funny in places, and you can almost taste the sweat dripping from him. Besides, there’s live stand-up records from this period that are much shittier than this. It’s a curio for sure, but worst? C’mon man.

Metal Machine Music, Lou Reed (1975)

Like The Beatles’ ‘Revolution #9’, Reed’s album of electronic, abstract feedback, is still hugely devisive. It is still ranked highly by lazy rock critics as an example of someone great doing something bad.

The thing is, if you consider Lou Reed a popstar, you’ll cry listening to this – but if you consider him to be an experimentalist, then it won’t offend you in the slightest.

Atonal and occasionally beautiful, Lou made an album that would be considered vaguely in the wheelhouse of ambient or drone rock now, and in the current climate, it sounds ahead of its time. Sure, it isn’t user friendly by any stretch of the imagination, but then, it’s not supposed to be. It’s long tracks of manipulated electronic feedback. People returned it to stores en masse when the record was first released, and for our money, that’s because everyone was being soft.

Soundtrack to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, various artists (1978)

A movie based on The Beatles’ music, but having zero involvement from The Fabs, with covers by the Bee Gees, Peter Frampton and more, was never really going to cut it. It was such a flop that it has the ignominity of being a ‘reverse platinum’ release. That means record shops took 4 million copies off the shelves to return back to their distributors. Yikes!

And it is pretty bad. Steve Martin hams it up alongside Alice Cooper and Frankie Howerd, but Earth Wind & Fire’s version of ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’ is still bursting with joy. Robin Gibb’s take on ‘Oh Darling’ reminds us why we all love his mournful voice so much. Robert Stigwood was the man behind this, and with his foot in the door at Hollywood, with the Bee Gees in tow, together they’d give us ‘Grease’ and ‘Saturday Night Fever’, so y’know, not a total wash-out in the scheme of things.

You can’t win them all, and while this album isn’t very good, there’s certainly a lot worse out there.

ELVIS’ GREATEST SHIT, ELVIS PRESLEY (1982)

This is a bootleg, so does it really count? It was a compilation of outtakes, bad songs from movies, and chosen to deliberately show Elvis in a poor light. It was all in poor taste too, with the artwork featuring a photo of Elvis dead in his coffin, and the label being a twist on RCA Victor’s dog mascot Nipper, being ‘Dog Vomit’.

This one is intentionally bad, and features a song so lousy that Elvis walked out of the session for, called ‘Dominic the Impotent Bull’. Yep, it sucks, but there’s plenty of enjoyment to be had on this, truly.

Thank You, Duran Duran (1995)

Remember Duran Duran releasing a cover of ‘White Lines’? We do, and it felt strange at the time. What’s even weirder is that the covers album it came from features Le Bon & Co also having a stab at ‘911 Is A Joke’ by Public Enemy, alongside songs by Sly & The Family Stone, Bob Dylan and The Doors.

The group themselves considered it “commercial suicide”, and it was roundly panned on release. Listening to it now, the thing it suffers from most is a criminal lack of camp. Maybe everyone was mad at them because this followed the gorgeous ‘Ordinary World’, and they thought Duran Duran were about to step into a renaissance. Alas, no.

Playing With Fire, Kevin Federline (2006)

“This is that hip hop flava mixed with a little bit of rock n roll” rapped K-Fed on his panned ‘Playing With Fire’ LP. Looking for some positives from reviews at the time, one reviewer basically said FedEx “enunciates well”, which is dim praise indeed.

It’s almost certain that the knives were out for this album because everyone had it in for Kev’s wife at the time, Britney Spears. With that in mind, you almost begin to try and stick up for this album, before reminding yourself that he’s a shitty guy.

This is a classic bad album, in that, it’s not very good and pretty boring to listen to. You want it to be so bad, that it starts becoming offensive to sit through. It’s just crappy. It didn’t sell well, no-one really liked it, and that’s that.

Chinese Democracy, Guns N Roses (2008)

Apart from the riff in ‘Welcome To The Jungle’, GnR fuckin’ stink. They’re the worst of rock n roll – pompous, bloated, theatrical shit with overly long solos and a complete tool on the microphone. Obviously, some people lap that up, but even fans found their patience tested by the development hell of this LP.

For eight long years and $13 million later, it almost got released and everyone thought they’d been put out of their misery when it saw the light of day in 2008. And then they pressed play.

It’s just over an hour long and, sincerely, if feels three times that when you’re listening to Axl Rose’s dreadful wailing and dogshit production. We’ll be glad to not have to listen to this again. A bad guy making exactly the kind of bad music you’d think he’d make.

Garbage.

Eoghan Quigg, Eoghan Quigg (2009)

Quigg was a child working for some pretty awful people when this came out, so to give it a kicking would feel like bullying in all honesty.

Sure, it’s a lousy album, but we’d put money on the fact that some of the people who wrote scathing reviews of it in 2009, would dial back their comments now.

It wasn’t ever going to be good, so you can’t say its one of the worst of all time, because Eoghan Quigg was a nice Irish boy, doing what he was told and trying his best.

Perhaps the only justifiable savaging this album deserves, is how the adults involved in making it should have given more care to Quigg’s career, and indeed, valued pop music more than the thin offering provided here.

LULU, Lou Reed and Metallica (2011)

The response to this album was so poor, that Lou Reed flatly stated “I don’t have any fans left”. In the fans’ defence, post ’90s Lou had challenged everyone with some very unusual moves, from doing shows with dancing kung fu masters, and appearing with the BBC All Star orchestra for an advert. There’s always something very comforting about how singular Reed became, but working with America’s most Capitalist thrash band seemed a bridge too far, and a weird match-up at best.

Listening to it in 2026, it’s not great, but it doesn’t sound unusually awful either. Warbling spoken word stuff over heavy guitars? ‘Mistress Dread’ sounds like a bunch of supposed noise bands the NME write nice things about these days.

Still, it’s true, it’s not a good album. Neither Metallica at their best, nor Lou Reed.

Streets in the Sky, the Enemy (2012)

On release, the music press seemingly had it in for this album from the get-go. People said things like “un-music”, and The Quietus turned off their atonal Eastern European drone records for long enough to say it reminded them of “shite, in the noonday sun, attracting flies”.

We’re no fans of lumpy indie rock, but is this album any worse than, say, Feeder’s output? Mid period Oasis? Maybe it all sounds the same to us and, sure we didn’t like it but were never going to. You could have told us this was The Courteeners and we’d believe you. We don’t like it, but we can’t see what makes it uniquely bad, apart from the assembled critical consensus that tastes had changed in 2012, but that doesn’t make for an all-timer of a bad record.

Nine Track Mind, Charlie Puth (2016)

If there’s such thing as nostalgia-baiting, then this album is it. It’s a young man, dressed in a suit, winking at old people while they tell him how handsome he is.

The thing with young people who claim to be old souls, is that they lack the emotional depth of the music they politely ape. There’s no whiff of cigarettes or strength through adversity on this entirely hairless album.

This was not an enjoyable listen at all.

Father of All Motherfuckers, Green Day (2020)

It’s remarkable that Green Day have had the career they’ve had. Not because they’re bad, but rather, you would have thought there’d be no power chords left to play by now.

We’re not averse to some fast, knuckle headed punk from Stateside, and what the group did with ‘Dookie’, they basically carried on doing til the present day. This album might suffer from a slight deviation from the norm, but does it sound like a Green Day album? Yeah, with some garage punk mixed in with their trad punk and pop punk – it’s not like they made a Drill N Bass record or anything. These punk fans man – they can be the most conservative musical people on earth, deliberating endlessly about what constitutes ‘real’ music all day long.

Yeah, this is a crappy Green Day album, but it isn’t generationally bad. They’d released worse records before this one, honestly.

143, Katy Perry (2024)

Katy Perry can’t put a foot right these days, and not in a fun camp way. It’s just uncomfortable to watch, especially when the pop message boards have a point when they say the best thing she’s released in years was a JustEat jingle.

Fact is, this album got panned because she released a women’s ‘anthem’ that was produced by Dr Luke, who doesn’t like women at all. Perry came in for criticism rightly enough but there’s a nagging sense of people finding it easier to hit a woman over the head for the crimes of a man who deserves much more ire.

That all said, ‘143’ is a bad album and is forgettable and saw Katy Perry’s schtick being overtaken by more fun, more silly pop stars who don’t team up with bad dickheads and don’t fly in zero gravity to promote their album.

Starface, Tyga (2026)

We reviewed this album already, and it is bad. In a vacuum, it’s boring and lacking in any decent ideas. However, this got panned for the sheer lack of creativity thanks to outsourcing the music to Artifical Intelligence.

And this is the thing – if you didn’t write the music, then you don’t get to be annoyed if people says it’s a load of old shit. It’s a Catch 22 situation too, because you can’t blame the technology either, because you chose to let it do the work, so you’re double bad. When you lash out in interviews about the whole thing, it’s like an anti-victory lap where everyone hoots while you run around the track in the wrong direction.

A dreadful, boring record.