The Worst Albums Of The 2020's (So Far)
The terrible twenty.
When to to albums nowadays, a lot of artists don't put in the love and care a full record deserves. This video covers what I think are the worst 20 albums of the 2020's so far, from genre missteps to trash beats to downright offensive stuff. It's all bad, and I can't wait to tell you what's the worst. A link to every album is included with each description if you feel like hurting yourself.
The schmaltzy, melodramatic style of pop music Lewis Capaldi specializes in is hard enough to stomach on a single track, let alone an entire album. He seems to know his music sucks, and I can appreciate some self awareness, but the music does still suck, and every over-the-top number on this record is as hammy and as unengaging as it could possibly be. Even the title is obnoxious in its attempt to be cool or meaningful.
There was an itch that Maroon 5 once scratched for me. Like when George W. Bush was in office and I was in 6th grade. That time has long passed, but Adam Levine and company’s feeble attempts at staying relevant are unfortunately still here. Shifting to a more contemporary trap pop sound just makes the group sound desperate to appeal to a younger generation, one that has so much more access to better music than we did when Maroon 5 first rose to fame. Just don’t bother.
The common joke is that every Imagine Dragons song or album sounds exactly the same. Indistinguishable from the last, their songs are copy/paste in the worst way possible. It’s a sentiment I mostly agree with, but LOOM does have a minor thing that distinguishes it from its brethren: a song with J Balvin on it. No one was asking for a reggaeton crossover track with these guys, but they gave it to us anyway. The rest of the album is what you’d expect: hackneyed, overdramatic pop dreck that’s too loud for its own good.
The older AJR gets, the less mature their approach to real world problems gets. The Maybe Man contains some of their worst bars to date, and a whole lot more swearing than on previous records. Is it supposed to make them edgier? It doesn’t. The Disney-fied melodies are sickeningly sweet, like a sour gummy that’ll make your teeth fall out instantly. I regret to say though, this isn’t their only album on this list…
The best thing you can say about Welcome To The Madhouse is that Tones And I’s worst song, that being the unlistenable “Dance Monkey”, is nowhere to be found. Other than that, there’s not much nice to day. Trying to make bangers about mental health is hard to stomach when Tones’ voice is as grating as hers is, and when she flips between self-betterment and party animal basically every song, any message is lost in translation. Don’t enter this madhouse.
A collaboration absolutely nobody was asking for, we now get two guys who misunderstand pop punk and emo rap for the price of one. Machine Gun Kelly’s singing and rapping voice is as awful as ever, and Trippie Redd’s croons add nothing when the two fundamentally misunderstand what they’re even trying to do. The genre is really just a front for the two to release more shitty music, especially with the effort level put in here.
Three albums in and I can at least say this about Greta Van Fleet: their scope of artists to rip off has expanded from just Led Zeppelin. Yes, there’s plenty of Robert Plant-esque vocals and Jimmy Page-driven guitar solos on The Battle At Garden’s Gate, but we now get pale imitations of Rush too! Of course, nothing these guys do is anywhere close to those legends, and the paint-by-the-numbers imitations get them nowhere. Everything tries so hard to be epic but it comes across as lame instead.
The songs on BLACKPINK’s debut record function fine, but that’s the problem. Their early singles were fun and boisterous, but instead of building on them, this album doubles down on the generic pop that every other k-pop act does, and everything is worse for it. Forgettable from start to finish with even more forgettable features (genuinely forgot about Selena Gomez popping up here until doing this list), THE ALBUM marked the beginning of THE DECLINE for a group that should be much better than this.
Overproduced as humanly possible, there’s little about Thirty Second To Mars’ 2023 album that feels genuine. From Jared Leto’s vocals to the production to the lyrics, it all feels like a front for having to feel real human emotion. “Stuck” or “Love These Days” do themselves no favors with how little substance there is to them, and anything interesting they might have stumbled into has been done far better by superior artists. If Leto’s cult wasn’t a thing, I have no clue who would actively choose to listen to their schtick.
A once promising pop artist on an incredible downward spiral, Kim Petras hit a personal low with this dreadful EP. The slut thing has always been a part of her music but never this woefully done. We’re talking preschool level rhymes and production that’d be fitting for an 8th grade computer ed class. Anyone with half a brain cell could write something more engaging than this. It’s sad because songs like “Heart To Break” were filled with such promise, yet Petras opts for trash over triumph too often.
We really gotta vet our celebrities. YouTube allows any talentless hack like Dream to get popular, and when these people get fame, they get to live out all their worst ideas. His claim to fame is cheating to set Minecraft speedrun records, so in what world does that give him the platform to make the musical equivalent of white bread? There’s almost nothing remotely interesting or memorable about Dream’s debut EP, from its copy/paste instrumental work to lyrics that his grade school listeners could probably outdo. What is memorable is how shockingly bad of a singer Dream is! There’s never a moment when he’s not flat as Florida, not to mention out of key. It’s almost like he’s not a musician. Who woulda thought?
Irony only gets you so far, as evidenced by FEMMEDORM. There has to be some form of effort involved for your ironic jokes or commentary to hit, and when something is as low effort and scraped together as this GFOTY album is, it doesn’t work. Songs about boobs (BRAND NEW BRA) aren’t that funny when they sound like shit. Tracks like “KOOKS SONG” only leave an impact with how poorly constructed they are. What’s weirder are attempts at mainstream pop like on “HARD KING” that flat out stink, especially standing out among all the purposefully low-budget tracks. No amount of budget could fix this thing.
