Counting Down Archives - Stereogum

Black Flag Albums Ranked Worst To Best

Andreas Loretan — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 16:05:56 +0000

When talking Black Flag, the music is only a portion of the appeal. While the late-'70s Los Angeles punk scene centered around Hollywood, complete with a UK-style obsession with safety pins and hard drugs, Black Flag quickly transformed what it meant to be a punk in California.

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Green Day Albums Worst To Best

Jay Papandreas — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 17:05:35 +0000

It does feel silly in 2024 to try to introduce a reader to Green Day, of all bands. You clicked on the headline, you know who Green Day are. My mom knows who Green Day are. I told my mom about this article and she said "Oh yeah, I know Green Day," but not in the way that your parents lie to you when they want to relate to you or pretend to understand. Everyone knows Green Day. You tell people you listen to anything resembling punk rock and they say, "Oh cool, I like Green Day."

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Joyce Manor Albums From Worst To Best

Danielle Chelosky — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 18:10:11 +0000

There's no band like Joyce Manor. Pulling from influences like Weezer, the Smiths, and Guided By Voices, the Torrance, California trio developed their own unconventional, invigorating, ultra-concise approach to pop-rock. Though they tour with mainly Warped Tour-era bands like Citizen and The Story So Far and are often credited with kickstarting the emo revival movement alongside acts like Title Fight and Tigers Jaw (Joyce Manor and Tigers Jaw recently covered each other's cult hits), many fans consider them to just be indie rock, especially considering their critical acclaim from music publications that often flat-out ignore their peers.

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Yo La Tengo Albums From Worst To Best

Elizabeth Nelson — Fri, 22 Apr 2022 13:52:11 +0000

We're refreshing and revising our old Counting Down lists to make room for new albums and insights that have come along since their initial publication. Our ranking of Yo La Tengo's albums from worst to best originally ran on October 12, 2012.

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Iron Maiden Albums From Worst To Best

Adrien Begrand — Wed, 01 Dec 2021 19:08:58 +0000

We’re refreshing and revising our old Counting Down lists to make room for new albums and insights that have come along since their initial publication. Our first ranking of Iron Maiden's albums from worst to best originally ran on March 4, 2014.

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Cannibal Corpse Albums Ranked From Worst To Best

Brad Sanders — Wed, 27 Oct 2021 19:00:09 +0000

Death metal is defined in large part by its extremity, so perhaps it stands to reason that the genre’s most provocatively off-putting band is also its most commercially successful. Buffalo, New York’s Cannibal Corpse released their first album, Eaten Back To Life, in 1990. Four years later, they would appear in the $100-million-grossing Jim Carrey vehicle Ace Ventura: Pet Detective at the behest of the rubber-faced comedian, an avowed fan. Two years after that, they’d crack the Billboard 200. Their 15th album, Violence Unimagined, went all the way to #6 back in April, and they’re now widely considered the best-selling death metal act of all time -- quite a feat for the dudes who wrote "I Cum Blood."

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Björk Albums From Worst To Best

Brad Shoup — Wed, 05 May 2021 19:13:35 +0000

We're refreshing and revising our old Counting Down lists to make room for new albums and insights that have come along since their initial publication. Our first ranking of Björk's albums from worst to best originally ran on February 22, 2013.

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Elvis Costello Albums From Worst To Best

Elizabeth Nelson & Timothy Bracy — Wed, 24 Mar 2021 17:15:31 +0000

We're refreshing and revising our old Counting Down lists to make room for new albums and insights that have come along since their initial publication. Our first ranking of Elvis Costello's albums from worst to best originally ran on August 9, 2013.

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Eminem Albums From Worst To Best

Christopher R. Weingarten — Mon, 25 Feb 2019 17:58:51 +0000

Verbally gifted, painfully self-aware, deliriously problematic -- there's really nothing like the last two decades of Eminem, the blonde swordsman.

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Metric Albums From Worst To Best

James Rettig — Wed, 19 Sep 2018 17:03:49 +0000

Metric occupy a curious place in the modern rock landscape. If they had come up ten years earlier, they certainly would have had a different story. But as they exist now, their legacy will probably be that they were the most successful of the crop of bands that emerged from Toronto in the late-'90s, the same hotbed that gave birth to sister projects Broken Social Scene, Stars, and Feist.

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Weezer Albums From Worst To Best

Pranav Trewn — Thu, 09 Nov 2017 16:46:11 +0000

Weezer had been collecting ill-will for years by 2010. Where most bands beloved for their first few albums typically fade into passive disinterest when their music starts to yield diminishing marginal returns, Weezer somehow courted active malice. This wasn't just a band failing to reach previous heights; they became one seemingly motivated to see how low they could go, to the extent that it became increasingly difficult to simply toss them into the legacy bin and enjoy greatest hits sets every other time they came to your town. If Rivers Cuomo's behavior in the '90s suggests anything, it's that he sincerely cares how his band is received, although for years he went on making decisions counterintuitive to every notion of feedback he must have heard.

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The New Pornographers Albums From Worst To Best

Dan Weiss — Mon, 28 Aug 2017 15:37:04 +0000

There's one thing to get straight about the New Pornographers. Even if you've ever listened to Limblifter, Immaculate Machine, the Evaporators, and yes, Zumpano, enlisting one member apiece from these bands does not make Carl Newman's reigning power-pop coalition a "supergroup." The New Pornographers, long-shining indie stars themselves for 17 years now, contain exactly two members whose solo fame is comparable to or larger than that of the New Pornographers: alt-country brainiac Neko Case, and Dan Bejar, who enjoys rapturous critical acclaim as the simultaneously showy and esoteric Destroyer.

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In Honor Of Sgt. Pepper‘s 50th Anniversary, We Ranked Every Beatles Album

Chris DeVille — Fri, 26 May 2017 14:48:41 +0000

It was 50 years ago today: The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, an album of profound significance in the arc of modern music. On the most basic level, this was yet another batch of amazing Beatles songs in a career full of them, but its impact on music history is much deeper than that. Sgt. Pepper solidified the LP as not just a collection of singles and filler but a full-length creative statement. It popularized concept albums in the mass consciousness. It redefined the possibilities for rock-star metamorphosis. There was literally nothing quite like it before the Beatles unleashed it on the world. So in honor of today's golden anniversary, we are republishing our 2013 feature ranking every Beatles album. You can find the original unaltered text below, just under a stream of today's newly released Sgt. Pepper deluxe edition.

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Prince Albums Ranked

Brad Shoup — Fri, 21 Apr 2017 14:27:07 +0000

"Considering Prince's continued vitality and infamous vaults, he's probably got another few lifetimes' worth of music ahead of him, too." That's how I closed my ranking of Prince's albums almost three years ago. The bit about the vault was sound. But like a lot of others, I confused the presentation -- his jokes about ignoring time, those famous break-of-dawn Paisley Park concerts -- with reality. For over 30 years, the joke about the Rolling Stones is that they should be dead. The joke about Prince was that he never would be.

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Oneohtrix Point Never Albums From Worst To Best

Lindsey Rhoades — Wed, 12 Apr 2017 15:00:11 +0000

After the recent passing of Chuck Berry, a letter Carl Sagan wrote to him in 1986 began circulating on social media. It congratulated Berry on the fact that the rollicking guitar riff on “Johnny B. Goode” was now hurtling through space via NASA’s Voyager Golden Record project, as an example of the very human sound of rock ‘n’ roll. Ironically, rock music was considered too “new” at the time to be considered essential to extraterrestrial understanding of earthlings, especially in comparison to classical greats, like Mozart, Beethoven, and Stravinsky.

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Stephin Merritt Albums From Worst To Best

Doug Bleggi — Mon, 13 Mar 2017 16:33:27 +0000

"Relating to other people has always struck me as the most overrated of pleasures."

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Xiu Xiu Albums From Worst To Best

Lindsey Rhoades — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 16:12:27 +0000

Jamie Stewart was applying to become an airport baggage handler the day his father, a musician and record producer, committed suicide. Stewart never finished the application; instead, he threw himself wholeheartedly into performing left-of-center pop music with his newly minted outfit Xiu Xiu. Named for the titular character in a bleak Chinese film about a woman who is sent into the countryside, only to suffer a series of tragedies ultimately leading her toward death, Xiu Xiu's immediate focus was on an equally bleak depiction of Stewart's twisted family history. As a self-loathing bisexual nihilist with a dark and dandy sense of humor, the LA native had a lot to say about awkward human encounters of all stripes. His examination of gender and queer politics became another tier of the truths the band attempted to dramatize -- sometimes comically, others tragically, but often a sick combination of the two.

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Leonard Cohen Albums From Worst To Best

Stereogum — Tue, 15 Nov 2016 15:14:23 +0000

Several years ago, The Atlantic published a controversial essay by a healthy, middle-aged oncologist who hoped to die at 75. Among his reasons -- the pain and physical deterioration that accompanies old age, a disinterest in subjecting himself to the modern desperation to extend life at all costs -- was an interesting meditation on the slowing of creativity. The author, Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, suggests "some deep underlying biological determinism" accounting for this decline. "The fact is that by 75," Emanuel argues, "creativity, originality, and productivity are pretty much gone for the vast, vast majority of us."

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Opeth Albums From Worst To Best

Stereogum — Tue, 04 Oct 2016 13:12:57 +0000

Formed the same year that Sinead O'Connor stood in front of a camera crying and singing a Prince song, Sweden's Opeth began their journey in the typical old-fashioned way wherein a couple of people who play instruments meet a couple other people who do the same, and they find out that they like the same kind of music and don't annoy the living shit out of each other, so they form a band. Despite most human beings not having the capability to walk and chew gum at the same age, Opeth vocalist/guitarist Mikael Åkerfeldt was just 16 years old when he was asked to join the band.

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Tim Hecker Albums From Worst To Best

Stereogum — Fri, 29 Apr 2016 14:54:22 +0000

There are few ambient electronic artists as consistent and groundbreaking as Tim Hecker, even if the terms "ambient" and "electronic" barely encompass the scope of his work. He does use electronic manipulation to create drone-infused atmospheres, but in recent years, he has increasingly relied on live recordings of orchestral elements to form a base for that work. Meanwhile, the fundamental characteristic of "ambient" music – generally pegged as background drivel by its very definition – seems a complete misnomer, as Hecker’s work demands to be heard under the same kind of meditative hyper-focus with which he makes it.

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PJ Harvey Albums From Worst To Best

Stereogum — Wed, 20 Apr 2016 17:29:00 +0000

PJ Harvey's discography speaks for itself.

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Iggy Pop Albums From Worst To Best

Phil Freeman — Tue, 22 Mar 2016 16:34:05 +0000

Iggy Pop is the beating heart of rock 'n' roll. Since 1969, his whirling, explosive live performances have set a standard that 99 percent of rock artists have utterly failed to meet. (Watch Henry Rollins, no slouch as a live act himself in the Rollins Band days, describe what it's like to share a bill with Iggy.) He first vaulted into the public consciousness in 1970, when the Cincinnati Pop Festival was broadcast on TV and a shirtless Iggy walked out into the audience, balancing on their hands, caught a jar of peanut butter hurled from the darkness, and began smearing it on his chest, while onstage his band the Stooges kept right on cranking out their slablike, psychedelic, grunge-inventing riffs. From that moment on, the Iggy cult -- small, but fervent -- was in full force as the man himself spent show after show flipping, writhing, diving off the stage, and gashing himself with broken glass, while still managing to deliver shockingly smart and perceptive lyrics in a leonine baritone.

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The Fiery Furnaces Albums From Worst To Best

Stereogum — Fri, 05 Feb 2016 17:48:56 +0000

From 2003 until 2011, over the span of six studio albums, an EP, a double-disc live extravaganza, and hundreds of catalog-recombinant shows, the Oak Park, Illinois-reared siblings Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger wrought a polarizing, idiosyncratic iconography; by and large, audiences were either reveling in the cavalcade of inside jokes, or they were resolutely weren't.

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Motörhead Albums From Worst To Best

Phil Freeman — Wed, 02 Sep 2015 15:43:42 +0000

Motörhead are one of those bands, like ZZ Top or AC/DC, that seemingly everyone who likes loud electric guitars can agree on. They exist for one reason: speed. No, seriously -- bassist/vocalist Ian "Lemmy" Kilmister formed Motörhead (originally Bastard) after being kicked out of space-boogie overlords Hawkwind for being into meth, rather than the hallucinogenics his bandmates favored. He was busted at the Canadian border on tour, and that was it; he was out, and Hawkwind's glory era pretty much came to an end with his departure.

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Richard Thompson Albums From Worst To Best

Stereogum — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 14:51:46 +0000

For four decades, the great British songwriter Richard Thompson has puzzled and enchanted, menaced and soothed, and remained an enigma far too slippery to attract anything larger than his devoted cult following. Drawing from a mixed bag of influences ranging from jazz and ragtime, country, and traditional English and Scottish folk, Thompson has amassed a collection of murder ballads, spiritual ruminations, and tough-hearted rockers that ranks amongst the most formidable catalogues in recent history. As a songwriter, he holds a unique position of esteem amongst his peers. The list of prominent artists who have covered his compositions include R.E.M., Elvis Costello, the Neville Brothers, Bob Mould, Sleater-Kinney, and Dinosaur Jr., to name just a few. As an instrumentalist Thompson's reputation is every bit as glowing. Even for those not typically moved by virtuoso heroics, Thompson's guitar work is a dazzling spectacle, melding otherworldly technical proficiency with a wild-eyed inventiveness that has coalesced into an utterly a unique playing style pitched somewhere between James Burton and Charlie Christian.

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P-Funk Albums From Worst To Best

Nate Patrin — Wed, 12 Aug 2015 16:45:05 +0000

George Clinton's Parliament-Funkadelic collective isn't always posed as a leading candidate for greatest or most important band of the '70s, but try and imagine what music would sound like without them. You'd still have Stevie pushing forward R&B's artistry, Kraftwerk doing their thing to turn synthesized pop into a mainstream notion, Donald Byrd finding innovative ways to modernize jazz, Led Zeppelin taking heavy metal to exospheric new heights, the O'Jays hitting the zenith of close-harmony soul, Pink Floyd fusing musical intricacy with concert theatrics, the Ramones injecting pop music with rebellious pulp-culture irreverence, James Brown and Sly Stone and the Ohio Players turning out a fine succession of funk-defining records ... and yet you wouldn't have that one core of musicians that could do all of that, and did so to stunning commercial success without compromising their sound, their look, or an essential perspective on post-civil rights America that still carries through today.

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The Doors Albums From Worst To Best

Ryan Leas — Thu, 30 Jul 2015 15:45:24 +0000

The Doors are part of a very specific category of classic-rock artists: the gateway artists. The bands that -- assuming you weren't around in the '60s -- are amongst the first names you explore when you start digging into pop music's past. Though keyboardist Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robby Krieger, and drummer John Densmore were all crucial to forming the very specific and unique sound of the Doors, the person who pushed them into legendary status was Jim Morrison, the erratic singer and iconic frontman who became lionized after dying in Paris, at 27, in 1971. This inextricably bound the Doors in the narrative of the '60s and rock history. Morrison is part of the legendary 27 Club, along with fellow '60s casualties Janis Joplin, Brian Jones, and Jimi Hendrix (and, later, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse) who died at that age. In the specific case of Morrison and the other legendary '60s artists who died around the same time, it formed one element of the story of how the '60s failed, how they burned out into moments like the Hell's Angels at Altamont or the Manson Family murders. By the time you get to the end of the 20th century or the beginning of the 21st century, this means these people are preserved and held up, forever, as tragic icons of their day. Which also means that when you're 13 or 14 and first discovering the music of your parents' or grandparents' generation, you see Jim Morrison's face on T-shirts in the mall, or you see the millionth biography or the millionth Doors reissue, either with Morrison's face staring back at you.

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INXS Albums From Worst To Best

Stereogum — Tue, 14 Jul 2015 16:07:45 +0000

"How can I call myself a straight man," a barback asked me and my friend, "if I would rather look at Michael Hutchence than all these pretty girls?" He returned to his duties, collecting empty glasses and wiping down the bar, and we were left to ponder this question alone. A TV in the bar was playing the video for "Disappear," the second single off 1990's X -- undoubtedly one of INXS's most sensual tracks and videos, in a long line of such tracks and videos. The answer, of course, is that Hutchence's charms know no bounds.

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Stevie Wonder Albums From Worst To Best

Stereogum — Thu, 02 Jul 2015 13:57:09 +0000

Steveland "Stevie Wonder" Morris is an indisputable icon of American music, but in many ways is best understood as a part of a separate tradition -- that of the musical prodigy. Like Mozart, Mendelssohn, Earl Scruggs, and Alex Chilton before him, Wonder composed and performed songs as a young child that inextricably transformed the contemporary landscape. For those of us vested with a more normative skill set, the surpassing strangeness of this state of affairs can be difficult to grasp. By the time he was 12 years old, Wonder was an ascendant star and popular live draw. By 18 he had already experienced a full career's worth of professional and creative triumphs and setbacks. By the 1970s, a decade he dominated with a masterful run of classic albums, Wonder had fully wed his extraordinary intuitive genius with the hard-won lessons of a calloused music business veteran. By age 30 he was largely spent as a creative force.

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Royal Trux Albums From Worst To Best

Stereogum — Thu, 25 Jun 2015 17:52:14 +0000

Royal Trux just might be the most misunderstood band in indie rock. But their influence can be seen in contemporary bands like Liars, the Kills, Sleigh Bells, MGMT, Primal Scream, of Montreal, and others. On the surface, they've never been the easiest to digest upon first listen, from Jennifer Herrema's gravely grunts and growls, to Neil Hagerty's decidedly un-indie guitar workouts and snarling backing vocals. In a world where experimenting and taking chances with music often takes a backseat to image and playing it safe, Royal Trux flipped the script and did the opposite; because they could, and because, for them, it was always, and only, about keeping themselves interested and happy with the music. Their goal from the outset was to deconstruct rock 'n' roll and put it back together as they saw fit, with their own artistic vision. It wasn't always pretty, but good art often isn't. What is true is that their music has stood the test of time and sounds just as, if not more, relevant today than it did when conceived.

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The Black Keys Albums From Worst To Best

Ryan Leas — Thu, 11 Jun 2015 15:44:49 +0000

Somewhere along the way, the Black Keys sneakily became one of the weirdest bands of the 21st century. Not stylistically, of course -- and that's where a whole lot of the weirdness is rooted. There are still famous rock bands in 2015, but the topic of their decreased relevance is by now its own cliché. And then you have something like the Black Keys -- composed of singer/guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney -- who began by playing as a scuzzy blues-rock duo, garnering obvious but not always accurate comparisons to the White Stripes and existing in the more amorphous world of the early-'00s rock revival outside New York, one of the satellites off in the ether of Akron, Ohio distantly orbiting the Strokes and their ilk. That's the best you can do for these guys in terms of context. What this is really about is two men who self-recorded four rough-hewn albums with big sludgy grooves in Ohio. There might be all these quotes out there from either of them, regarding their love of rap, or just how much of a blight Nickelback is, or their rationale behind not putting a record on Spotify. All these quotes do is provide a cognitive dissonance, because otherwise the Black Keys exist almost totally removed from their time and place, making classicist rock music of the most classicist form, but never seemingly with any irony or self-consciousness on the matter. This is just the music they played. And then eventually they became one of the biggest rock bands of the 21st century.

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Faith No More Albums From Worst To Best

Stereogum — Thu, 04 Jun 2015 16:23:02 +0000

When I saw San Francisco's revenant Faith No More play Seattle for the first time in nearly 20 years, they closed their set with "Mark Bowen," a song from their first album, named after their very first guitarist. Mark Bowen was there in the audience. It struck me as a classy move to reach back to the band's first album, one that didn't feature the band's iconic vocalist, Mike Patton. It also struck me as a dick move, since the band didn't let Bowen onstage to play his own song.

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Yes Albums From Worst To Best

Stereogum — Wed, 20 May 2015 14:21:33 +0000

Yes are one of the flagship acts of progressive rock. They're also one of rock's weirdest bands. Their best music is intense and aggressive, incorporating influences from jazz, folk, and country, but blending them with wild synthesizer explorations, crazed art-boogie guitar shredding, bass louder than most metal bands', crushingly complex drumming, and Jon Anderson's unique, highly recognizable upper-register vocals. At their mid-'70s peak, they were imaginative and self-indulgent enough to release a double album with one song on each side; a decade later, they partnered with producer Trevor Horn (Art Of Noise, Frankie Goes To Hollywood) and created one of the biggest hit singles of the '80s. But they've had a staggering number of lineup fluctuations -- the only constant presence has been bassist Chris Squire -- to the point that their last two singers have been recruited from Yes cover bands. They're some of the most talented and technically skilled musicians in rock history, but it's a safe bet that the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame will burn to the ground before they'll be inducted.

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Blondie Albums From Worst To Best

Nate Patrin — Wed, 06 May 2015 16:41:40 +0000

When music critics talk about the reasons "punk had to happen," they're usually making accusations about how bloated and corporate arena rock was getting in the mid '70s, or about how music was losing its sense of rebellious teenage fun. But the fact is that little of that actually matters in the face of its most lingering effect: its ability to narrow the gaps between artsiness and catchiness, being cool and being kind of a dork, teen stoopid and grown-up clever, pop stardom and the self-aware subversion of what that kind of status even meant. And out of all the first-wave New York bands to run around in that free-for-all landscape, Blondie came the closest to embodying all those paradoxes to a truly mass audience.

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Wire Albums From Worst To Best

Stereogum — Wed, 22 Apr 2015 14:01:05 +0000

"There are those who say Wire was the best punk band ever because it broke all of the rules, didn't stick with any of the blueprints and did actually what it wanted," Colin Newman told Rolling Stone in 2013. "I just wouldn't call that punk, personally. Punk is just one of those words that's so overused that you have no idea what it means anymore."

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Ariel Pink Albums From Worst To Best

Stereogum — Tue, 31 Mar 2015 15:51:45 +0000

As his band traveled through a lightning storm somewhere in the American Midwest, Ariel "Pink" Rosenberg yelled at me over the telephone. It was April 2005, and I was holed up in the spare bedroom of a rented house in York, PA, repeatedly posing pre-prepared interview questions in order to be heard over the noise at the other end of the line. The tape recorder exploded my hesitant entreaties and Rosenberg's replies to a monstrous, grotesque volume, his bandmates snickering as their leader's answers vacillated from measured to unhinged, sometimes in the space of several minutes; the transmission frequently trembled, whinged by sharp bursts of static. And while some of that exchange survives here, what I came away from the conversation with was a fascination for, a confusion about, and a fear of the guy. I was fascinated by the depth and breadth of his musical scholarship; confused because I couldn't begin to fathom how much of his persona might be a put-on and how much might be genuine mental instability; and afraid because our chat, despite a separation of hundreds of miles, was the most uncomfortable and unsettling telephone interview I'd ever conducted with any musician. (A decade later, this still holds true.)

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Madonna Albums From Worst To Best

Stereogum — Wed, 18 Mar 2015 14:32:37 +0000

Throughout Madonna's four decade career, she's pissed off a lot of people. Backlash against Madonna has brought otherwise divergent groups to consensus, from Pope John Paul II to Planned Parenthood. As an artist, she has given us so many iterations of herself that she's been able to remain both relevant and agitating across generations.

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Beck Albums From Worst To Best

Ryan Leas — Thu, 19 Feb 2015 18:07:02 +0000

As you might've heard, Beck won a Grammy for Album Of The Year about a week and a half ago, for his early 2014 release Morning Phase. I don't know if your Twitter feed looked anything like mine, but let's say people were less than supportive of this decision -- because, of course, Beck beat Beyoncé, who had released that surprise self-titled album that everyone thought deserved to win. Beck's win, for a beautiful album that was nevertheless pretty far from his career peak, became the subject of attacks on the Grammys' conservatism. And, oh yeah, Kanye almost crashed the stage, goofed on himself and his infamous Taylor Swift stage crash, then said he was actually serious in an interview after the ceremony and that "Beck needs to respect artistry and he should've given his award to Beyoncé." This turned into a whole thing, naturally: people calling Kanye an asshole for downplaying Beck's own artistic merits, people saying Kanye was right and should've crashed the stage, some people coming to Beck's defense, occasionally in ways like this.

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The Fall Albums From Worst To Best

Stereogum — Thu, 12 Feb 2015 18:06:15 +0000

"If it's me and your granny on bongos, it's the Fall." So sayeth Mark E. Smith (MES), the mercurial, irascible, and incredible leader of the legendary post-punk band. It's a quote that gets thrown around often in response to the parade of musicians (upwards of 60 by my rough count) that were hired and fired, joined and quit during the nearly 40 years of the band's existence.

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Napalm Death Albums From Worst To Best

Stereogum — Wed, 04 Feb 2015 15:38:11 +0000

Napalm Death are one of the most important bands to come out of the UK metal scene, period. Like Black Sabbath and Judas Priest, they hail from Birmingham, one of the ugliest, most crushed-under cities in the country's post-industrial West Midlands. Though they started out as a hardcore punk duo, they were calling themselves Napalm Death as early as 1982, and gigging and recording demo tapes. It took them until 1986 to get anything like a steady lineup, but they had a solid live reputation nonetheless, which got them signed to fledgling label Earache Records. Their first album, 1987's Scum, was the third Earache release, following the Accüsed's The Return Of Martha Splatterhead and a split LP between Heresy and Concrete Sox. In its own way, Scum was a split LP, too; it had two completely different lineups on its two sides, with the only constant being drummer Mick Harris.

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