Speaking of low effort, that’s what makes Drake’s sixth album such a misfire. His last few albums had been overstuffed for sure, but there was always a hit or two in there to really bring the quality up. Certified Lover Boy doesn’t have anything of the sort. Sure, “Way 2 Sexy” or “Girls Want Girls” had their time in the shine, but they don’t have the gravitas of a “Hotline Bling” or “Nice For What”. When you take away the hits, you’re subjected to an hour and a half of weak ass Drizzy tracks that exist only for playlist fodder. There’s no thought on how songs are placed either, and CLB plods along through similar sounding song after similar sounding song. It’s boring, and that’s something Drake had never been before. It did give Kendrick good ammo during their 2024 beef though.
Another release that sees no care put into it, the only reason DaBaby’s worst release to date doesn’t rank higher is the fact that it’s an EP. Thankfully there are only three songs on it, because if there were any more songs with shitty, repetitive beats within, CALL DA FIREMAN might be #1. DaBaby has never been Shakespeare but the “bars” are impressively awful throughout, and the production couldn’t have cost more than $50 overall. But even though its mercifully short, 6 minutes of this trash is still too much.
What made Katy Perry one of music’s brightest stars at the turn of the 2010’s? Whether it was her titanic voice, her sugary but catchy production team or her general aura of fun, you had several things to point to. It’s all vanished over the last decade, culminating in 143, one of the worst major pop releases I’ve ever heard. To hear the “Firework” singer sound as robotic as this would be sad if it didn’t hurt my ears. It’s as if Perry purposefully repressed her big voice, leading to incredibly generic tracks like “LIFETIMES” and “GORGEOUS” to define the album. There’s no spirit, no juice to any of Katy’s vocals across 143, and her lack of energy infects her co-stars as well. Doechii should not sound as boring as she does on “I’M HIS, HE’S MINE”, yet she does. 21 Savage’s feature on “GIMME GIMME” is atrocious even by his standards. Lyrically it’s banal and at times insulting (you should already know how I feel about “WOMAN’S WORLD”), and even by the dreadful nature of her last few albums, 143 represents a new low for an artist who never should have fallen this far.
C,XOXO might be more willing and more interested in making something memorable than a lot of the other albums on this list, but by misunderstanding its inspirations, it creates something worse than almost all of them. Lazily meshing elements of hyperpop and Charli XCX’s shtick isn’t enough to make something good when you don’t give it the care it deserves. Instead, C,XOXO is disjointed as all get-out, a disfigured creature by its own design. Cabello’s insistence on using Autotune constantly does no favors to her voice when it doesn’t match the instrumentals she’s singing over already. It’s one of the clearest examples of why “stay in your lane” is a phrase. Even if it ends on a slightly better note, I’d be surprised if many people get far enough into C,XOXO to find that out. Nobody asked for this combination, and yet here we are. And I still can’t get over the fact that there’s a standalone Drake song in the middle! WHY???
Father Of All… would just be another terrible Green Day album in a long, long line of them if the trio didn’t try to be so full of themselves when promoting it. This billboard that popped up advertising the album’s release promised pure, 100% uncut rock, as if they’re above the conventional methods of pop music. It makes it all the more funny that Father Of All… stoops to the lowest, most painful tropes of rock and pop music itself. There’s nothing creative about any of these tracks, as they all plod through verse, chorus, verse, chorus, rinse, repeat. It’s the most generic and frankly awful set of songs the group has ever released, and even at less than 30 minutes, I dare you to make it through 10 minutes without rolling your eyes. Songs like “I Was A Teenage Teenager” or “Oh Yeah!” are destined to live on at minor league sports arenas, played after the mega pop hits written by the Swedish songwriters they’re apparently better than.
It’s one thing to hear AJR childishly wander through adulthood in a normal setting, but hearing them try to approach the pandemic through their juvenile lens took things from awful to really awful. OK Orchestra is never OK at any point, with the usual pop vomit the trio specializes in finding new ways to make us cringe. Every instrumental is overly busy and overstuffed with more elements than it can handle. Every insipid lyric is a new exercise in insanity, finding new ways to infantilize doing your taxes or dealing with depression. Yes, the world sucks, but acting like you’re eight years old isn’t gonna fix things! They also telegraph a lot of the compositions by telling you what instrument they’re playing or what harmony they’re about to puke onto us, like we’re too stupid to know what a metronome is. I’d rather my pop music not drag me down to a preschooler’s reading level please.
Eurovision has a long and storied history as Europe’s greatest musical event. But if we’re going to put it on and give bands like Måneskin a platform, we just need to cancel the whole thing. Their approach to rock ‘n’ roll is as surface level as any major band has ever been, and their debut album is a grueling experience to say the least. Damiano David’s nails-on-a-chalkboard voice is my pick for the worst thing about it, whether he’s singing in English or Italian. The group’s understanding of rock is that you have to be loud for it to be good, but the volume level doesn’t mask the stupidly simple rhythms or melodies, it just makes them worse. Couple all of this together and it’s torture to hear it over and over on an album that’s 17 tracks and 50+ minutes.
What makes mainstream sellout the worst album of the decade in my eyes is, beyond the awful singing, the atrocious lyricism, and its bastardization of pop punk, is its attitude. Machine Gun Kelly is so put out that people didn’t like his first terrible pop punk album back in 2020, so his answer was to double down on everything that made it bad. He can barely rap and he definitely can’t sing, and he’s learned nothing from past criticism with how he yell/talks the lyrics all across this thing. He barely understands what the genre is about, other than it sounds cool and he’d rather keep having Travis Barker drum up cheap imitations of his old Blink-182 stuff than make anything interesting. He whines constantly about how people accuse him of “selling out”, but I don’t think that’s ever been the problem. The problem is that the music is terrible, and when you misunderstand the message, you end up making an album that’s even worse than before, and that’s exactly what mainstream sellout is.
More of my Best of the 2020’s (So Far) lists:
